Who is your clinic for? Positioning is the owner's decision
Dear colleague
Last fall I sat at a kitchen table with a clinic owner. She had just had a new website built. Good-looking, fast, decent photos of the team, a green button that said "Book an appointment" in the top corner. She turned the screen toward me and asked if I didn't think it had turned out well.
It had. So I asked the only question I had brought with me: who is it built for?
It went quiet. She knew the answer, but nobody had ever asked her the question. The website was built for patients.
All patients.
And that was exactly what wasn't working.
New patients were coming in. The phone rang, the appointment book filled up. But the people booking were not the people she had built the clinic for. They came for the cheap treatment, said no to anything that cost more than an exam and a cleaning, and rarely came back. She read that as a visibility problem. She wanted me to look at whether she should put more money into Google and into the agency that had built the site and had just quoted her for search engine optimization (SEO).
The clinic had plenty of traffic. It was just the wrong traffic.
What she had never done was put one decision in writing: who the clinic is for and who it is not for. Without that decision, the website, the Google profile and the posts all speak to everyone at once. And a clinic that speaks to everyone gets chosen by the people who only look at the price.
She had done nothing wrong. Positioning had simply never been defined as her job. Nobody had told her that the decision belongs to the owner and not to the web agency.
Traffic is rarely the problem
A German trade publication recently followed the patient's path from first search to booked appointment. Around seven out of ten start online, and a growing share of those searches end without a click at all, because the answer is already there on the screen. That is true, and it is well worth knowing. But it is not where most clinics lose the patient.
My team and I walked her own booking path the way a stranger would experience it. Some call it the customer journey. We found the clinic through a Google search, clicked into the website and looked for a reason to choose her over anyone else.
There wasn't one.
The site said the same as the four other clinics in town: experienced dentists, modern equipment, a calm atmosphere.
We lost the thread in three places:
The phone number was one thing on the website and another on Google (and hard to find on the website at all).
The opening hours didn't match.
And the booking button led to a form with eleven fields.
Each of those can be fixed in an afternoon. But they are symptoms. The reason the surfaces didn't hang together was that there was nothing to hang them on. When you haven't decided who the clinic is for, there is no single line to be consistent about. So each surface gets built on its own, by different people, at different times, and they pull in different directions.
And the worst part of it all is that most sites are built so that they are hard to fix yourself.
The positioning you can decide this week
You are not in doubt about which patients you want more of. You already know them. They take up a fair share of your appointment book right now.
So start there.
Take three concrete steps, and take them in that order.
First:
Pull your patient list out of your practice management system and find the three patients you wish you had twenty more of. Write down what they have in common. Age, needs, what they said yes to, why they keep coming back. That is your positioning. It sits in your own numbers, not in a marketing course.
Next:
Take that one decision and make it visible in the same place every time. Same name, same number, same opening hours, same reason to choose you, on the website, on Google and on every profile you have.
It sounds banal. It is. But a search engine and an AI assistant both recommend what says the same thing everywhere, and hesitate about the rest.
Finally:
Walk your own booking path as a patient who has never heard of you. Find the places where you would drop off yourself. Fix them.
The clinic owner I talked to spent one afternoon on the first step. It turned out the patients she wanted more of had all arrived the same way, for a reason she had never written down. Once she wrote it down, the rest got easier. Not because she got more traffic, but because she finally knew who she was talking to... and it turned out to be very cheap. It required no advertising on social media or Google.
More marketing on top of a clinic that hasn't decided who it is built for just gets you more of the wrong patients, faster.
So here is the question I would ask you if we were sitting across from each other: if you opened your appointment book today and found the three patients you wish you had many more of, do you know what they have in common? Or would that be the first time you wrote it down?
Positioning before marketing
That is what I will be writing more about over the fall.
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Thank you for reading.
Warm regards
Jesper Hatt
Dentist, adviser and advocate for clinics where security, community and balance are a natural part of everyday life.
T: +41 78 268 0078
