Any business that wants to succeed needs to find their niche – their strengths. When you find out what makes you unique and what your patient audience is looking for, you hit the sweet spot. Before you can start identifying unique strengths, you have to start with the foundational ones.
Below, you’ll find a breakdown of the four main pillars you should focus on and expand upon. What unique flair you decide to apply to each will be your own.
1. Expertise in Eye Care
The knowledge, clinical experience, and your strong prescribing ability make you the absolute expert that your patients need. Eye care is an often misunderstood aspect of our medical care, with patients not understanding the importance of caring for their eyes. This means they also don’t know the best practices and need you not just to provide a great vision solution, but to educate.
Learn to leverage your unique strengths.
Your education style will vary depending on you and what makes you unique. Think about how you best teach others but don’t get bogged down too much in the details – just enough that the patient understands your prescription.
2. Technology Agility
Adopting new products and technology tools is vital to growing a practice. Technology updates are only speeding up, so it’s crucial to stay on top of the latest and greatest. Agility, however, is the ability to change quickly. Whether you own one practice or ten, it’s important to adopt new technology quickly.
The key to this is creating a system of training and follow-through with your team. Your supplier partners should provide you with enough materials on new lenses and tools that help you adopt them quickly. Take the time to find a system that works for you and make learning new products part of your success metrics.
3. Patient Trust and Relationships
Consumers expect excellent customer service, and this trend is only going to increase. To leverage this strength, you need to bring your strongest asset to the market, your team. By building up your expertise and always adopting the best technological tools across your team, you are one step ahead. Everyone should make sure the customer feels heard, understood, and educated.
To put your unique flair on this, find what resonates with your patients. It’s ok to ask for feedback. The most important thing is to be authentic. If your patients don’t feel you are authentic, they’ll find somewhere else to go.
4. Personality and Brand
A personal brand is the image you send out into the marketplace through your physical office, the marketing you create, and the experience you provide. Before you start to find and leverage unique strengths, you need to plant your flag and choose your brand and the personality you put into the marketplace.
There are a lot of eye care practices out there, but there is only one of you. Leverage what makes you and your team unique and communicate that with the world. Three necessary keys to building a brand are:
- Be who you are
- Be consistent from the waiting room to your marketing
- Know your audience - don’t market a heavy metal band to a market of 65+ retirees; likewise, don’t market progressive lenses or early detection AMD tests to a college town.
Building Upon These Pillars
Building these pillars might seem easy or maybe an insurmountable task, however, you are likely leveraging each of these in some form. Take the deliberate time to examine each and set goals and plans on any you want to build up or change. It’s okay if, after you do that work, you decide you are leveraging these pillars and to move into building upon your unique strengths.
Once you feel you’ve met your goals, it’s time to start thinking about what else sets you apart. Take some time to think about what makes you stand out, ask patients, team members, and friends to help you out.