If you want to market your infusion center, online marketing and physician outreach will likely give you the best return on investment. Before marketing, we encourage you to really look over your online identity to be sure it’s fantastic and assess your patient experience to ensure it is excellent. Once those are in place, you are ready to start marketing online and to physicians.
Online Identity + Marketing
Website
Is your website easy to navigate? Do all the links work properly including the links to your social media? Are your forms online, easy to download, and easy to fill out?
Build content around the different conditions you treat to drive traffic. Build content around some of the drugs that people search for regularly, both brand name and generic. If you offer wellness infusions, build out content around each infusion and why someone may want it. Include as much as you can about the ailments and drugs – anything patients ask about them.
Create a section for patients with What to Expect for Your Infusion and FAQ with all of the questions that patients ask you. Check with your staff to see what patients ask regularly and write about it. Add a blog with content that you educate patients on every day. Write about the things that patients repeatedly forget or struggle to comply with…because that is what they search Google for as well.
In tandem with these updates, if you don’t already have a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy in place, now is the time. And, once it’s all ready, consider launching a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Google or social.
Social Media
Build a social media presence with differentiated content across the different platforms. No one wants to read the same content on three different platforms or see “Link in Bio” on a Facebook post. You can definitely recycle content, but edit it to be specific to the platform and the way users interact with it.
Build a Facebook presence that is heavy on education and light on selling your infusion center. Include pictures of the facility and staff so that people start to build a familiarity with the infusion center.
We like Instagram as a behind-the-scenes view of the infusion center. Focus on photos or the team and the facility and use them as a way to show people what it is like to be there on a daily basis. If you do wellness IVs, Instagram is a great place to promote them. Use pics of people getting the IVs (with a release, of course) and talk about the benefits.
Use LinkedIn to show the professional side of your infusion center. You should have a company page and your leaders should have personal pages. Set your team up as content experts on LinkedIn. This is also a great spot to pull in your Medical Director to help with content.
If you want to do any PPC advertising on social, all of these strategies set it up for success.
Reviews
We definitely recommend a proactive approach to reviews. Having easy-to-find and accurate information about your center will be useful. And, you’ll want a proactive strategy to respond to reviews in a timely and meaningful dialogue. It’s not hard work; just time-consuming. Find someone on your team that you trust to do it. There are also companies that can automate the process.
Physician Sales
Outreach to local physicians is a great way to get referrals into your infusion center. Preparation is key to successful physician outreach.
Build a List
Build a solid list and scrub it ahead of time to maximize the efficiency of the sales calls. I find that investing the time to build a great list with accurate names, addresses, specialties, and insight saves a ton of time later. For instance, if a physician has an infusion chair in their office, probably not worth going to visit. And, if you do, be prepared to talk about non-competing services that you offer.
There are lots of specialties you can consider but start with Gastroenterology, Neurology, Functional Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Rheumatology, Allergists, Endocrinology, Oncology, and Wound Care. Plus any specialties really close to the center should be considered including Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Podiatry.
We do find that proximity is huge, so we tend to start within a 3-5 mile radius and work our way out. This all depends on the flow of traffic through your community though, so go with your gut.
Have a Solid Value Proposition
Have a solid value proposition to share with physicians, but only after first asking about their practice and their needs. Secret shop your competitors. Make their weaknesses your strengths. If they have long wait times, don’t mention them, but do let potential referrers know that you can get people in quickly.
A spa-like environment is a big selling point for consumers. Happy patients are a good step towards happy referring physicians.
Make it easy on referring physicians. Remove any barriers you can like pre-authorizations, getting people in quickly, and even offering infusions outside of normal business hours.
Nurture the Relationship
After you visit them, stay in touch! Check in to see how you are doing and what you can do better. Get reports over to them quickly so they are always informed about their patients. Nurture that relationship so that you maintain and grow it.