If you’ve already tried a lot of the marketing advice out there on how to grow your eyecare business, you’re probably wondering why it isn’t working for you or what you’re doing wrong. (“I even tried digital ads and social and everything!”)
Well, we’ve got two pieces of good news.
Firstly, you’re not alone; surveys show that marketing their practice and growing their customer base is one of the biggest challenges that most optometrists struggle with.
Secondly, there actually is a method to running the kind of marketing that consistently and reliably grows your business and outperforms competitors. And we’re about to show you exactly what that involves and how to do it (hint: it’s something fundamental that most businesses and marketers overlook or avoid, simply because it’s uncomfortable.)
In this guide, My Solutions In Sight gives you the complete marketing playbook for ODs and ECPs — a step-by-step approach to marketing that lets your practice win more customers, increase sales, and boost revenue. Ready? Let’s dive in!
How to Expand Your Optometry Business
The most effective way to grow an optometry business in 2023 is to deploy a coherent marketing strategy instead of random, ad-hoc tactics. Data, including meta-analyses of the 31 top empirical studies, show that strategic planning has a significant and positive effect on business performance.
In other words, the reason why most eyecare businesses get underwhelming results from their marketing efforts is that they lack an effective strategy guiding their business decisions. As Roger Martin, a bestselling author and mentor to many CEOs, explains in the helpful HBR video below, there’s a lot more to a strategy than just a plan or checklist of marketing tactics (like posting on social media, running ads on Google / Facebook, participating in community events, and so on.)
Accordingly, in the following sections, we’ll review the most important aspects of building winning strategies for eyecare businesses, before discussing the specific tactics you can use to execute a strategy.
Crafting Strategic Marketing Campaigns for Optometrists
No two eyecare businesses are alike. Even if you target exactly identical customers in exactly the same markets as your competitor, you’ll still have different priorities and objectives, and different sets of skills and resources with which to pursue those objectives.
What’s more, the very essence of marketing is differentiation — influencing customers to choose your practice over others, because of how you’re different from the rest. For all of these reasons, no two marketing strategies can be the same.
In fact, since consumers and markets are also constantly changing, a strategy that worked for your practice a year ago may no longer be optimal today, even if your goals haven’t changed.
That said, for every eyecare business, developing an effective strategy involves six key elements:
- Setting business goals that are realistic, achievable, and appropriate
- Identifying the right target audience (your potential customers)
- Choosing the optimal communication channel
- Consistently communicating messages that are well-suited to your audience and channels
- Measuring the right metrics to make adjustments to the strategy and tactics as necessary
- Allocating the resources necessary to achieve these goals
In the coming months, we’ll develop detailed guides that simplify each of these aspects. Subscribe to our newsletter to get these free, helpful guides.
For now, here’s a brief rundown of how to go about each of these steps.
Setting Realistic Goals for an Eyecare Business
Useful goals are neither too ambitious (you risk burnout and failure), nor too modest (they don’t propel your business forward). To set just-right Goldilocks goals, run a SWOT analysis to determine the most important priorities for your practice.
Download our free SWOT analysis template for eyecare businesses.
Based on the results of the SWOT analysis, set goals that are specific and measurable. For example, goals like “grow revenue by 10% over the next quarter” or “reduce customer complaints by 80% in the next six months” are much better than vague goals like “Increase revenue” or “improve customer satisfaction”.
Identifying Target Customers as an Optometrist
“Every person in my city or my neighborhood who can see,” is an example of a terrible target customer definition, unless your ECP business is in a town with fewer than 1,000 residents.
It might sound very clever when Nike says their mission is to inspire every athlete, and that anybody with a body is an athlete, until you realize that, a) your eyecare business (probably) isn’t a $180-billion company like Nike, and b) even Nike carefully picks and chooses who they market to, when, and where.
Given finite time and resources, you vastly increase your odds of getting more patients into your optometry business by being extremely specific when defining your target audience.
Start by defining the characteristics of your ideal customer based on demographics, behaviors, and needs. Then use market research and data to develop targeted marketing segments based on specific customer attributes, interests and preferences.
Here are just a few examples of well-defined target customers:
- Local families with school-aged children who need regular eye exams and may require eyeglasses or contact lenses.
- Elderly individuals who require specialized eye care services such as treatment for cataracts or age-related macular degeneration.
- Athletes who require sports-specific eyewear, such as prescription goggles or contact lenses.
- Patients with chronic eye conditions such as dry eye syndrome or glaucoma who require ongoing treatment and monitoring.
- Individuals who work in professions that require excellent vision, such as pilots or construction workers, and may require specialized eye exams or protective eyewear.
Tightly defined target customers will help you identify the right platforms to market your eyecare practice, and save you time and money on your campaigns. If you already have a website and social media presence, use the data from your analytics tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Page Insights, Ad Analytics, and so on, to help inform your decision-making.
If you don’t have this data, don’t worry; there is no one right answer. Marketing is an experiment and the best strategies succeed by coming up with well-defined hypotheses that can be tested quickly, with the results used to improve subsequent efforts. Your SWOT analysis can help you prioritize a particular segment of customers.
The Best Communication Channels for Eyecare Businesses
Choose the right platform based on your objectives, audience, and communication strategy. For instance, Facebook is great for building groups and community interaction, Twitter is geared towards engagement and real-time communication, Instagram and TikTok are best for short-form, entertaining video content, and so on.
