How To Start 2019 With A Bang

This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will share how to start 2019 with a bang. Find out more by watching the video now.

The content for today, the topic is how to start 2019 with a bang and that’s what we all want to do. Look, for the first few days let’s ease into it. I think I did that myself. I started back last week and I eased into it but now that I’m ready to go, I’m raring to go.

So, what do you need to do to start 2019 with a bang?

First thing, let’s see if we can do this. We’re going to be reviewing 2018. It would be crazy to just continue doing all the same stuff from a marketing point of view without actually reviewing the previous year.

A friend of mine, American guy has done some work with some Navy Seals and one of the things that the Seals do is whenever they go out on a mission, pretty quickly afterwards they will come back and check and say, well how did we do?

That’s the process of constantly improving. So in terms of reviewing 2019, the first thing you want to be looking at is new patient numbers. Now, to just sort of put this in perspective for you, I would recommend that you absolutely should have your finger on the pulse of new patient numbers every month at a minimum.

What I recommend you do is not only go back to 2018 but actually go back to 2017 as well so that you can get a sense of your new patient numbers over time because new patient numbers are really the life blood of your business and if you find that those numbers are trending sideways or going down, that’s really not a good sign.

The next thing that you need to do is, patient sources. So you want to know how many new patients have been generated each month and look at those trends, both from year to year and month to month. Have you got some quiet months? Do you have some busier months?

Because you can be adjusting your marketing to suit that but also looking at your patient sources.

As part of that, look at your data capture. Now what I mean by that is how are you capturing what the sources of your new patients are? For most of you, that means the new patient form in the practice that people fill out, which is okay. But often when I review those what I find is that it’s not a particularly detailed question.

You give people maybe two or three options and everybody just ticks Google and you’re really none the wiser about what’s actually working and what’s not.

What I would recommend you do is have a bunch of all the different possibilities and write “tick all that applies” because one of the things that we’ve learned in recent years is it’s usually not just one source.

It’s the combination of a whole bunch of marketing activities that will lead someone to finally pick up the phone.

So this is a really good time to be reviewing your data capture. Even better than doing that on the new patient form is actually asking the question at the time somebody books the appointment. Who do we thank for referring you to us? And then capture that data at that time.

Once you’ve done that data capture and data review, have a look at those sources. Which ones are working best? Which ones are not? Then you can start to adjust for that.

Alright, so how to start 2019 with a bang, you’ve got to review the previous year. Look at your new patient numbers. I mean, it’s like this basically generating a map for you.

• What’s the trends?
• Where were we compared to previous years?
• Are we going up or down?
• How are our sources going?

Make sure that you’re capturing that data well and then from there next week we’re going to look at what to do next.