Summary of this blog
- A growth strategy for clinics costs you less than a year of trial and error. Your budget stops moving every month, the counting starts on day one, and your patients are booked on a system you can read.
- Six parts, in order: the buyer and the outcome, the position, the channel order and the budget band, the website, and the five numbers in your monthly report. None of the six is handed over here. This guide says what each one contains and what it changes for you.
- Sources: Google’s own documentation, Pew Research Center and Nielsen Norman Group. Google doesn’t accept payment to rank a page higher. Pew’s 2013 report found 77% of online health seekers began at a search engine. Both facts decide your channel order.
- Outcome: a diary that fills on a system rather than on a hunch. Your cost per patient falls because the spend stops switching, and you keep the plan as a document.
A growth strategy for clinics has one promise: a year with a plan costs you less than a year of trial and error, and books you more patients. Switch channel every quarter and you pay the learning cost of each one and keep the gain from none. Pay for a plan once and the counting starts in your first month. Your cost per patient falls because the budget stops moving, and your diary fills on a system. That’s the whole case for a strategy. This guide shows you what the plan contains and what each part changes.
Guessing is dear because your patients already follow a pattern, and a plan is built on it. Pew Research Center’s report Health Online 2013 found that 72% of adults who use the internet looked online for health information in the past year. That report also found 77% of online health seekers began at a search engine. So your patient’s route to your clinic is known before you spend the first dollar. A growth strategy for clinics follows that route rather than whichever channel a salesperson rang you about last week.
Trial and error looks respectable from the inside. A quarter of Google Ads, judged on clicks. Then a quarter of social posts, judged on followers. A directory listing, a redesign and a referral card, each started with hope and dropped before you could judge it on patients. You pay for every one from month one and drop it at the point it was about to pay back. Stop starting channels you haven’t decided to keep. A growth strategy for clinics ends that cycle: you decide the order before you spend anything, and you count bookings rather than noise.
This guide is written for you if you own a dental, aesthetic, fertility, physiotherapy, functional medicine or mental health practice. You pay the bill and you read the diary. Our pillar on health and wellness marketing covers the wider plan a growth strategy for clinics sits inside. Our HealthTech growth strategy guide covers the software founder; this one is for your clinic. Each of the six parts below is described by what it contains and what it changes for you. Method stays with the specialist, because a plan you could run from an article alone is a plan the clinic down the road could copy.
A growth strategy for clinics is the difference between paying for marketing once and paying for it every quarter, each time from the start.
The channel-switch test
Five minutes with last year’s invoices shows you whether your clinic has a strategy or a habit. Write down every marketing channel you’ve paid for in the last twelve months, with the month each began and ended. Beside each, write the number of patients it booked. Two things show up. First, the channels you stopped before ninety days, before you could judge any of them. Second, the blanks in the patients column, because nothing was counting. Three or more stopped channels and a blank column means trial and error, paid for in full. A growth strategy for clinics fills that column before you choose the first channel. Six sections follow, one decision each, in order.
1. What a year of trial and error costs a clinic
You buy four learning months a year and keep nothing when you change channel every quarter. Say you spend $4,000 (about £3,100) a month. Over a year that’s $48,000 (about £37,000), across four channels of three months each. The first month of each quarter goes on learning: the account set up, the page built, the agency briefed. Month two is the first real test. In month three you open the diary, the gaps are still there, and you ring someone about something else. Nobody enjoys that phone call. Four learning months paid for, nothing given time to compound, nothing that says which quarter worked. The figures are yours; the shape is what a growth strategy for clinics exists to prevent.
The cost you never see on an invoice
Your invoice shows the spend, and the spend is the smaller cost. The larger cost is the patients who would have booked had you given one channel a year. A search page written in January starts earning in the spring and earns for years. What did yours earn when you switched it off in March? Nothing, for nobody. An ad campaign that had learned which searches book was reset the day you replaced it. At Healthora, we have seen what channel-hopping leaves behind: a spend sheet with four channels and a patients column nobody can fill in. A growth strategy for clinics turns that around: you pay for the learning once and the gain compounds.
You spend the money once, in order
You pay for a plan once, before you choose the first channel. Then your budget runs in an order decided in advance. That illustrative $48,000 (about £37,000) buys you a website fixed first, one channel that fills your diary this quarter, and one that carries it next year. A monthly report tells you what each patient cost. Nothing is reset. By the second quarter you can see which treatment earns most from which channel, and move the money there. That’s why a growth strategy for clinics costs less than guessing: one sum, spent once, in order, and counted. The plan is a document you keep, so a Growth Diagnostic ends in one.
