Everyone who takes my online course or docs I talk to who are launching their own cash-based practices are often most concerned about which EHR to choose. That’s until they actually launch their business and hear crickets, realizing it’s really about finding patients for their medical practice.
Your Pool of Potential Customers
I do health coaching and direct primary care. The health coaching is for someone quite committed to turning their health around – and I don’t mean the ones who’ll follow a fad diet for 2 weeks and give up.
The primary care patients are people who prefer to not get unnecessary medical interventions and don’t feel their 7-10 minute appointments are of much value.
This group is a subset of a subset of a subset of adults in the US. My health coaching clients can be from any state but my direct primary care patients must be from California. Let’s do the math.
- 300 million US adults.
- 30 million (10%) of whom could afford my $400/month health coaching.
- 300,000 (1%) who’d be inclined to take any action for their health.
- 3,000 (1%) who’d be willing to work with me.
This is my advertising pool. I might reach them on social media, word of mouth, online advertisement, podcast, and, much less likely, directly from my website.
30-Touchpoint-Rule
Let’s say I can reach most of these 3,000 people, they’d be unlikely to work with me unless they see my brand and face enough time. Without familiarity, nobody is parting with $5K a year.
If they see me on social media, then hear me on a podcast, see a video on YouTube, read something on LinkedIn, run into one of my ads … that’s 5 interactions. Supposedly, I need another 25 to reach some magical 30X interaction, that’s when they’d be willing to buy my service.
That’s how I am. Before I hired my rock climbing coach I saw him climb, then saw him comment on Reddit, then saw a video of his, then saw him coach someone, heard him on a podcast, checked out his website, forgot about him until I saw him again … anyway, you get the picture. Eventually I decided that a $3K coaching session from him was worthwhile.
“Dr. Mo, How Do You Find Patients?”
This is like asking someone, how did you lose 89 lbs? You’re hoping for a secret or you hoping to hear the magical 4 letter word, GLP1 so that you can say, ‘Oh, I knew it!’. But the reality is that it’s always the same, calorie deficit + increased energy expenditure + motivation to lose weight.
Finding customers for your business is the same. You knocked on every door, you wrote a ton of articles, recorded podcast episodes, and posted YouTube and IG videos. Eventually someone found you and they left you an online review. Then you worked on growing your online reviews and more people found you. Then one of your friends asked for you help and her 2 friends also signed up with you. No magic, just persistent and consistent effort.
Giving Up Right Before Success
“I’ve tried everything, nothing worked. I give up!”
Do you know when you find your first couple of patients, those next few days after you completely give up but continue putting in the effort. It’s been like that for every doc I’ve chatted with.
I mean, I call it success but that’s not success. Success is enjoying doing something you love. If you stick to anything long enough you’ll get to enjoy some sort of success. When I coach docs I’m just trying to get them to stick with it a little longer.
So, why did you give up?
Setting Realistic Expectations
I’m gonna build it and they will come. Well, if you build it then there is a place they could come to but they won’t come willingly. You have force them kicking and screaming and beg them for their money and they’ll stay because they are then convinced of the value.
I’ve worked in a lot of healthcare startups and it was a lot of sweat and tears. Hard work, with persistence. Oh, and you gotta spend a lot of money – did I mention that?
Spending Money on Leads
Doctors don’t like word “leads”, I dunno why. A lead is someone who could be a potential patient. I know many doctors who are trying to sell their weight loss and lifestyle coaching services to a brittle diabetic on death’s door. Bro! That patient is in no place to give up their soda, much less their home diabetes regimen that includes a shockingly sweetened cactus juice which they believe will cure their diabetes.
In the beginning when you spend on leads you’ll hit all the wrong leads.
“Hi, are you the health coach I saw online? I’m trying to get rid of my leukemia, what can you do for me?”
You can spend time or money but you have spend one or both of them. No other choice unless your brother, wife, or child is a marketing genius.
If you go the time route you’ll have to create all of your own online ads, create and edit your own videos, write your own articles, edit them, check their analytics performance, adjust them, and then do it all over again – every, single, day.
If you go the money route, expect to spend $3,000 – $5,000 per month on marketing for 2-3 years to get off the ground. Don’t worry, you can start slowly and ramp it up. You pay $1,200 for expert help and another $500 on your advertising budget. Then you add a little more money as you see some engagement (people clicking on your website).
Using Data to Make Decisions
Fortunately now we have things like ChatGPT that can walk us through better decisions based on data we can gather and analyze.
Take my Google Ads or some YouTube video short I created. An ad campaign shows that people are seeing it but nobody is clicking on the links. I can take a screenshot of the analytics data on your Google Ads dashboard, feed it to ChatGPT, ask it how to make 3 adjustments to improve performance. I do this every week.
Find this Information helpful? Need help finding your patients online? Book a coaching call with me and let me help you!