A marketing strategy focused on vision-dependent professionals like pilots and surgeons might work much better on LinkedIn, while another to target stay-at-home moms might work far better on Pinterest.
| US Active Users (millions) | Average US User Age | User Growth Rate | Average Organic Reach | Average CPM | |
| 242 | 41 | 1.3% | 5.2% | $14.9 | |
| 206 | 23 | -N/A- | -N/A- | $3.5 | |
| 171 | 29 | 5.0% | 5.0% | $33.8 | |
| 127 | 30 | 5.4% | 13.5% | $8.8 | |
| TikTok | 113 | 19 | 10.5% | 28.0% | $10.0 |
| Quora | 105 | 34 | -N/A- | -N/A- | $2.6 |
| 95 | 40 | -1.0% | 10.0% | $6.5 | |
| 84 | 35 | 7.5% | -N/A- | $3.5 |
Messaging and Consistency for Eyecare Marketing Communication
Once you’ve identified your audience and platform, the next step is to communicate consistently to your audience. Whether you’re trying an organic campaign or running paid ads, results take time.
For the average consumer, the journey from when they first discover your eyecare business to the point when they finally visit your practice or become a paying customer, is far from linear. From the marketing funnel model, to Google’s famous “messy middle” model, there are many theories on how consumers become customers.
Whichever model you use to guide your strategy choices, remember that it takes time for your audience to become customers. A 2015 study found that on average, 10 exposures to a brand were needed to maximize conversions, while a more recent study found that much more than 10 exposures are needed before a person responds to your marketing.
For example, if somebody has only just heard the name of your practice, showing them an ad featuring a promotion or discount code — when they still have unanswered questions about who you are, where you’re located, whether they can trust you, and if your practice is a good fit for their needs — might not be the best use of your marketing dollars.
For ECPs to increase sales, it’s essential to plan for the audience of their marketing campaign to receive around 20 exposures to the messages, typically via three or more messages (one for each stage of the conversion funnel), spread over six to seven weeks.
| Marketing Type | Awareness | Consideration | Conversion |
| Content Marketing | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Display Advertising | ✔ | ||
| Email Marketing | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Influencer Marketing | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Native Advertising | ✔ | ||
| Paid Search Advertising (PPC) | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Promotions & Offers | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Retargeting | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | ✔ | ||
| Social Media Marketing (SMM) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sponsorships & Events | ✔ | ||
| Video Advertising | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
A well-structured marketing campaign should therefore typically have different types of communication targeted at people at different stages of the marketing funnel. For instance, a display ad pitching your unique selling proposition might be the right choice for discovery / awareness, while retargeting ads may work during the consideration phase, followed by a targeted social media promotion for the conversion phase.
Budgets and Performance Metrics for Optometry Marketing
The exact marketing budget for a given optometry business varies widely based on its goals and market conditions, but a general rule of thumb is to allocate between 10 and 16 percent of projected revenue towards marketing.
Once a marketing campaign is running, of course, there are several metrics to monitor to fine-tune and adjust the campaign. Depending on your campaign, this may include your new patient acquisition rate, website conversion rate, customer retention rate, website traffic, store calls, walk-ins, optical capture rate, and so on.
The Secret to Effective Optometry Marketing Campaigns
Once you’ve covered all the critical steps listed above to formulate a marketing strategy, you still need to remember one golden rule before diving into the marketing tactics. And that is: a good strategy is as much about what you decide not to do, as it is about what you choose to do.
In much the same way, it’s a good idea for you to decide what you’re not going to do. By trying to do everything and deploying a dozen different marketing tactics at once, you only increase the risk of failure by spreading your resources too thin.
The list below contains 21 of the most effective tactics to grow your optometry practice, but if you’re DIY-ing, it’s highly recommended that you choose just one to two primary ongoing activities, and no more than two to three secondary initiatives.
21 Proven Tactics to Grow Your Eyecare Business
- Develop a strong brand identity: Ensure that your communication is consistent, both visually and in terms of style and substance
- Optimize your website for conversions: focus on clear, concise benefits, social proof, and strong calls-to-action
- Create a blog with helpful content to attract organic traffic
- Prioritize local SEO with Google Maps and Business listings
- Leverage social media, with informative and entertaining posts that help your audience with eyecare knowledge / decision-making
- Offer free lead magnets and resources to build your email list
- Run a newsletter with curated or original resources that help patients (focus on specific customer segments or eyecare needs)
- Run discounts and promotions periodically on social media and email to attract new patients
- Implement review-management software to encourage patient reviews and manage your online reputation
- Run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to attract prospects who are actively looking for services that you provide
- Attend local events and fairs to increase visibility
- Sponsor local sports teams or community events
- Develop a loyalty program for frequent patients
- Collaborate with other local businesses for cross-promotion
- Incentivize happy customers to provide testimonials, especially on video
- Publish case studies or success stories, particularly for cases with specialized needs and for B2B / institutional customers
- Use retargeting ads to reach potential patients who have already visited your website
- Partner with influencers, bloggers, and podcasters to offer interviews and helpful advice
- Offer virtual consultations or telemedicine services
- Utilize data from trends and analytics tool to optimize your inventory to meet consumer needs
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