Marketing to general practitioners is the part of specialist practice marketing that most marketers and practice managers skip.

It’s an odd thing to skip. Plenty of patients walk into their GP’s office knowing they need to see a specialist, but with no idea which one. The GP makes that call. And if your practice isn’t front of mind at that moment, someone else gets the referral.

It comes down to building a consistent relationship with practices and GPs. The problem is scale. Meeting GPs face to face works fine in a country town with eleven practices. It doesn’t work in Melbourne, where you’d spend the week driving between clinics waiting for a five minute window between consults.

So in this article I’ll break down how to stay front of mind for GPs, and how to scale that without door-to-door sales pitches that waste everyone’s time. It’s one of the highest-return pieces of medical marketing a specialist practice can do, and one of the least contested.

Why do GPs refer to one specialist over another?

GPs refer to specialists they trust. The ones they know will look after their patients.

That means your top-of-funnel GP marketing matters, but so does the patient’s experience once they’re in your rooms. A good GP will always ask their patient how it went. And they remember the answer.

Access matters just as much, and it’s the one specialists underestimate. A GP with a patient who needs review in a fortnight will refer to whoever can see them in a fortnight. Clinical reputation loses to availability more often than anyone likes to admit.

Then there’s what happens after the appointment, which is the biggest one of all. More on that shortly.

As with all marketing, we’re aiming to build trust rather than constantly sell. GPs are already bombarded with pitches, from pharmaceutical reps to device companies to other specialists, all trying to get them to prescribe something or refer somewhere. Adding another voice to that pile does very little. Becoming a resource that makes their day easier does a lot.

One more thing worth knowing. GPs refer within circles they already know: registrars you trained, colleagues from your hospital appointment, specialists who looked after their own family. The relationships you built before you had a practice to market are already working for you.

Marketing strategies to get more GP referrals

Get your correspondence right first

Before any marketing, look at what leaves your rooms after a patient is seen.

Timely, clear letters back to the referring GP do more for repeat referrals than any flyer, newsletter or CPD event. A GP who refers a patient and hears nothing for six weeks has learned something about your practice. No amount of marketing undoes that.

Ask your practice manager to actually measure your turnaround time rather than estimate it. If it’s more than a week, that’s your first project.

A few other things worth checking:

• Can the GP act on your letter without decoding it? Diagnosis, plan, what they need to do, and what should prompt them to call you.
• Does the GP find out when a referred patient doesn’t attend? Almost nobody closes that loop, and GPs notice when you do.
• When you hand care back, is it explicit? Ambiguity about who’s managing what is a common source of frustration.

This isn’t marketing in the usual sense. That’s exactly why it works.

Use a referral platform

There are several platforms that make the process of referring and communicating with specialists easier for GPs. We’ve seen practitioners have a lot of success with HealthLink and ReferralNet.

Both allow secure messaging and transfer of confidential patient information, including reports, referrals, pathology results, radiology results, discharge summaries, letters and images. HealthLink also puts your practice in the directory that referring doctors search, so you’re easier to find at the moment the referral is being written.

Every extra step between a GP deciding to refer and that referral leaving their desk is a chance for it to go somewhere easier. Lower the barrier.

Two practical notes. The person who controls this is usually the practice manager rather than the GP, since they decide what’s configured in Best Practice or Medical Director. And being listed isn’t the same as being findable, so check how your practice appears in the directory and whether your subspecialty interests are clear.

Make your access obvious

If a GP doesn’t know how quickly you can see a patient, they can’t factor you in.

Put together a single page and keep it current:

• Your standard wait time for a routine appointment
• Your urgent pathway, how to trigger it, and who answers
• What you need from the GP before the appointment, including which imaging or pathology to order first
• Fees and the expected gap, because GPs field that question constantly and would rather answer it accurately than guess

It’s one of the cheapest assets a specialist practice can produce, and it’s one practice managers actually keep.

Provide useful resources

Start by asking GPs what would help them and their patients understand the conditions you treat and the procedures you perform.

The question matters because it stops you guessing. Plenty of specialists have paid for a thousand glossy brochures that are still sitting in a box in the practice manager’s office.

Ask on a practice visit, on a call with the practice manager, or in a follow-up after a complex referral. It also flips the usual dynamic. You’re offering to solve their problem instead of asking for their referrals, which is rare enough to be memorable.

Here’s a filter. A resource is worth building if it saves the GP time in a consult, or answers one of the questions their patients keep asking. If it does neither, it’s a brochure.

