The Truth About Referral Marketing
In my nearly 23 years of delivering practice management training and consulting, I’ve found that of all of the marketing techniques available, properly asking for referrals is easily the most useful. There are several reasons for this:
- It is the least expensive. You don’t have to create and buy ads, make newsletters, send mailings, etc.
- It is something that you can directly affect on an ongoing daily basis and see and monitor the results without much time lapse.
- It is something that you can train all of your staff to do. You can create a reward systems to enhance the staff to do more of it.
- You can, more than any other way, attract the type of patient/client that you want. If you analyze the patients/clients in your practice, you can quickly isolate those who are the most cooperative, financially secure and the most fun to have around. These people will, by referral, bring in similar types of new patients.
The whole trick to getting referrals is nothing more complicated than asking for them. This can and should be done as a coordinated team effort by all the staff. There are many successful actions that you can implement in order to accomplish this.
First, determine which patient/client will be approached. A staff muster at the start of the day can identify patients/clients who’ve had great results and are very happy with their service. Those are the people you want to approach. Determine who will talk with these people. It may likely be the receptionist who will be talking with a person after their appointment. Work out a simple script (we have several) that can be used and have a card ready to give out to the person that they can then give to their referral.
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