Marketing Your Practice in 4 Steps
When it comes to marketing your practice, you’re never really finished. As the world changes, so does your marketing. This year has proved that over and over! But even before 2020, this was true. For this reason, it is important to constantly analyze and fine-tune your marketing efforts. Now, you’re probably thinking… “Constantly change my marketing? On top of everything else? That sounds like a lot of work and a whole lot of money!”
But, just keep reading for a few simple steps to help you get the most return on your marketing investment and make the marketing process a little easier for small business owners just like you.
Simple and easy rules to remember:
1) Test it… 2) Track it… 3) Tweak it… 4) Scale it… Repeat.
Rule #1 of Marketing Your Practice: Testing
It’s true that trial and error is the name of the game, but start off with some solid research to make sure you are headed in the right direction.
Research your target audience, and the content and media they are attracted to. The internet can help with marketing your practice, but remember, you have patients coming into your office all day – they are the perfect “focus group” for you if you’re paying attention! Have a patient you love? Find out more about this patient and use that information to fine-tune marketing your practice! Also, check out your competition—what are OTHER practices doing for advertising in your community? For instance, don’t copy their stale, old ideas … use their marketing as a starting point, and then … do something totally different!
Tracking
Train your team to be able to track the source of EVERY SINGLE inbound phone call, website visit, and walk-in. There’s a whole grab bag of options to use to track your marketing: custom URLs, separate phone numbers, landing pages, surveys…the sky is the limit!
Remember when consistently marketing your practice, monitor your metrics so you can determine which sources should be eliminated and which ones are promising. If you fail to track your campaigns, you will have NO CLUE which campaigns you should continue to fund, and which ones are a bottomless money pit!
Scheduling Institute has a solution that can make this process super easy. Click Here to learn about Call Tracker, our online analysis tool that gives you access to quickly see exactly how each of your marketing pieces is performing. Or, Click Here to schedule a demo.
Tweaking
Once you’ve analyzed the tracking data, it’s time for the real fun to begin: tweaking your marketing pieces. Again, this process is completely trial and error. Tweak one thing at a time and then re-test and analyze the results. Some elements to tweak in a poorly performing campaign may include:
• wording your offer for readability
• A discount or price
• The colors, font, or design
• Alter the headline format to make it more compelling
• Appealing visual
With just a few changes of a headline, you may find that patients are suddenly interested in the same offer that you sent them last week! However, not ALL tweaks will produce positive results, but DON’T be discouraged. The money lost on ineffective altering is the SAME MONEY that you would lose if you weren’t tracking the efforts of marketing your practice whatsoever.
Rule #4 of Marketing Your Practice: Scale-Up
Once you’ve tweaked your piece to the point where it is getting consistently great results, it is time to scale up your efforts. Marketing your practice should be scalable as a great strategy to manage costs and increase New Patient numbers. You can scale your marketing by reaching a bigger audience, making your content “evergreen” so it is relevant over time, or using your content in an automated sequence so it will be reused automatically.
Even after scaling a successful campaign, you should continue to test, track, and tweak to ensure your practice marketing is still resonating with your audience. As the market shifts, so will your campaigns; constant re-evaluation is needed.
Follow these guidelines for testing, tracking, tweaking, and scaling up … You will be sure to improve the results of your marketing – and your bottom line!
At our recent Results Creator Bootcamp for Marketing Directors, we taught the importance of testing, tracking, tweaking, and scaling marketing campaigns. Notice the super-sized tracking board on stage! It is guaranteed to help our team super-size practice marketing results. Learn more about Scheduling Institute’s team training in marketing or another facet of your practice here.
Love what you read on the Scheduling Institute blog? Check out the Private Practice Playbook Podcast, powered by Scheduling Institute, and hosted by Jay Geier! Our podcast will provide you with timely, relevant, specialized knowledge that will help with marketing your practice. This business podcast is delivered on a monthly basis and will allow you to remain focused on your human capital, financials, space and equipment, marketing, and clinical duplication. Subscribe today and start listening immediately!
