Dr. Licausi (far left looking at photo) and Dr. Zilnicki (far right looking at photo) with a patient. Drs. Licausi and Zilnicki say they carefully evaluate the proven effectiveness of all their marketing investments.
Honing your optometry practice marketing strategy
By Miki Lyn Zilnicki, OD, FCOVD,
and Jessica Licausi, OD, FAAO, FCOVD
Sept. 4, 2024
Marketing your services as an optometry practice allows you to expand access to care in your community while growing your business.
Here is what worked and what didn’t in helping us reach families in need of our vision therapy niche.
Print & Paid Online Advertising: Bad Investments for Us
When we first opened our practice in 2015, we spent a ridiculous amount of money on print advertising in a local paper (~$20,000).
It was a bad investment and yielded almost no new patients. We quickly learned this was not the best way to market our services.
We also tried internet-based marketing on our local paper’s website (cost: $5,000), with almost no ROI there either.
In addition, we explored marketing with the DMV (cost: $2,500) that showed our office information on the video loop while people waited. We definitely saw some ROI in this, but it was not nearly worth what we paid for it.
What Worked Best: Word-of-Mouth, Referral Relationships with Other Healthcare Providers, Practice Newsletters & Social Media Posts
Our best form of marketing has been word-of-mouth from patients and creating relationships with our referral sources.
We share with our current patients a monthly-to-quarterly newsletter that highlights what is going on in our office office, recent vision therapy graduates, new episodes of the podcast we created and seasonal highlights.
Our current marketing plan is to increase our social media presence. We posted consistently for a while, but took a break recently because it was taking too long to create content.
Other Articles to Explore
We are considering delegating social media posting by hiring a social media manager. We are trying to gauge if the cost of that social media manager would have a beneficial ROI for our office compared to doing it ourselves.
Social Media Posts that Get the Most Engagement
This is a post about vision development in children. It got significant engagement, and we noticed a spike in new pediatric patients following the post.
We found that posting these types of educational tips help teach our patient base and family/friends about what we can do, and it starts conversations that definitely drive people into the office.
Many of our posts focus on the importance of vision development. We personalize our social media by including posts of the types of activities we do with our own children to help foster healthy visual systems.
We’ve gotten feedback that seeing these posts motivated parents in our community to bring their own children in for their first eye exams and learn from us how to play with their children in a way that builds a strong visual foundation.
Pictures in Our Office of What We Do
When you walk into our office, you see pictures of vision therapy success stories on the walls. These are definitely conversation starters!
We also have our promotional pamphlet on a bulletin board that lists common visual symptoms of visual disorders. It will sometimes trigger a new patient or primary care patient to realize that this is something they may be experiencing.
Many patients do not realize that it is not normal to see double, blurred vision or that reading should not be uncomfortable.
Free Vision Screenings & Community In-Service Educational Sessions
We have done free screenings at the office and have offered multiple in-services with local occupational therapists and reading specialists to help identify what to look for in their patients/students that may indicate a possible visual dysfunction.
We also sometimes attend local library and school open house nights and host tables where we provide a few examples of what vision testing looks like and educational information.
We offered to provide school screenings, but experienced logistical difficulties within the school districts. Despite not being able to do this as much as we want, we have a great relationship with numerous local schools. They are familiar with our services and how we can help their students.
If we have a patient/parent ask, we happily connect with the district, nurses, teachers and support staff via e-mail or at Committee on Special Education meetings to help communicate how/why the student is struggling and what accommodations would help that student thrive.
Engaging with Patients About All of Their Family’s Needs
Our vision therapy services are always in the back of our heads when we see primary care patients. Whether it’s a child or adult, we always include quality-of-life questions in our case history to probe for binocular vision symptoms. This often gets patients thinking of how they feel doing visual tasks, and can make parents realize their children may be experiencing a visual symptom that they did not report.
We also always do binocular vision screening tests during our comprehensive exams and discuss positive findings with patients. This often leads to the conversation of returning for a vision therapy evaluation to further work them up and consider vision therapy.
While our practice is heavily referral based, we also pull many vision therapy patients from the primary care population in our practice.
Proactive In-Person Outreach to Other Healthcare Providers
We recently had a big outreach revamp to drive more referrals for vision therapy. One of our action plans was to have our office manager go out and canvas local pediatricians, speech therapists and occupational therapists.
We did a ton of community outreach when initially opening the practice in 2015, which was highly successful in bringing in new patients.
In the past few years, we did not do as much in-person outreach due to a combination of the pandemic limiting contact and keeping coverage in the office with multiple maternity leaves.
We decided it was time to get back out there and reconnect with our current referral sources and with new ones as well. Our office manager has been bringing business cards, vision therapy pamphlets and referral pads to these local providers and meeting with both support staff and physicians to educate them on our services and how we can help our mutual patients.
We also always write exam summary letters to our pediatric patients’ pediatricians, so they are informed of their patients’ visual system and ocular health. We found this to be a BIG way to spread our name in the community.
Friends & Family Referrals
This is a huge source of referrals for us. We found word-of-mouth to be our biggest practice builder when it comes to the specialty of vision therapy. All it takes is helping one patient recover from a concussion, or one child to be able to perform near-work more comfortably after a course of vision therapy, and word spreads.
Marketing is Unique to Your Practice’s Needs & Advantages
Marketing is unique to your practice!
You have to think about your demographic and location and what would work best for your office! Print marketing with a coupon to drive people into the office may be beneficial for those who have opticals, whereas an investment in a social media manager for an office in a younger, urban community (i.e. Jersey City, N.J. or Brooklyn, N.J.) might work better!
It is important to continually look at your marketing strategy and be critical: What is working, what is not and where is it beneficial to spend money?
Miki Lyn Zilnicki, OD, FCOVD, and Jessica
Licausi, OD, FAAO, FCOVD, are co-owners of Twin Forks Optometry and Vision Therapy in Riverhead, N.Y.
To contact Dr. Zilnicki: DrZilnicki@twinforksoptometry.com.
To contact Dr. Licausi: DrLicausi@twinforksoptometry.com
This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.
