Medical Marketing | medical practice marketing

"7 Steps to Medical Marketing Success - Part 1 of 2"

Medical Marketing Made Easy

     Medical practice marketing is a real source of stress for some doctors.  Providing great care and service seem like they should be enough to make a medical practice thrive. However, without a marketing plan, the great care you intend to provide may go unnoticed as prospective patients go down the street to your competitors.

The truth is that every practice does need a marketing plan.  Fortunately, it’s much less complicated and painful than it sounds. It’s essentially a “to-do list” for growing your practice.

In part one of this two part installment, we’ll give you the three step process to developing a medical practice marketing plan.   In part two to we’ll give you the four steps to putting your plan in place and make it a routine everyone on your staff looks forward to coordinating.

 Every Patient Is a Referral

    Every new patient that sits in your chair has been referred to your practice somehow. Whether by another patient (family, friend, co-worker, etc.), a Yellow Pages ad, a newsletter, website, or even a postcard or mail piece just to name a few. The first step to obtaining more new patients is to identify those referral sources.

Step #1: Identify Your Sources

    A marketing source is a means by which you continually get new patients.  If you run a rather large practice, your sources may number in the double digits, while smaller practices may have only three or four. Existing patient referrals may be your most lucrative source of new patients, as this is true for a lot of practices. Other sources could include staff referrals, print advertisements, mailings, and even the sign in front of your building.

Think of marketing sources as streams feeding a larger body of water, like a lake or ocean. Your practice is the lake. There are things you can do to either expand or restrict the flow of those streams. Ultimately, you want the streams to grow with new patients and fill up your practice as a result.

Step #2: Include Your Staff

    Obviously, it’s important for a doctor to know and pay close attention to his or her marketing sources, but it’s just as important for your staff to be able to do the same. In fact, it might be more vital for your employees to be able to quickly pinpoint a marketing source because they are the first point of contact for these new patients and should be responsible for tracking the referral source of every new patient.

If you’re spending any money at all on marketing and advertising strategies, then categorizing the marketing sources of new patients and tracking results for each source is the only way to determine which strategies are working and which aren’t.

Step #3: Set Goals

    Once you and your staff are familiar with your marketing sources, you need to sit down and set new patient goals for each source. This should be done on a monthly basis. It’s important to consider each source separately.

Don’t set a small goal for your mailings simply because you’ve set a larger goal for your media ads. The expected result of one shouldn’t impact the expected result of another.  It's important to never underestimate your practice’s marketing potential.

    A while back I hired a decorator for my personal office to make it more inviting and less like an uninhabited void. While meeting at the decorator’s studio, she showed me her recommendations, which I promptly ignored. I was sure that my office was too small for the pieces she had chosen.

Well, I was wrong...Even though I looked at it every day, I had no idea just how big the room really was. When I finally decided to follow her advice I realized she was spot on. I had underestimated what my office could accommodate.  In the same way, the familiarity you have with your practice can actually skew your perception of it and cause you to think small. Don’t fall into this trap.

Getting Started

    The next step is to dedicate a few hours where you’ll have no interruptions and work through this three step planning stage.  The old adage, “a small hinge opens a big door” is extremely appropriate here because it really just takes a little bit of attention, training, and positive thinking on the part of a doctor and his or her staff to make huge improvements in the number of new patients coming through their doors.

Check back soon for part two, where I give you the four-steps to put your medical practice marketing plan into action.  Follow these simple steps and your marketing will become a routine part of your practice that generates a reliable, consistent flow of new patients.