Things that usually pass that test:

• Referral criteria and checklists. When to refer, when to manage in primary care, and what to order first. Often the most requested item on the list.
• Printable flyers. These live in the consult room and get handed over during the appointment.
• Educational videos. The patient can rewatch at home with family, which helps with anything that’s hard to explain in ten minutes.
• Ebooks and longer guides. Better suited to educating the GP than to patient handover.
• CPD and training materials. Highest effort, highest relationship value.

Once you’ve built a few, send them directly to the GPs who asked for them. Get some feedback. Then use them in your email marketing and under a “For Referrers” tab on your website.

One caveat that catches practices out: anything that reaches a patient falls under the AHPRA advertising guidelines, even when a GP is the one handing it over. Keep patient-facing material educational rather than promotional, avoid testimonials, and be careful with before and after imagery. And if you name a prescription medicine or device, the TGA restrictions apply as well.

Make your email marketing helpful

If you’re not doing email marketing to GPs, the first step is putting together a mailing list.

Do it properly. Under the Spam Act 2003 you need consent to send commercial electronic messages. Inferred consent can apply to a conspicuously published work address where the message relates to that person’s role, but scraping every address off every practice website in your catchment is where practices get into trouble. Every message needs accurate sender details and a working unsubscribe.

Then the job is to be useful rather than visible.

What does that look like?

• Links to leading research in your field, with a short summary of what it changes for primary care
• The patient resources you built, in a format the GP can print or forward
• Changes to guidelines, funding pathways or item numbers relevant to your specialty
• Your videos, paired with a companion document or flyer

That last one is worth doing every time. Some GPs will watch, most will skim. Give them both options and their patients get the same choice.

On frequency, monthly is the ceiling. Quarterly and genuinely good beats monthly and thin.

Offer CPD training

Offering continuing professional development to GPs builds your exposure while giving back to the medical community, and it puts you in a room with referrers for an hour. No email achieves that.

Be realistic about what’s involved. Accredited CPD activities need to meet the standards of a CPD Home such as the RACGP, and becoming an accredited provider yourself is a serious undertaking rather than a weekend project.

There are two lighter paths worth looking at first. You can partner with an existing accredited provider who handles the accreditation while you supply the clinical content. Or you can run non-accredited education in-practice, such as a lunchtime session at a large clinic. No accreditation burden, and much the same relationship value.

Make your website work for both audiences

Your website has two jobs here, and most specialist sites only do one.

For patients researching their condition, your site needs to be the most in-depth resource on the web. That means breaking down complex procedures properly, not publishing four hundred words of overview. We like to treat a procedure page as an initial consult, so we cover everything from candidacy and the procedure through to recovery, risks and costs.

A patient who walks into their GP’s office already asking for you by name has effectively made the referral decision themselves. That’s what SEO and Google Ads are for, and it’s the same work that demonstrates E-E-A-T to Google.

For referrers, you need a section built for them. A “For Referrers” page with your referral criteria, downloadable forms, direct contact details, wait times and your resource library. GPs do look you up before referring, particularly the first time. Make the decision easy.

Track what’s actually working

None of the above tells you anything unless you’re measuring referrals by source.

Record the referring practice and the individual GP at intake. Most practice management systems support this. Most practices don’t use it.

After a few months you can see which practices are growing, which have gone quiet, and which of your activity moved something. It also tells you which twenty practices deserve your face to face time, which is the only way in-person visits make sense in a large city.

Without it, you’re guessing.

Where to start

Reading through all of this at once, it’s easy to end up with seven projects and no clear first move. They don’t all carry the same weight, and some only work once the basics are right.

Start with your correspondence. Timely, clear letters back to the referring GP do more for repeat referrals than anything else on this list.

Then make yourself easy to refer to. Get set up on secure messaging, make sure the practice managers in your catchment know how to reach you, and be clear about your wait times and urgent pathway. Referral decisions come down to trust and access, in that order.

Once those two are solid, the rest is worth doing. Ask a handful of GPs what would help in clinic, build the two or three that come up most, and use them as the backbone of your email marketing. CPD is the biggest commitment of the lot, so build towards it rather than starting there.

And track it from day one.

None of this is quick. GP relationships compound over years, not campaigns. But the practices that do it consistently end up with a referral base that doesn’t depend on ad spend.

Sources and further reading

• AHPRA and the National Boards, Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service
• AHPRA, Advertising hub
• RACGP, CPD requirements and CPD Homes
• HealthLink, information for specialists
• ReferralNet
• TGA, Advertising therapeutic goods
• ACMA, the Spam Act 2003 and consent