You are in the pain relief business. If you were to identify the pain that your physicians are experiencing when it comes to referring to physical therapy and knew how to promote your practice in a way that can take away the physician’s pain, you will get his referrals. This video helps show you how. You can find out more by checking out our New Patient Marketing Course.
All right. In this video, I want to talk to you about how to get doctors to refer patients to you. Doctors who like you will refer to you, doctors that don’t like you, don’t refer to you. You can say whatever you want about it, but if you have that viewpoint and your job is to figure out how to get physicians to like you more, then you’re headed in the right direction.
Now, what do we do to do that? Well, first of all, what we want to do is create something that takes away their pain, right? If you take away their pain, they will like you more. If you refer back to my video where I talk about the four reasons that doctors refer, you’ll see that they are:
Four Reasons Physicians Refer to Physical Therapist
1. By listening to their patients
2. No complaints
3. Results
4. Doctors like to be acknowledged.
How to Market Your PT Practice to Doctors
In your very initial aspect of your marketing campaign to your doctors, you can’t ask for their business before you get them to like you. You don’t visit a doctor you’ve never seen and say, “Send me all your patients.” So you have to get them to like you, before you can ask for their business, right?
How you do that isn’t with the love that you might give to your patients. It’s by taking away pain; taking away problems that the physician has in his referral relationship to you or anybody else in physical therapy. So that’s where your survey data comes in very, very well. If you know the pain points that the doctor has, and you can solve those pain points, you get the patients.
Getting the Physician to Like Your PT Practice
Knowing that doctors will listen to their patient to see if there were results, that there are no complaints and that the physician is acknowledged, you can craft a series of promotional pieces. You can craft a series of promotional pieces in the very beginning about how you make sure that patients don’t complain when they go back to the doctor. Your patients’ results actually improve the PR (public relations) positioning for you and your practice in the eyes of the physician. So by doing that type of activity and those things, you will increase the like quotient between the physician and your practice. Okay?
So we want to look at PR first and then we want to look at marketing, right? Now, when we look at marketing, what are we going to be packaging up and promoting for our practice, Physical therapy? No, that’s too broad, right?
The Best Physical Therapy Practice for ….
What we want to do is narrow it down and your best way to narrow it down is what do you see the most? Sometimes it may not be what you’d like to see, but what do you see the most? So again, take a look at what condition you treat the most and that’s what you want to be the best in town at. And for most practices, it’s going to be back pain. Now you might say, “Well, everybody does that.” Well, let’s say you don’t want to do that. Even if you don’t want to do that, and you want to promote your vestibular program or any other program, you’re still beaten by back pain, even though you don’t want it. So why don’t you just embrace it, right?
So what you want to do is build a marketing campaign that creates maximum nod-your-head factor with your doctors on the subject of what you see the most. If that’s back pain, whatever it is, right? You build a maximum nod your head factor. For more detail on how to do this and how it relates to sales and referrals watch the video.
In our new patient marketing course, we break down these three major functions, PR, marketing and sales. We show a physical therapy practice how put the right amount of effort and work into the right areas to create the impact that you’re looking to create. Thank you very much for your time reading this and watching the video. We’ll see you on the next one.
Shaun Kirk
CEO – PT Practice Success