2. The buyer and the outcome come first
Your plan opens with two decisions, and you make both before you name a channel. Who you want more of, and what the year is for. “More patients” is a wish. “Forty more implant patients from within fifteen minutes’ drive, at a cost the treatment value supports” is a decision you can build a plan on. The buyer decides which searches, which page and which proof. The outcome decides your budget band and your report. A growth strategy for clinics that skips these two decisions is a plan for everyone, which is a plan for nobody in particular. Write both in one sentence your whole front desk can repeat, and refuse any proposal that arrives without it.
Name your buyer and every later decision gets cheaper
Two clinics with identical treatments can spend one budget and book different numbers. One markets to anyone in the county. The other has named its best patient: a woman in her forties or fifties, a short drive away, choosing a clinician she will remember. Its website speaks to her. Its ads show only where she lives, and its reviews come from patients like her. Which of the two is your clinic? If your ads show in towns nobody has ever travelled from, you’re the first. At Healthora, we have seen what a named best patient does to an ads budget: it shrinks, because the ads stop showing in those towns. A growth strategy for clinics starts there.
Set the outcome in patients and everyone you pay counts bookings
The outcome sets the measure, and the measure sets the behaviour of everyone you pay to market your clinic. Tell an agency the goal is reach and it will report reach. Tell it the goal is forty booked patients at a named cost and it has to count bookings, on the page and the phone, from day one. The outcome also sets your budget band. A year that needs forty patients at a known treatment value can afford a certain spend and no more. Write the target in patients and revenue in month one, and make the report show you the gap every month after. A growth strategy for clinics is judged against that line and nothing else.
3. The position: why this clinic and no other
Your third decision is one sentence: why a patient should book with you and nobody else. Open the four nearest clinic websites and the answer on each is five words: experienced, caring, modern, affordable, convenient. So the patient chooses on price. A position is the one claim your clinic can make that the three nearest can’t, said in the patient’s words, everywhere the patient meets you. A growth strategy for clinics fixes your position before the website is rewritten and before an ad is written, because both are built from it. Our guide to health brand differentiation covers how a health brand finds that sentence. Here the point is what it changes in your diary.
Give the patient a reason to stop comparing
Every patient comparing three clinics on a phone at night is looking for a reason to stop comparing. Your position gives them one: the clinician who does only this, the clinic built for the nervous patient, the practice that sees a new patient within the week. The claim appears in your heading, your ad, your reviews, and what reception says on the phone. A clinic without a position competes on the one thing left, which is price. Stop competing on price. A growth strategy for clinics puts the position first among the words, because the words then cost you less to write and earn more when read. A specialist then checks you can keep the claim.
What one sentence does for a physiotherapy diary
Say you run a physiotherapy practice in a town with four others. What’s your one sentence? For illustration, it’s this: the practice that sees a new patient within two days and books the follow-up before the patient leaves. Your website says so above the fold, and so do your ads. Reviews, asked for at the right moment, say so in patients’ words. Reception says so when the phone rings. Nothing about the treatment changed; the patient now has a reason to choose you. Your whole team can say the position in one breath, and the patients who book are the ones it was written for. In a growth strategy for clinics that sentence is the cheapest asset the plan produces.
4. Channel order and the budget band a growth strategy for clinics sets
Buyer, outcome and position decided, the plan chooses your channels in an order, never as a list. Two facts set the order for every clinic. Google Search Central, in its page on how Google Search works, says Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher. Ranking is done programmatically. Pew’s 2013 report found 77% of online health seekers began at a search engine. So search is where your patients begin and can’t be bought: the long channel. Paid ads can be bought this month: the short one. Never buy channels in the order the salespeople rang. A growth strategy for clinics runs both, in an order set by your diary.
Which channel goes first in your diary?
The order depends on your diary. If you have gaps this month, you start with ads on a page built for them, while search starts alongside and carries the diary by the third quarter. If your diary is full and a second site opens next year, you start with search and add ads at the launch. No channel is started as an experiment and dropped as a disappointment. Reviews and your Google profile run from month one. When we published our wellness cluster, six target keywords reached the top ten within three weeks, and pages earning search impressions rose from around 100 to 150 in a month. A growth strategy for clinics writes the order down so nobody resets it.
