Caution. Attracting patients from another market will do one or all of three things.
1). Slowly and sustainably grow your REI practice
2). Hedge your patient flow in a recession
3). Offer you data to decide if maybe even one day it would make sense to open a clinic in that area (if you´re so ambitious)
In an earlier post, I showed you how to use Google Analytics to see if patients from other markets are investigating your clinic. Now, I´ll tell you what to do if they are
1). Create an entire page specific to patients from that market. Example: If you are in Springfield Illinois, give the page its own tab on the home page called ¨Chicago Patients¨*.
2). Interview patients that are currently coming from the potential market. This will take time. If you need your business manager to do it, that´s okay. If you need to reward them with restaurant gift certificates, gas cards, for their time, do it. Ask those patients from Dallas why they chose to drive up to Tyler. Ask for all of their reasons, and then ask them to rank them. Look for common responses among the interviewees. This will be the copy for your page.
3). Address each of the pain points on the page. Order them in the importance that your patients ranked them. Bullet the points as the problem they described it. Then support with the solution.
Example: IVF in Chicago is too expensive: In Springfield, our IVF cycles are half of the average cost in Chicago, and our success rates are even higher.
4). Support each pain point with a testimonial. Consider HIPAA and state and local regulations relevant to your area, but those who love you will happily sign a release.
5). Within step two, ask patients why they considered NOT coming to your market/clinic. Repeat steps three and four with each potential objection, and why the patients themselves overturned them.
6). Geo-target a landing page to bring the right visitors directly to this page. Your web guy/gal will know how to do this. Just tell him/her that all visitors coming from the certain zip code or metro area should see this landing page.
7). A-B test every landing page. Repeat monthly or bi-monthly at the longest. This means that you are testing titles, page copy, testimonials and images, to see which results in more patient form downloads or new patient inquiries.