Startup DPC Blog: Start and Grow Your DPC Practice
Sales Funnel For Your Direct Primary Care Practice
This week, we got a really nice testimonial from Alexandra A. about our Startup DPC book and Sales Funnel Course:
Thank you so much Dr. Thomas!
I read your Startup DPC book at the end of my first year of residency, and it has been such a help as I've started my journey.
Thank you for everything you have done for the burgeoning DPC community.
Thank you to everyone who has picked up a copy of the book or one of the courses - I appreciate all of you!
-Paul Thomas, MD
As a primary care doctor, you are unlikely to have any history of building a website or creating content online, and THAT IS OKAY. You don’t need to know how to write code, and you don’t need to know how to do complicated tasks online. However, you should know how to use a service like SquareSpace or Wix or GoDaddy to build your own website.
I like using SquareSpace, and both my PlumHealthDPC.com and this StartupDPC.com are built on the SquareSpace platform. It takes anywhere from 2 to 8 hours to build a decent website. You have to choose a theme and select the pages that you want. Some companies are going to a “one page website” where you have all of your information on one page without clicking to other pages. This would greatly simplify your web-building process.
However, as you can see, I take a more traditional or typical approach to my website. I have a main page, an about page, an FAQ page, a blog page, and then my schedule/enroll page. This meets the expectations of most of my potential customers and allows them to easily engage with my content.
I can also write many blog posts and add that information to my blog page, which increases my traffic and search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.
I have a lot of doctors ask me to develop their website for them. I charge $3,000 for this service as it takes a good amount of time and there is a decent amount of back-and-forth to get things just right for the doctor. Most good web designers charge this amount of money, and you can find someone to do the work for you on a site like Fiverr or UpWork or a similar free-lance friendly website.
I will say, your website is the most important part of your business. It’s the front door to your business, and it acts to attract new patients and enables them to enroll seamlessly. You must have an excellent website that is easy to use and does not have any broken links.
On a final note, I’m taking a digital marketing course right now to improve my digital marketing skills, and this was one of the topics: how to improve your website!
When you are building your website, it’s important to identify the goal of your website. For my Plum Health DPC website, my goal is to get more people to enroll in our direct primary care service. We achieve this goal by writing content on our blog to improve search engine optimization, and then sharing that content on our social media channels and back-linking to our blog to attract new readers, who hopefully become new members.
When you are building your website, it’s important to identify the goal of your website. For my Plum Health DPC website, my goal is to get more people to enroll in our direct primary care service.
Additionally, your website should be easy to navigate - as the old saying goes, keep it simple silly! If you have too much information, a cramped and crowded website, it may drive people away. Having enough white space allows your website to breathe and your potential customers to feel relaxed as they read through your information.
You should have your logo on each page, as that can add more credibility and professionalism. You should choose fonts and colors that complement your brand and your logo. I like to include videos and multimedia - written content paired with images and videos can help communicate the information to different audiences who consume information in different ways.
Additionally, your website should be easy to navigate - as the old saying goes, keep it simple silly! If you have too much information, a cramped and crowded website, it may drive people away. Having enough white space allows your website to breathe and your potential customers to feel relaxed as they read through your information. You should have your logo on each page, as that can add more credibility and professionalism. You should choose fonts and colors that complement your brand and your logo. I like to include videos and multimedia - written content paired with images and videos can help communicate the information to different audiences who consume information in different ways.
Thanks so much for reading! If you love this content, then check out our Sales Funnel course, where I go in-depth on how to attract more patients to your direct primary care practice. As a big hint, you need to have content on your website and a seamless way to enroll on your website to achieve this goal.
Have a great week!
-Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC and Plum Health DPC in Detroit, Michigan
Adding new skills on LinkedIn can help to keep your LinkedIn profile looking fresh. It will communicate with your audience that you're actively engaged in the work that you're doing. If you're a direct primary care doctor, having a fresh and engaging LinkedIn profile is a must for attracting and retaining new patients to your direct primary care practice.