Your budget band comes from your diary and your treatment value
Your band comes from the revenue stage, the treatment value and the diary gap, never from a percentage copied from elsewhere. For illustration, if your main treatment is worth $1,500 (about £1,200) over the year and you have twenty empty slots a month, you can afford a different spend from a consultation-only clinic with five. You agree the band in month one. The split between the short channel and the long one moves each quarter as search takes over. Your spend should fall as a share of revenue while bookings rise; if it hasn’t by the third quarter, the band came from the wrong number. A growth strategy for clinics holds the band steady so the counting means something.
What a specialist sees in your plan
Four channels tried this year and still no growth strategy for clinics?
Stop paying for marketing that does not work. Book a Growth Diagnostic: two to three weeks, one document, one recommendation. The Diagnostic is a paid, fixed-scope piece of work. We read your clinic the way the patient does, from the search to the booking button. We read your last year of spend channel by channel, the way a growth strategy for clinics would have set it out. Then we name the point where patients are being lost, what to fix first, what it will change, and what another year of trial and error would cost. The document is yours to keep whether you work with us or not. Healthora specialises in health marketing.
Book a Growth Diagnostic5. The website before any channel
Every channel you run lands on your website, the weakest part of the marketing on the clinic sites we audit. Nielsen Norman Group’s research on how little readers read found that about 28% of the words on a page are read on an average visit. A patient sent by your ad or a search result gives your page seconds and a quarter of its words. If your heading doesn’t say what the patient typed, or your button sits three screens down, the channel was wasted at the moment it worked. A growth strategy for clinics fixes the page before your first dollar goes into a channel. Our guide to health clinic website copy covers the page.
Fix the page first and every channel after it earns more
At Healthora, we have seen a dental clinic grow bookings by 20% after a rebrand and website optimisation. That’s the shape of the change a page makes on its own: the same patients arriving, a larger share of them booking, and every later channel earning more. The page you build is one per treatment: the treatment and the town in the heading, your clinician named, the price question answered, and booking in two taps. A specialist checks every claim and image before it goes live, because a page that describes care has to be right. This article is marketing guidance and never medical advice. In a growth strategy for clinics the page comes first.
What fixing the page last costs you
Fix the page after the channels are running, and you paid for every month before the fix at the lower rate of booking. Fix it first, and every month after runs at the higher one. One ad budget, one set of rankings and reviews, and a fuller diary, because the page is the multiplier on all three. Where does your booking button sit today, on the first screen or the third? If it’s the third, every channel is running at the lower rate. That’s why a growth strategy for clinics puts the website first, even when you want ads by Friday. Done well, it’s a page you’d send a patient instead of a brochure.
6. The five numbers and the monthly report
The last decision is what you’ll see every month. Your plan fixes it before the first channel runs, so the counting starts on day one. Five numbers: new patients booked, by source; cost per new patient; revenue per new patient over the year; enquiries that became bookings; and the share of patients from each channel. Nothing else goes on the first page. Can you say today what your last new patient cost you? If not, you have a list of activities, and a growth strategy for clinics without those five is the same list. With them, you can see by the second quarter which channel earns and which treatment earns most, and move the money without a meeting.
Your report changes three conversations by the second quarter
A report that opens with patients and what each one cost changes three conversations for you. The one with your agency, which now has to explain bookings rather than reach. The one with your front desk, because enquiries that never became bookings are a number now, with a reason beside each. And the one you have with your budget, because the money follows the column that earns. One page, read in ten minutes on the first of the month, five lines in a fixed order every time. You write the quarter’s one decision at the foot. A growth strategy for clinics is kept alive by that page more than by any meeting.
The Growth Diagnostic names the decisions you never made
Our Growth Diagnostic reads your clinic against the six decisions and names which ones you never made. The pattern repeats: the buyer was everyone and the outcome was “more”. The position was the five words on the clinic down the road’s site too. Channels started in the order salespeople rang, the website came last, nothing was counted. The Diagnostic is paid, fixed in scope and two to three weeks long. Its document carries one recommendation: the decision that would change your diary soonest, and what it would cost. You keep it. We call the six the Six Decisions; a growth strategy for clinics is the six made in order. Our services page describes the plan once you commission it.
Growth strategy for clinics in practice: what the plan contains
Growth strategy for clinics in practice begins with the channel-switch test and a reading of your last year’s spend. Which channels ran, how long you gave each, and what each booked. Then you make the six decisions in order, and the order is the point. First the buyer and the outcome, because every later decision is cheaper once you’ve named them. Then the position, because your words are built from it. Next the channel order and the band, which stop the resets, then the website, where every channel lands. Last the five numbers, because you can’t judge anything without them. A dental, aesthetic or physiotherapy practice gets all six; only your buyer, your treatment and your diary gap differ.
