Four pillars of a successful practice: 2. Attract new patients

What should you write about?

Topics of interest to lay readers in your community undoubtedly include wellness, menopause, cancer prevention, female sexual dysfunction, and vaginal rejuvenation. You can create an interesting article about new procedures, new treatments, a unique case with an excellent result, or the use of new technologies, such as new in-office procedures for permanent contraception.

Like medical skills, writing skills can be learned and polished. The more you do it, the better you get. The better you get, the more women you will attract to your practice.

Use your Web site to attract new patients

For most ObGyns, the majority of patients they serve come from within their community. A clinician’s service area usually encompasses no more than three to five zip codes or a 25- to 50-mile radius. All of us enjoy seeing a patient who has traveled more than 100 miles to see us for a gynecologic problem. Imagine the excitement when a patient from 1,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 miles away contacts your office for an appointment. This is exactly what a Web site can do for you and your practice. (Note: In a future article, I will focus on Internet marketing.)

Blogging offers an opportunity to engage potential patients

If you have a Web site, then you’ve already taken the most critical step toward marketing your practice in an increasingly Internet-savvy age. Today’s patients rely on the Internet for personal health information; they also expect a level of interaction and communication from their clinician on the Web. That’s because popular social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, are growing rapidly, enabling patients to use a variety of social media resources for support, education, and treatment decisions. A static Web site that consists only of your practice name, staff biographies, your office address and phone numbers, and a map to guide patients to your practice won’t cut it any longer in terms of patient expectations.

Health-care practitioners are just beginning to embrace social media—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging—as an important component of their Internet marketing strategy. Blogging is easy, quick, and free. In many cases, a blog already is integrated with the rest of your professionally designed Web site. To get started, you just need to contribute content to the blog.

Although a blog won’t deliver an instant return on investment, it can, with time, build awareness of your practice and help promote your services to existing and potential patients. Blogs are driven by content, and a blog tied to your practice gives you the freedom to write and publish content that is unique to you and your practice. Written effectively, blogs present the perfect opportunity to interact with your patients while promoting your services.

Blogs also can improve your search engine ranking significantly. By adding new content to your blog on a regular basis, you ensure that search engines “crawl” your site more often. More important, blogs make it possible to dually publish content on other social media sites, functioning as the nucleus of your social media maintenance. Regular posts to your blog can be synced with your Facebook and Twitter accounts for seamless social networking.

Choose a snappy headline

Few patients will read a blog post with a headline that doesn’t entice them in some way. A compelling headline is essential to get your visitor to read the rest of the article and revisit your blog for new posts in the future.

Think of your blog title as a billboard. Consider that you are trying to attract the attention of drivers who have only a few seconds to look at your signage. The same is true for the title of your blog. Visitors often read the title and make a decision about whether to read the rest of the content. For example, an article entitled “Evaluation and treatment of urinary incontinence” probably would not get the eyeballs to stick, compared with a headline like “You don’t have to depend on Depends!” Doctors tend to think conservatively and may generate bland titles more suitable for a medical journal. I suggest that you think more like a tabloid journalist to attract readers to your blog.

Keep blog posts lay-friendly

Because patients will be reading your blog, remember to write for them and not for your colleagues. Be conversational and avoid overusing medical terminology that your readers won’t appreciate or understand. Try to target your writing to the 10th grade level so that you attract both educated and less educated readers. Some blog sites evaluate your writing to determine its grade level and will assist you in keeping your material understandable by most readers.