How To Market A Practice: Test, consult, diagnose, treat, follow-up

Think of a marketing program as if it were a patient. With patients you take a history, gather information, ask question, run tests, consult with colleagues, make a diagnosis and then proceed to treatment and subsequent follow-ups to achieve healthy outcomes.

The same approach works when planning a marketing program for any practice of any size or specialty. For history look at current marketing initiatives from other practices and within the profession itself. Review what other physicians in your specialty are doing and the level of competition they pose for similar services. Ask yourself how you might best promote your practice and its services in today’s new competitive medical reality. Is your specialty effected by seasonal changes, like allergy and immunology, or does your service remain constant, like surgery. Are your services in or out of the insurance loop? Do they apply to a specific gender or age group, or not? Will you target patients locally or attract from a larger geographic region? Once these types of questions are answered you will have an accurate marketing diagnosis and be better equipped to move forward with treatment; the actual creation and placement of ad materials in the marketplace. Next comes the follow-up. Measure results and change what’s indicated to achieve the best outcomes possible.

Internal Marketing: The secrets of an office brochure

Creating a brochure for a medical practice is more difficult than creating one for a business. Yet each needs to do the same thing, namely promote products and services. Business brochures follow a time tested rule for success. They give the reader information, news, helpful hints, and a description of product benefits. They compare price and performance to show customers that their company’s goods and services are better than the competition. They target their audience as specifically as possible and often include testimonials and demonstrations in support of product claims. They do this to get a competitive edge. And it works.

Practice brochures can do the same. They can use the same techniques as business brochures to achieve a competitive edge. However, to do this, to be the same but different, they must be changed in content and context from their counterparts in business and, more importantly, also reflect medicine’s ethical standards. Creating them to achieve a competitive edge for your practice will be helped by:

• Substituting successful outcomes and cure rates for product reliability.
• Substituting experience and number of procedures performed for product acceptance.
• Substituting before and after facts for product demonstrations and testimonials.
• Substituting specific, new medical technologies for industry news and information.
• Substituting women, who are responsible for making upwards of 70% percent of all health care decisions as the right demographic for any industry or business specific demographic.
  

Brochures techniques such as these will keep your internal marketing lively, interesting, informative and well focused - and give you the edge you want.