Based on a PracticeCare® podcast conversation, Joe Lessard on Offline Marketing Strategies, with Joe Lessard, partner at Professional Business Management, a healthcare practice management and accounting firm in the Northwest Chicago suburbs.
Why should a private practice bother with offline marketing when everyone’s goes online for everything?
Because offline still works, and it’s often cheaper. Joe Lessard, a partner at Professional Business Management, says his top recommendation for every client is simple: get involved in the community you’re in.
Online spending still matters. But community involvement usually costs a lot less money. What it costs instead is time, and time is a resource too, even if practices forget to put a dollar value on it.
Think of your marketing budget as money plus time. If one is short, the other has to make up the difference. A startup with a shoestring budget usually has more time than a mature practice. Both are valid ways to fund the same goal.
What does “get involved in your community” actually look like?
Simpler than most people think. Sponsor a Little League team. Get involved in Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, the Park District, the PTA, the library. Join the Chamber of Commerce, even though that one’s a slow burn.
Lessard tells the story of a client who bought a practice in a small town built around cheerleading and football. She got involved in both before opening. She had patients from day one and was profitable within her first year because the community already knew her.
The bigger lesson: buy or start your practice where you live, or live where your practice is. Being tied to the community you serve compounds every other tactic on this list.
Can partnering with other local businesses actually generate patients?
Yes, and it can start by accident. Lessard describes a dental client with a highly visible corner office. A passerby wandered in one day, got talking with the doctor, and it turned out he owned a fitness gym a few buildings down.
Both businesses are health-minded. Both have a following. Lessard’s advice in the moment: partner. Elevate each other’s brand as the health-conscious businesses in the area, and look for a natural way to send clients back and forth. It doesn’t need to be complicated to work.
How did one practice turn a community event into a fix for a real image problem?
An OBGYN client of Lessard’s had already spent heavily on SEO, but patient satisfaction surveys kept surfacing the same complaint: staff were short with patients, and wait times were too long. The practice had an image problem money alone couldn’t fix.
Their answer was to start a 5K. It gave the team something to organize around, forced more friendly, community-facing engagement, and repositioned the practice as more than just a place that delivers babies. Years later, the race is still running and still growing.
How do you actually know if offline marketing is working?
Build in tracking before you launch, or accept you’re doing it for brand awareness only. An example: a client sponsoring a Little League outfield wall added a QR code linking to a landing page on their website only reachable from that sign. Every lead from that page had one possible source.
Other options: a unique phone number for each channel (tools like CallRail make this cheap), or literally color-coding billboards so patients can tell you which one they saw. None of it is perfect, but “how did you hear about us?” at the front desk is a start, even though patients often can’t isolate the exact source.
If there’s truly no way to track a tactic, just be more frugal with it, and treat it as brand-building rather than a lead-generation bet.
How should referral-dependent specialties approach this differently?
For specialists like oral surgeons, endodontists, and orthodontists, offline marketing should center on the general dentists sending them patients. The same logic applies to any specialist working off referrals from primary care or any other generalist-type practice.
Gifts and lunches matter less than most people assume. What referring providers actually want is confidence that the patient they hand off will be taken care of, and that they’ll hear back about how it went. One bad experience reflects on the referring provider’s judgment, not just the specialist’s.
Lessard’s broader point: find one good referral source, work out the kinks, and make it work well. Grow from there. You can ask your first referral source for recommendations of others. They tend to know each other.
What role do education and free events play?
They can work well. Lessard points to hour-long, free “new parent” classes a pediatric client runs. He sees plenty of practices give free talks at libraries or community centers, opening them to anyone in the community.
It doesn’t have to be a full class. A short video explaining a common concern works too. Either way, it builds trust and awareness at the same time, and it plays directly to why most people got into healthcare in the first place.
How do you get started if you don’t know where to begin?
Ask your patients. Lessard and Carl White both point to this as the simplest first move — ask a patient how they’d recommend the practice get more involved locally, and they’ll usually know an organization, an event, or a connection you don’t.
A final note from Carl White
Offline marketing rewards consistency and follow-through. You need time, not necessarily a big budget. Whether it’s sponsoring a team, building a referral relationship, or hosting a free class, the practices that win are the ones who keep showing up long after it stops feeling new. Pick a few things you can do without fail, and let them compound.