Traditionally, growing an occupational medicine practice has centered on a traditional business-to-business sales approach. One or more employees are typically responsible for working with prospects to convert them into clients. This involves activities such as calling, knocking on doors, and attending networking events to connect with potential clients. Even in the age of digital marketing, a direct sales approach remains key to growing your practice.
However, there are additional strategies to grow your practice that can help optimize the time and energy spent on traditional B2B sales efforts. While maintaining a strategy focused on direct outreach, you can also incorporate email marketing and LinkedIn prospecting to increase both the volume and quality of leads for your occupational medicine medical practice.
Email Marketing: To boost the volume of leads, consider purchasing targeted email lists from reliable sources that have permission to sell this contact information. You can then send cold emails to this list. For instance, your local chamber of commerce might provide a way to email all of its members. Similarly, you can purchase lists of emails based on a combination of geography and industry. While these emails may be colder, you can compensate by sending timely and valuable industry-specific information.
In addition to these outbound strategies for cold email outreach, you can also collect email addresses on your website. This will require a search engine optimization strategy and/or other techniques to drive traffic to high-quality content on your website. If you provide the right information on your site, you can then require your prospects to submit an email address so that you can follow up with more details.
Regardless of how you collect email addresses, a single email isn’t likely to turn most of your prospects into clients. Instead, think of ways you can build relationships with and nurture these leads. Start with an onboarding series of emails that presents an overview of your services, and then consider a monthly newsletter to provide seasonal or other timely updates. By nurturing your leads in this way, you will improve the quality of the conversations you have when they are ready to talk.
LinkedIn Marketing
Along with an email marketing strategy, you should also consider LinkedIn prospecting. Since LinkedIn is a professional networking site, it can be far easier to connect with prospects than on other platforms, such as Facebook. The key here is to find the right prospects and follow the correct procedures for navigating your contacts list. You’ll also need to present information that demonstrates how you can provide value to any potential clients within their network.
To start, you’ll need to identify and connect with prospects. Assuming you are using an email marketing strategy, you should look to connect with all of your email prospects on LinkedIn as well. Then, you can use LinkedIn’s native search capabilities to identify and reach out to people based on a combination of their geography, job titles, industry, and other variables that LinkedIn collects.
After making new LinkedIn connections, you might consider a direct messaging strategy to reach out and see if your new contact is interested in a call or meeting to learn more about your services. But, if they are not ready yet, that’s okay. You can nurture these contacts by posting helpful content to your LinkedIn profile. Over time, this will help build the relationship and convince the prospect of your expertise.
Bringing it All Together
Ultimately, your first contact with a prospect may be in-person or online. In either case, your prospect will likely need multiple touchpoints to learn enough about your services before becoming your client. You can encourage this in many ways.
For example, with most email marketing software systems, you will have the ability to see when people open your messages. This can help you identify the prospects that are most interested in your services. You can then follow up with a phone call to those people who engage with your emails.
Or, when you meet someone in person and they give you their business card, you can then connect with them via email and LinkedIn. In some cases, this may lead immediately to another call or meeting. But if not, you can nurture the contact via the strategy outlined above.
