30 Apr 5 Simple Ways to Increase Bookings Today
1 – Get focused on your target market
A lot of therapists waste a ton of money on advertising because they haven’t spent enough time choosing the right market and niche to target their advertisements to.
Getting clear about who your perfect patient is the first step in targeting your specific niche and ultimately increase the number of prospects seeking your services out which results in greater bookings and an increased return on your marketing dollars.
You want to be specific and select an audience that your both skilled at working with but also passionate about helping. When you create a list of numerous conditions and types of patients you treat, you end up making yourself a commodity amongst other practitioners and difficult for prospects to understand what makes you different and more likely to go with the cheaper or closer option.
2 – Fine-tune your Unique Service Message (USM).
If you are still competing with other businesses for new patients, then your USM needs work.
Create a USM that makes your business clear and the only choice for your prospect to select in dealing with their problems.
Your USM really needs to be specific to both the problem you solve and who you solve it for.
EG “We help men & women over 50 resolve low back pain so they can get back to living and loving life, without medications or surgery”
Once you nail this, you will have a lineup of prospects waiting to book in.
3 – Sell Packages & Memberships
When you take a bunch of products and services you are already selling and create a package with a compelling price, you can often make not only more revenue for your business but also offer a more comprehensive package to ensure that patients get even better results.
For example, we worked with a physiotherapist who also employed a personal trainer to develop a “Back to Sport” program which included a combination of therapy and training sessions to optimize their active adult patients’ injury recovery and getting them back activity into their sport of choice.
This increased their revenue monthly by almost $7000 and allowed them to start joint partnerships with a local running group.
On average the healthcare businesses that offer memberships have a 200% higher lifetime value and triple client retention rate.
4 – Sell to Groups
We have talked about the idea of selling to groups from workshops, community events, webinars, and so on, instead of one-to-one. When you get good at selling to groups you can appeal to more prospects at a time while building your authority and trust.
We incorporated a workshop with a massage therapist who just started out and had a limited advertising budget. Her target niche is post-pregnancy women suffering from low back pain and migraines. Together we crafted a workshop that allowed her to present to a group of 15 women how her services can help them get out of pain and back to pre-pregnancy life.
During her first presentation, she booked 12 out of 15 for her 8-week plan of care and added $9600 in revenue. She currently continues to run this workshop monthly and has changed her entire practice to only post-pregnancy while being booked months in advance.
5 – Round-up Past Patient
You might be surprised how many of your patients have “gone missing” over time. This can be for many reasons maybe they’ve moved away, didn’t require your services, had a bad experience or simply just forgot.
The key here is having an automated system in place to catch when a patient hasn’t been active in booking and understanding why to ultimately get them to rebook. Often they will be happy you remember them and many will be eager to come back, especially if they got busy and forgot.
In our practice, we have an automated system that sends a note to our front receptionist to reach out via phone when a patient hits a specific time of being absent from booking. We also have programmed notices to send handwritten letters to past patients as a way to stay in contact and encourage the rebooking.
We typically rebook 12-15 past patients per month from using these systems in which we increase our revenue, our therapists are busier and ultimately the patients get held accountable and see better results!
These are all immediate solutions to bring an instant flow of cash into your business with little work. Doing one of these things will increase your income and scheduled bookings. Doing all of them could make a tremendous impact.
Pick one or two to start and once you’ve implemented them and systematized them, move on to another one (or two) on the list.