The six parts of the plan
- The buyer and the outcome. One patient named and one target in patients and revenue, written in month one: the line your growth strategy for clinics is judged against.
- The position. One claim the three nearest clinics can’t make, said in the patient’s words on your page, in your ad and on your phone.
- The channel order. Search as your long channel, ads as your short one, reviews from day one, in an order written down so nobody resets it.
- The budget band. Set from your revenue stage, your treatment value and your diary gap, and held steady so the counting means something.
- The website first. One page per treatment, your clinician named, two taps to book: the multiplier on every channel a growth strategy for clinics runs.
- The five numbers. Patients by source, cost per patient, revenue per patient, enquiries that booked, share by channel: the page you read monthly.
Why a specialist gets you there faster
You, a specialist, or the two of you together can make the six decisions. The difference is how many times they’ve been made before and how soon the counting is set. How many of the six have you made in writing? A specialist in health has read enough clinics to know which one is missing before the audit is finished, and makes the five numbers the first job so every later move can be judged. The decisions get made while you see patients. Our services and case studies show what a growth strategy for clinics looks like in engagements we have run.
A specialist in health marketing understands that the patient choosing your clinic is choosing someone to trust with their teeth, face, back or mind. That trust is built in an order. Name your buyer and your outcome, fix your position, set the channel order and the band, build the page first, and count the five numbers every month. Then your diary fills on a system rather than on a hunch. Your cost per patient falls because the budget stops moving, and the plan is a document you keep. That’s a growth strategy for clinics, and a year of it costs you less than a year of guessing.
Ready to stop paying for the first month of every channel?
HEALTHORA SPECIALISES IN HEALTH MARKETING
Four channels in a year, each stopped before it could be judged, is the dearest plan a clinic can run. Stop paying for marketing that does not work. Book a Growth Diagnostic: two to three weeks, one document, one recommendation. The Diagnostic is paid and fixed in scope. We will read your clinic the way the patient does, and your last year of spend channel by channel. We will name the decision your growth strategy for clinics is missing and tell you what to fix first. The document is yours whether you work with us or not. Healthora specialises in health marketing.
Book a Growth DiagnosticFrequently asked questions
What is a growth strategy for clinics?
A written plan that makes six decisions in order. Who you want more of, what the year is for, and why a patient should choose your clinic. Which channels run and in what order, what your website must do first, and which five numbers you read monthly. A growth strategy for clinics is judged on patients booked and what each one cost, never on clicks or followers.
Why does trial-and-error marketing cost a clinic more than a plan?
Because you pay for each channel from the first month and stop it before it can pay back. Four channels in a year means four learning months bought and no gain kept. A growth strategy for clinics spends that money once, in an order, and counts from day one. You can see which channel earns by the second quarter and move the budget there.
What should a clinic decide before choosing a marketing channel?
The buyer, the outcome and the position. Who you want more of, what the year must produce in patients and revenue, and the one claim the three nearest clinics can’t make. The channel choice follows from those three. A growth strategy for clinics that starts with the channel is a plan for everyone, and a plan for everyone books nobody in particular.
Which comes first, the website or the ads?
The website. Nielsen Norman Group found that about 28% of the words on a page are read on an average visit. Your page has seconds to say what the patient typed and show the way to book, and every channel lands on it. Fix it first and every month of spend that follows is paid for at the higher rate of booking, which is why a growth strategy for clinics puts it first.
How long before a growth strategy for clinics shows in the diary?
The website fix and paid ads show in your bookings within the first quarter. Search and reviews carry more of the diary by the third. The monthly report shows you the trend from month one, which is the point: you stop judging by feel. A growth strategy for clinics is written for a year and reviewed each quarter against the five numbers.
What does a growth strategy for clinics cost with Healthora?
The fee depends on scope. A single-site practice with one treatment to grow needs a different plan from a group with three locations. The scope is set after a Growth Diagnostic: two to three weeks, one document, one recommendation, paid and fixed in scope. The document is yours whether or not you decide to work with us. Healthora specialises in health marketing.
Keep reading
The six decisions above hold for every clinic with a diary to fill. Two guides below cover the clinic that needs new patients from somewhere other than referral, and the clinic opening a second site. The third covers the dental practice, where the diary gaps are the ones a growth strategy for clinics is written to close.