The Importance of Building a Practice Community

practice community Feb 25, 2019

What is a Practice Community?

Your practice community is the group of people you intentionally and proactively draw around you in your business. Every practice needs a community of raving fans to bring life, energy and success to it. These are people who love what you do, they love how you do it and most importantly they love YOU! 

Why do You Need a Practice Community?

Think about a rock concert or a sporting event in a large stadium. With only a few apathetic spectators present, the event is going to feel lackluster. Put just a few excited people in the stadium & the atmosphere can start to change. Enthusiasm and excitement are contagious. At the next event, there will be more excited people and as the positive energy grows and the word spreads, more people want to get tickets and be part of what's happening. This is the feeling you want to engender in your community, so they tell their family, friends, and work colleagues how great you are at what you do and pretty soon if they need your services they will be picking up the phone wanting to be part of what you are doing.

In short, your community of raving fans becomes the best marketing team you could ever wish for.

Who do You Want in Your Practice Community?

Now your community needs to be multifaceted but let’s start with:

Your Patients

Any patients fill appointments in your diary true, but they don't all bring with them that positive energy, interest, fun, and enthusiasm I'm sure you'd rather have around the place.

Knowing who the people are you want to fill your appointment book with is essential in attracting more of them.  You basically need a community of patients that love you, and the chances are these are going to be the patients that you love to see.

Create a Patient Community Building Strategy

To help you grow your patient community, you need to know the answers to the following questions:

Who is your dream patient? (You need a community full of people like them)
Where do they hang out? (You need to know where to go to find them?)
What is their pain? (emotional as well as physical)
How can you touch them? (using words & images)
How many people do you need in your community? (this is the number you need to sustain or grow your practice)

If you can answer all of these questions you are up and running and going in the right direction.  Now you just need to create a strategy to join the answers together.

If you can't answer these questions you need to spend a bit of time thinking about them, because the answers will really help you make great strides forwards with your business.

Once you have the answers, think about:

Identifying exactly who your dream patient is
Going to places, real & virtual, where groups of them congregate and see how you can help them
Listen to the words they use to describe their "pain" and use those exact words to market your services
Develop your service round the wants and needs of your community
Promote those services with words & images that resonate with these people
Calculate how many patients you need in your community to sustain or grow your practice, and work hard to achieve that goal

Marketing a healthcare practice is not rocket science but you do have to understand the basic fundamentals first and these 5 questions and their answers should get you rolling in the right direction.

BUT you are going to have to put the work in, to have an impact on your practice - HOWEVER, just think how amazing it will feel to have an appointment book full of positive energy and excitement rather than negativity and apathy.

But don't stop just at patients

Many practitioners focus solely on nurturing patient relationships, but why stop there? Just think how much more amazing your practice could be if your fan base included lots of other people, standing on the sidelines cheering you on.

Your Team

Second, on your list of relationships to nurture in order to build your community MUST be your team.
You need people on your team who have the same values and vision as you, but who also bring more to the party.  You all need to be pulling in the same direction, representing a unified front so that patients feel they are in safe hands with a team that has their very best interests at heart. However, having team members who challenge you, and put new ideas or ways of thinking on the table, are a great asset to any practice too.
Even if your team is just you and a part-time receptionist or locum practitioner, a cohesive and aligned team will give your patients that warm and fuzzy feeling about your practice, as well as giving you a competitive edge.

Treat your team well, listen to their ideas, nurture, and invest in their talents and let them shine. Giving them a degree of ownership in the practice and including them in the development process will reap great rewards.

I've worked with practitioners who live in fear of their associate practitioners or reception staff. I've even been asked to speak to one associate practitioner on behalf of the practice owner because they were so scared of their response to a request to put a photo on the practice website! 

Let me tell you this is NO WAY to project a unified front and develop a loyal, loving, and enthusiastic team community. You have to work through relationship problems or part company. In that situation, these are the only ways to move forward.

Your Local Community

Thirdly, think about your local and business community. It doesn't matter how big or small your local community is, you can still build a raving fan base of people who love what you do & how you do it. You just have to think of different things to do in your wider community, other than treating patients:

Think about ways of nurturing relationships with other local health professionals. People who you professionally admire and trust and who you would be happy to cross-refer patients with.
Your suppliers can be part of your community too. They will rave about you to other professionals because you are kind, always pay on time, and always have a smile and a hot coffee for their delivery driver.
Think about local organisations or businesses like sports clubs or nursing homes, who's staff, members, or residents you could support with health promotion talks or equipment demonstrations a few times a year.
Your local school who's teachers you could support by providing a lesson once a year on an element of biology & the national curriculum (if you are a UK podiatrist call the Societies Education team and ask about the PASS project - they've already done the work for you :-) )
Consider local charities who you feel aligned with, who you could support through running events or making donations of your products or services. Getting involved with a local charity is a great way to pay it forward as well as raising your profile and helping more people.

The list goes on but I'm sure you get the picture. The more people you can involve with your business and help them get enthusiastic about it, the better.

A great supportive community is not going to spring up around your practice by accident. As with almost everything to do with developing your business you need to be intentional and proactive about creating it.

What do you do once you've got a practice community?

Building a community of people who love what you do and will be loyal and supportive as long as you are in business is not the end of your efforts.
Once you start to create a community you then need to get proactive about nurturing the relationships with these people. Remember that if you have a team, this is as much their job as it is yours. But you need a system so that no one gets forgotten.

You need to make time to get to know these people, make them feel part of the business, and most importantly valued by your practice. This might sound like hard work but if you can set up automated systems to communicate with each group on a regular basis, share useful information, promote things they are involved with or share their social media content or you can build really strong relationships with much less effort than you might think. BUT it does take time and it does take effort on your part.
However, having a practice community rather than just a hotchpotch of random people connected to your practice will definitely pay dividends for you and the practice going forwards.

I'd love to know in the comments box at the bottom of this page what you think about this idea and also what you've been doing to make this a reality in your practice.

Many thanks for taking the time to stop by my healthcare marketing blog today.

Until next time
Thank you