Why Most Medical Practices Are Invisible Online (and How to Fix That)

A physician can spend a decade in training, treat thousands of patients and earn a strong reputation among peers, and still watch a newer practice across town pull in ten times the Instagram following and twice the consultation requests.

The newer practice usually doesn't offer better care. It's just better at marketing, and those are two different skills. Most doctors were trained rigorously in medicine and then left to figure out marketing on their own, through trial and error and whatever an agency happened to be pitching that quarter.

I've been marketing private medical practices for almost 10 years, most of them in the cosmetic field. For a lot of that time I ran a media company that handled social media marketing and management for practices. I kept running into the same problem, and it was rarely the one the practice thought it had.

The $7,000-a-month problem nobody was answering

A cosmetic dental practice was spending $7,000 a month on professional video content. Their views kept going up, but they called me frustrated because none of it was turning into paying patients.

I decided to call their front desk myself, posing as a prospective patient. The phone rang eight times before someone picked up, and the person who answered couldn't tell me what a consultation cost, how long recovery took or when the next opening was. They had no call tracking in place, so nobody at the practice had any idea how many calls like mine were coming in each week.

The videos were doing their job. The practice just had no one ready to handle the people the videos were sending.

About a year later I saw the same thing happen at a med spa in another city. The procedures were different, but the content was excellent, engagement was real, and the front office was quietly losing a big share of the leads that content brought in.

In both cases, the business had paid to create demand before making sure it could handle that demand and turn it into booked patients.

Why RXforDocs exists

RXforDocs is written for physicians who own private practices, especially in the cosmetic field, including plastic surgery, cosmetic dermatology, cosmetic dentistry and other elective, cash-pay specialties. You built something independent, and your marketing has to work without a hospital system's budget or name behind it.

Followers, likes and reach are nice to have, but they come as a side effect of good marketing. What you actually want is a schedule full of the right patients. I'm not going to try to make you go viral or turn you into an influencer. The goal here is to help the people who find you online become patients who show up, using real numbers and a practice that's ready for them.

You'll see two recurring sections in everything I publish:

• Pre-Op Check: a look at whether your practice is ready for the results before you spend money chasing them. Are the phones answered? Can your staff answer basic questions about procedures and pricing? Is someone following up with leads? A surgeon confirms a patient is cleared before operating, and your marketing deserves the same check.
• Prescription: what's going wrong, the specific action to take, and what you should expect to see once you've done it. Treat it as a standing order for your practice.

What I'll be covering

Over the coming months, I'll be writing about:

• The three numbers every practice should know before spending more on marketing: how patients move from first finding you to booking, a budget that fits your growth stage and what a patient is worth to you over time
• SEO and your website, so patients can find you and feel confident choosing you
• Social media and content that brings in patients instead of just views
• Building your marketing team, whether in-house or with an agency
• The consultation and patient experience, which is where a lot of leads are won or lost
• Influencer partnerships and paid ads, and when each one makes sense
• Topics most marketing advice for doctors leaves out, like reviews, physician referral networks, CRM and automation and how to tell whether your marketing is working
• Ways to keep your marketing HIPAA compliant, from patient photos and testimonials to how your team replies to reviews and messages

A quick note on HIPAA: what I share about compliance is meant as suggestions and reminders, not legal advice. Every practice is different, and at the end of the day your compliance lawyer should sign off on anything you put in place. My job is to flag the things that commonly trip practices up and give you tips to help you stay compliant.

I'll also be releasing several worksheets that work as audits. You can print them and hand them to your marketing director, or fill them out yourself as a quick pulse check on how your marketing is doing.

And I'm launching The Practice Marketing Planner 2027, a planner built specifically for medical practices to plan and track their marketing month by month. More on that soon.

Where to start

• Download the free guide, 5 Marketing Mistakes Costing Doctors Patients
• See what's in the Practice Marketing Planner 2027
• Book a marketing audit if you'd like a gameplan built around your practice

The best way to keep up is to subscribe to the blog. Subscribers get every new post by email, access to the audit worksheets as they're released and the first word when the planner is available.

I'm glad you're here.