The call to treat sleep is strong and irresistible to those who see the symptoms and consequences daily. How many marriages, lives could you save by making this refreshingly simple patient treatment experience available to your community?
Then you find out why so few large practices seem to treat the overwhelming majority of appliances: A sleep practice start-up is hard…and expensive.
After you find your HST company, hire a sleep coordinator, subscribe to the EMR, pay for insurance credentialing, you still need to get patients.
Luckily, in the sleep marketing world, there are some quick wins you can achieve on your own with existing tools: beyond the easy website, Google Maps, posts on social media, and advice you’ve read about 1,000 times.
Modesty is typically a virtue we strive for in our daily lives, but if a physician asked you why they should refer their patients to you and you said “Well, we get decent outcomes,” you probably wouldn’t see any referrals come through.
Talking to patients, physicians, heck, even recruiting people to work for you, you have to be willing to confidently state what you do well and that you do it really well. You may not like calling it bragging, but that’s what it is.
However, saying it is easy, proving it less so. That’s where the Brag Book comes in. The “Our great oral appliance therapy outcomes” Book just didn’t have the same ring to it.
This should be a quick, one-page (front and back if you’ve got the goods) document you can pull out of your Physician Resources folder to hand to a prospective referral source. The nicely designed, branded document should include a table with (anonymized) basic patient information, their pre- and post-treatment AHI and ODI readings, and any important notes about them, such as which appliance, any combination therapies, or unique outcomes.
It’s quick and easy to make, and it’s the most powerful tool in the physician marketing resources kits we make for our clients. Print many of them to leave behind with the physicians and referral coordinators you meet with, along with information about what insurances you take, your credentials, and patient screening tools.
If you’re wondering how to be found by AI users, you don’t need a fancy GEO company. You can help yourself by claiming and filling out an Apple Business account.
We talked about AI search and Apple Business in our most recent monthly email newsletter. Most people don’t know Apple Maps has undergone a major overhaul in the past year, building a back-end platform called Apple Business as a more serious competitor to Google Business Pages.
The platform is more robust, with real call-to-action buttons, photos you can upload yourself (instead of through Yelp) and more details to add. Ads will roll out soon, and we’d expect them to have their own review system in the future.
When one of the over 1 billion iPhone users out there asks Siri for information, what would it say about your business? Would it even know you exist? ChatGPT and other AI platforms also rely on Apple Business as a primary way to verify accurate information to their customers.
Everyone (should) have Google locked down, but this is where you can get ahead, be an early adopter, and get extra patients for minimal investment.
Never in the history of any business has there been a 100% conversion rate on leads, no matter the source. While we’re always working with offices to improve phone communication skills, follow-up speed, and sleep consultation language, the reality is some patients will fall out of the process, or say no, or “maybe” and never call back.
This is especially true in sleep, where patients will come up with any reason to not move forward with treatment because while it’s annoying to be tired, it’s not so painful you’ll do anything in that moment to fix it. There’s no emergency sleep docs like there are emergency dentists.
“It costs too much”
“I need to convince my spouse to do it”
“I need to wait until after the election cycle because I just don’t know where the world is going” (Seriously, we heard that one once)
And that’s fine; we’re all humans who have made up reasons not to do something beneficial because we just weren’t ready.
The question is: when they ARE ready, will they remember you, and will your practice be there to restart the conversation?
For most practices, sadly, the answer is no. The team does the five follow-ups and moves on.
But what if I told you that implementing a reactivation campaign, it could potentially return 58% of your “lost leads”? In one healthcare reactivation campaign, only 42% of overdue patients said they would have scheduled without the practice reaching out. Another randomized study found that multi-channel outreach increased completed care from 21% to 36%.
This week: have your team put together a list of patients that didn’t complete treatment, and commit to reaching out to a set number per day with a personalized message until you get through the list. Text message is preferred, but calls and emails work well too. Or do them all; that’s the multi-channel part. You’ll be shocked by how fast your schedule fills up, just by following up with the leads you already paid for.
Pro Tip: This is especially effective in Q4, when patients have used their deductible and want to maximize their insurance benefits. In our Patient Conversion System that does this follow-up automatically for our clients, we call this the Use It Or Lose It campaign.
Good marketing takes investment, but there have never been more inexpensive opportunities to get started and make meaningful progress toward your goals in sleep. Document your successes and be willing to talk about them, keep your information up to date everywhere, and be persistent with patient follow-up, and you’ll have the flywheel turning to allow for more growth. Everyone started at zero; it’s your effort, creativity, and partnerships that will get you to one.
Lane Rizzardini brings over 14 years of experience doing the actual work building maps and listings, launching websites, running Google Ads accounts, reporting results for dental practices. He is the co-founder of Sleep Apnea Leads, a hyper-specialized company focused solely on driving patient acquisition for sleep practices. Lane lives in Waco, TX with his wife, kids, a bunch of chickens, a goat, and a pug. In his spare time, he runs, bikes, and dabbles in triathlons and duathlons.
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