Thu. Apr 25th, 2024

I am a big fan of Joe Polish and the I Love Marketing Podcast. Some of the tips I give here will obviously be influenced by what I hear there as well as other books I have read. Oh, and from experience as well. Let me tell about Push, Pull and Dangle. That’s the easier way to say it it but the true order is:

  1. Pull – your marketing campaign has to pull them in. What are you using? Ads on a billboard (expensive and rarely work for DPC)? Ads on TV or paper (expensive). Direct marketing postcards? FB ads? This is the strategy of getting to your website. Now if your website sucks or is confusing then you wasted your money.
  2. Dangle – This is the technique of giving them something to get their information (name and email). I created the free Consumer Guide to Primary Care to offer patients. I talked that more in my updated The Official Guide to Starting Your Own Direct Primary Care Practice. That was another thing I learned from Joe Polish. The guide is a large PDF that goes into detail about all the problems in the system and why DPC fixes it. You can offer whatever you want but dangle something. Keep is PG-13, though. 🙂
  3. Push – this is where you take those emails and names and constantly educate these people on the benefit of DPC. NOT SELL but educate. You can use the list to send out when you do a free lecture or an open house. At Forest DPC, I would use that information to send an email with the attached Consumer Guide PDF. I would then send another email a week later with links to videos I made about my practice. I did stop after that but there is nothing to say you couldn’t grow this list and continue to educate these people.

There is your DPC marketing tip of the day. I would love to hear what you are doing. Put it in the comments.

8380cookie-checkPull, Dangle and Push: Marketing for DPC
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By Douglas Farrago, MD

Douglas Farrago MD is board certified in the specialty of Family Practice. He is the inventor of a product called the Knee Saver which is currently in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Knee Saver and its knock-offs are worn by many major league baseball catchers. He is also the inventor of the CryoHelmet used by athletes for head injuries as well as migraine sufferers. From 2001 – 2011, Dr. Farrago was the editor and creator of the Placebo Journal which ran for 10 full years. Described as the Mad Magazine for doctors, he and the Placebo Journal were featured in the Washington Post, US News and World Report, the AP, and the NY Times. Douglas Farrago, MD received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Virginia in 1987, his Masters of Education degree in the area of Exercise Science from the University of Houston in 1990, and his Medical Degree from the University of Texas at Houston in 1994. His residency training occurred way up north at the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Maine. In his final year, he was elected Chief Resident by his peers. Dr. Farrago has practiced family medicine for twenty-three years, first in Auburn, Maine and now in Forest, Virginia. He founded Forest Direct Primary Care in 2014, which quickly filled in 18 months. Dr. Farrago still blogs every day on his website Authenticmedicine.com and lectures worldwide about the present crisis in our healthcare system and the effect it has on the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Farrago’s has written three books on direct primary care: The Official Guide to Starting Your Own Direct Primary Care Practice, The Direct Primary Care Doctor’s Daily Motivational Journal and Slowing the Churn in Direct Primary Care (While Also Keeping Your Sanity) are all best sellers in this genre. He is a leading expert in direct primary care model and lectures medical students, residents, and doctors on how to start their own DPC practice. He retired from clinical medicine in October, 2020.

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