Coming up with new ideas to market your practice can be challenging. From the act of initial brainstorming new ideas to the time it takes to set up an idea to execution to reviewing the performance and ROI of an ad - it's a lot of work. We've looked to the experts to generate a pool of marketing ideas that have proven track records of working well for eyecare practices. Which of these methods have you tried in your office? What works best for you? Let us know in the comments!

7 Proven Marketing Strategies for Your Eyecare Practice

Facebook Ads

Social media can be a very valuable marketing machine when done correctly. As a business page, many of your followers won't see your posts unless you pay to promote them. On the bright side, paying for these promotions can be done with a relatively low budget. When you pay to promote your posts, make sure that you're promoting to the right audience. Whether it's to people who currently like your page or a targeted audience within a certain age group living in a certain area close to your practice, setting up the right audiences will help you get the most bang for your buck.

Online Reviews

Boosting your practice's online presence with patient reviews helps potential patients make informed decisions about the care they are looking to receive. This is one that can be a little hard to control, but there are ways to promote positive reviews of your practice online. The more positive reviews you can generate for your practice, the less impactful the negative ones will be. A few places you can encourage patients to review your practice are by using:

• Post Visit Surveys
• Text Remindesr
• Thank You Emails
• Invoice Messages
• Waiting Room/Front Desk Signage

SEO

Optimizing your practice's website for SEO and using Google Adwords to target relevant keywords that future patients might be searching for will help your practice show up at the top of the list of Google searches. If your practice isn't one of the first to appear, there is a high chance that potential patients won't even consider your practice for their health care.Google Adwords can be intimidating to use, but once you get over the hurdle of getting a few ads up and running successfullly, it's easier to manage and make changes over time when needed.

Local Events

Being active in your community is a great way to generate new business. People like doing business with people they trust and have things in common with. Most communities have school events, local sports teams, or non-profit organizations that are in need of sponsors and volunteers. Becoming a sponsor of local events allows you and your staff to be more involved in the community and spread awareness of your practice. With some events, you might be able to set up a little "pop up shop" and offer free frame adjustments or show off some of your frame lines.

Email

Email is a relatively cheap and easy way to get in front of your patients. It's non-invasive and requires a lot less staff time versus putting out phone calls to a group of patients. While the thought of email marketing might sound intimidating to someone who doesn't have experience with it, there are a ton of affordable or free services that will walk you through the process with simple templates for sending out your first email. Plus, you'll be able to track the performance of the emails so you can make changes and improve your ROI over time.

Snail Mail

This one might surprise you, but now that snail mail is so much less frequent than it used to be there is someting a little more special about getting a thoughtful piece of mail. Whether it's a birthday or holiday card, sending your patients a well put together piece of mail could really resonate with certain people.

Word of Mouth

This is a big one for many practices, but can also be hard to put into action since word of mouth works best when it's organically shared from your patients. But, to help encourage word of mouth advertising you could implement a referral program for people that send new patients to your practice. With a referral program you can offer incentives to people who help bring the most business into your practice. You could offer a small incentive for each referral or enter all referalls into a drawing each month for a bigger prize. We have a separate article dedicated entirely to creating a referral program in your practice, check it out here.