How can a newly opened medical clinic or health care center attract offline customers?

Newly opened medical clinics or health clubs face huge challenges: lack of visibility, low customer flow, and immature team and service processes. In this context, how to effectively attract and expand customers becomes the key. This article will share some practical offline customer acquisition strategies to help medical clinics achieve a cold start and attract the first batch of customers.

For a medical clinic or health care center, the first few months after opening are actually the most difficult.

Firstly, it is not well-known and has few customers.

Secondly, the store’s team building, service processes, employee management and other aspects may not be on track yet.

In addition, online customer acquisition channels still need to be cultivated, so the first three months of operation will be a great test of the operations team's capabilities.

Therefore, how to find the first batch of customers and achieve the cold start of the clinic becomes very important at this time.

Without further ado, today I will share with you some ideas on offline customer acquisition for your reference.

If you happen to be in such a dilemma, you might as well take a closer look. I hope it can be helpful to you.

1. Doing a good job of ground promotion can quickly break the deadlock.

In physical stores, there are three types of customer traffic: 1. Natural traffic; 2. Marketing promotion traffic; 3. Word-of-mouth referrals.

The natural traffic depends on the specific location of our store, such as shops along the street with dense traffic, shopping malls, commercial streets, etc.

However, in the traditional Chinese medicine health care industry, many stores are opened in inaccessible places with almost no natural traffic, such as office buildings and residential areas.

In this case, we have to rely on offline promotion to quickly break the circle.

Traditional ground promotion is something everyone can do, such as making a DM, printing some coupons and giving them out, but such ground promotion will not be very effective and is a bit of a waste of manpower and material resources;

A better way to promote the store is to work with the street office, neighborhood committee, property management company, and nearby large commercial complex for business development (BD).

How to do it? Take the cold start plan I made for a newly opened clinic as an example:

The first step is to find the neighborhood committee where the clinic is located to discuss cooperation, by jointly organizing public health checkups for community residents, entering the community and helping the elderly in the community to have free checkups;

The second step is to prepare the materials needed for the event after the plan is completed, including those for online promotion and offline display, write pictures and texts, and ask the neighborhood committee to help distribute them to the homeowners group, calling on and organizing the elderly in the community to participate;

The third step is to provide training for service personnel on the day, including: physical examination project process, communication skills, conversion process, etc. At the same time, do a good job in online traffic acceptance process to convert and retain customers in a timely manner;

The fourth step is to notify and confirm the number of attendees in advance one day before the event, conduct an on-site evaluation, and ensure that the event goes smoothly. On the day of the event, you will be responsible for controlling the site, providing good service, and converting as many customers as possible through conversion plans.

Through such a community public welfare physical examination activity, we can not only demonstrate the professional level of the clinic, but also help the community neighborhood committee to do practical things. The most important thing is to go deep into the front line to understand our precise customer base, understand their real needs and service feedback, and have a deeper understanding of our own market positioning. At the same time, we also do publicity work and capture precise customers, killing two birds with one stone.

2. Carry out cooperation among peers and different industries and promote mutual exchange of information.

In addition to cooperating with communities and neighborhood committees to hold joint activities, there is another promotion method that is worth a try;

This is collaboration among peers or different industries.

Peer/cross-industry cooperation is mainly cooperation between businesses. By working together to integrate resources between different businesses, they work together to promote activities in order to form a greater synergy and more welfare and preferential programs to attract more consumers to the store.

This is a marketing activity of resource exchange and win-win cooperation. Therefore, as the leader of the activity, how to design a plan that is beneficial to everyone is the biggest core point to promote this kind of cooperation.

First of all, you have to choose the right partner. Everyone should have similar target consumer profiles and there should not be too much competition in terms of products and services. Only then will it be suitable to do joint activities.

Secondly, we need to ensure that the activity is attractive to consumers and that the experience of consumers participating in the entire activity is smooth and coherent, so as to avoid causing consumers to feel bored and having the opposite effect;

Finally, it is necessary to conduct a good ROI (return on investment) assessment to ensure that the final investment and benefits of the entire activity are satisfactory to all parties, so that the activity can continue.

For example, suppose there is a store selling Chinese health tea drinks in your area. The customer base of this type of store has a certain overlap with that of health clubs and medical clinics, and they pay more attention to health and wellness. You can consider talking to the boss and offering some of your store's services as gifts or discounts. As long as you spend XX yuan in his store, you can get a free trial. Similarly, as long as you apply for a card in your store or spend XX yuan, you can go to their store to get xx drink.

This type of activity, by leveraging each other's resources, provides exchange benefits that are helpful in attracting consumers to the store. It is beneficial to all three parties, and as long as the invested resources can bring back the final revenue, it is worth doing in the long run.

3. Do a good job in KOL/KOC marketing and achieve rapid fission.

In addition to the above two offline customer acquisition methods, there is another promotion and traffic method that is often overlooked, which is to find KOL (key opinion leaders) and KOC (key opinion consumers) to cooperate.

If our medical clinic and health center has some physical products, we can look for KOL/KOC to cooperate in product distribution, and use products to attract traffic through rebates or profit sharing, etc.

If the goal is to attract customers to visit the store, you can first invite appropriate KOLs/KOCs to experience the products and services in the store, so that they have a basic trust in the store. Then, by recommending customers to join, you can offer them free trials or discounts to achieve customer fission.

We need to carefully look for this kind of KOL/KOC. They are relatively good at organizing and calling on the groups around them. They are the kind of people who often hold parties in the circle of friends. As long as we carefully discover them, if a store has 20 to 30 such cooperative groups, the store's customer flow will not be a big problem.

Through product distribution and customer fission, we can save the store's marketing costs and improve traffic conversion. In this way, we can quickly build customer trust and lay the foundation for long-term cooperation in the future. It also avoids direct price competition with surrounding peers and stores in the market. It is worth our long-term investment.

4. Final words

Offline customer acquisition focuses more on the team's BD capabilities, event planning capabilities, and execution capabilities;

The above three methods are not mutually exclusive. If conditions permit, you can try multiple methods.

Of course, it cannot be completely separated from the online operation and run independently.

Some activities can be planned in conjunction with online platforms, such as pre-sales of new stores on Meituan Dianping, opening ceremonies, store collection and check-in activities, etc.

Text/Yan Bo This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Yan Bo Shuo], WeChat public account: [Yan Bo Shuo], original/authorized to be published on Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.