How to Attract New Patients With Other People’s Networks
If you have an online health practice, you know you need a way to be seen online so you can attract new patients virtually.
While direct referrals are always great, you can’t rely on getting them from your patients all of the time. So it makes sense to build an audience and stay in front of them with ongoing marketing through email and social content.
But how do you get started in building an audience? Where could these potential patients come from?
Partner Up
Beyond referrals, one of the best ways to build an audience is to get in front of someone else’s audience. You can attract new patients when you are a guest speaker on various types of platforms — including joint ventures, podcasts, and summits.
Who Else Do You Know Who Has a Similar Audience?
You might know several other fellow health professionals with different specialties who have already attracted patients who could be served by you, too.
Say, for example, you’re a functional nutritionist specializing in weight loss for women over 40. You might have colleagues who work with a similar demographic — such as gynecologists, chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, or energy healers.
If these colleagues already have an online audience, and they regularly promote complementary products and services to their patients, you could potentially partner with them in a joint venture agreement.
With a joint venture, you typically agree to work together on a specific online program or product and cross-promote each other to your mailing lists.
Get Interviewed on Complementary Podcasts
There are thousands of podcasts available online, and hundreds that focus on health and wellness. The way they stay relevant and profitable is to continually produce content. That means that most podcasts are constantly looking for new guest speakers to interview.
So you can search for podcasts that cover your specific areas of expertise and pitch yourself as a potential guest speaker for their show.
The benefit of being interviewed on a podcast is that your show will live forever. And if the podcaster continues to publish more interviews, they will continue to grow their audience and gain popularity.
So even if you don’t find you get an immediate response from your interview, you may find that you continue to build your audience more and more from one interview that you did months earlier.
Be a Guest Speaker at an Online Summit
Summits are a great way to connect with thousands of potential patients from several other people’s audiences.
A summit is an online event that brings together several different health experts who speak about their expertise relating to a specific topic — for example:
- How to optimize sleep
- Women and hormone balance
- Addressing adrenal fatigue
- How to reduce stress
- Overcoming trauma
There are summits for almost any health-related topic you can imagine. And there are summits for nearly every single week of the year, so there are plenty of opportunities to participate.
One of the great reasons to participate in a summit is that it is typically launched as a limited-time event, and everyone who participates in the summit is required to promote it to their audience during the event.
Because of all this exposure, you can potentially get hundreds of new subscribers to your list.
Here’s how it works: when you become a speaker on a summit, you typically have the opportunity to offer a free bonus to the summit attendees. Your bonus could be an ebook, audio recording, video series, or anything else that an attendee can download by providing their email address.
When your interview goes live, you’ll likely have several hundred people who decide to sign up for your free bonus and subscribe to your newsletter.
And as long as you continue to follow up with these new leads by sending newsletters and valuable content, you can potentially warm them up to become new patients in your practice.
A Smarter Way to Build an Audience
When you collaborate with complementary health practitioners and health-related businesses, it’s easier to attract the right kinds of people to your practice.
Since these businesses have already built a strong, health-minded following, you can provide value by sharing your specialty with people who are already interested in being proactive with their wellness.