For me, I just took 5 minutes to update my LinkedIn profile. This action will help me reach a broader audience and keep my current audience engaged. I just wrote a book called Startup DPC: How to Start and Grow Your Direct Primary Care Practice, so I needed to update the publications section of my LinkedIn profile.
In this video, I show you step by step how I did this. If you spend 5 minutes on LinkedIn every day, you'll see tremendous results for your personal and professional brand. I created an entire course on attracting new patients to your direct primary care practice, and it can be found here.
I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn - you can add me by going to my profile and clicking on the “Connect” button.
Have a wonderful day,
-Dr. Paul Thomas
Direct primary care doctors want to know how to attract more patients to their direct primary care practices. This can be accomplished by using a sales funnel, which may seem like a foreign concept, but let me explain. You see, doctors aren’t taught how to market themselves in medical school. There is no course on branding and marketing in medical school or residency. Further, doctors can feel icky about marketing themselves or selling their services.
However, you shouldn’t feel gross about marketing yourself, and here’s why. The best form of marketing is giving the right people in your community the right information about your service. If you can clearly explain what it is that you do and how you help people, that’s marketing. If you can share interesting stories about yourself and about your direct primary care practice, that’s marketing.
There’s a lot of nuance here and there are some tips and tricks to create the best marketing plan for yourself and for your direct primary care practice, which is why I created the Direct Primary Care Sales Funnel Course on Startup DPC.
For me, it’s been exciting to watch more and more doctors purchase this course, learn from this course, and start applying this new knowledge to grow their direct primary care practices! Further, I’ve been getting some great reviews for this course material. Here’s what one of our successful students had to say about the Sales Funnel Course:
Paul Thomas through his marketing course explains how a blog will get people to click on your actual website and while there take a look at your services. You can also title the blogs to items frequently searched such as #bestdoctorincharlotte or #howtofindagooddoctor Since I’ve taken what I would’ve normally put in a Facebook post (like info about COVID-19) or that I put in weekly emails, into a “blog article on my website”, I’ve cross posted it in blog format so when they click on it to read-they are at my website. I get quite a few views from Facebook and LinkedIn which I used to never interact with. Google searches have gone up too. In terms of SEO it definitely works to drive traffic to your site (now it’s fun to see how many people have been to my website after a posting). In terms of patients-definitely a couple since I started doing it this way, but like a lot of marketing-it seems to be a long game. Since I’m basically giving out good info for free, it doesn’t feel like “marketing” or trying to be a saleswoman which I like. I do spend about 3-4 hours researching and working on content, so was very hesitant to commit at first. Since I’m still building and have empty slots-I just use that time to work on content. As I get busier, I plan to blog less or as needed when a topic is relevant. Some docs pay a service to write blog articles for them as part of their SEO-you could do this, but it isn’t as personable to you. It does work though-just have to weigh the benefits/ROI of your time.
I responded to her by saying that this made my day, because it sincerely made my day! There are few things that make me happier than seeing doctors succeed in their direct primary care practices. Sincerely thank you Melissa Jones, DO for writing this.
This is the review from Facebook of our Startup DPC Sales Funnel Course.
To learn more about Melissa Jones, DO, please check out her website, here. Her practice is in Charlotte, North Carolina and her goal is to provide all of her patients with quality care, greater access, and better solutions all of the time. Check her out on Facebook as well!
If you enjoyed reading this blog post and if you want to learn more about starting and growing your direct primary care practice, look no further than our courses on how to start and grow your direct primary care practice. We at Startup DPC have begun compiling some of the best content available on this blog and in our courses.
The best place to start is to take our Direct Primary Care Business Plan course, available here. From there, you can learn how to attract new patients to your direct primary care practice and how to find the perfect location or build out the practice of your dreams.
Thanks for reading and watching, and best of luck in your direct primary care journey!
- Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC
