“Marketing Plans That Are The Foundation for Your Private Medical Practice Profitability”

"The essentials of a marketing plan that
will create income persistently, because you
have a continuous growth of your practice
along with increasing numbers of new
patients that make it happen."

Most physicians in private medical practice have a general idea of what advertising is all about. When it comes to marketing, very few physicians have neither a clear usable understanding about the marketing process nor how it can be implemented into their medical practice management. That's what a marketing plan forces you to learn quickly.

Those with a previous business education already have a leg-up on what marketing does for any business. However, even those with a foundational business education commonly come up short in the application of medical practice marketing, medical practice management, and business principles in regards to the business of medical practice. MBAs are too superficial to help physicians enough in any practical or useable way.

For those physicians who intend to begin or continue with private practice of medicine in today’s world, the effective application of every marketing method appropriate to medical practice is mandatory. Most realize it eventually, but many find that they are not prepared financially or mentally to launch into medical practice marketing or physician marketing. Unfortunately, most physicians choose to accept what circumstances hands them--and there goes their freedom in private practice. 

The most common misgivings physicians have about starting a "marketing program" for their practice include...

• Wasting time and money on marketing that fails---all marketing you do always works to the degree you spend on doing it the right way.
   
• Recognizing that a marketing plan is necessary, but don’t know how to create it--Buy Dan Kennedy's book on AZ--"No BS Direct Marketing" the perfect book of instructions. He published several other top quality marketing books as well.
   
• Insecurity about the extent of their marketing knowledge--read Dan Kennedy's
  marketing books.
   
• Not convinced that marketing would improve their practice income or growth to any significant degree--the fear and skepticism is the result of your lack of knowledge about marketing the right way. Closed minds to medical practice marketing is the epitome of self-destructive arrogance.
   
• Worry about sacrificing time with patients (income) in order to do the marketing--assignment of the process to a hired knowledgeable person or even to your wife is how most smart
  physicians handle it.
   
• Have no desire to do better than they are already doing--this belief is a lack of self confidence--when one gains the marketing knowledge that problem is guaranteed to disappear. The more you learn, the more confidence you have. So, I ask you, how does a surgeon feel the first time he ever touched a scalpel to the skin of a real living patient?
   

Do you know the difference between advertising and marketing?

Advertising is a small published brief message, commonly less than a single page of space that catches the eye, provides benefits, and tells the reader that the product being offered can solve a problem, need, or want of the customer. It's a notification that the product is available.

Marketing is a process that starts with an idea for a product, development and creation of the product, public notification that the product is available (advertising), the sale and follow up of the product after purchase. You can select and use any part of the process to market the product.

Have you noticed how many commercial products are very intense about why the product was created, detailed description or video of the product being made, and all of the wonderful things it does for everyone who buys and uses it, along with a guarantee of its lifespan and other uses it may have for buyers? "We have the meat"-- "Pain relief", etc.

You market your practice by using the attributes of your reputation, your skills, your medical school and background, how well you treat your patients, what procedures you just learned that other doctors lack, etc. And don't tell me that patients don't want to know about your life history and what you love to do. So, you tell them. You develop relationships with your customers (patients) which grows your business.

6 Essentials of a medical practice advertising plan...

• Goals: These must be practical, measurable, and attainable.
  
• Media Resources: Which do you intend to use? Which are the most effective?
  Consider newsletters, newspapers, trade magazines, billboards, yellow pages,
  office brochures, signs, coupons, Valpaks, mobile device applications,
  websites, blogs, social network sites, and business cards.
  
• Copywriting the ad information: Structuring the advertisement,
  wording, and design to create urgency, usefulness, uniqueness, and specificity.
  Ad must get attention, provoke interest, create desire, and inspire action.
  
• Ad must get attention, provoke interest, create desire, and inspire action.
  
• Follow-up: Ads must frequently be upgraded, repeated, kept current,
  be appropriate for target market, and provide reasonable results
  (more patients).
  
• Restructured to match changing trends and technology: What
  clients or patients want today is not what they were demanding
  a month ago, year ago, or 5 years ago
  

7 Essential elements of a medical practice marketing plan...

1. Create reliable, consistent, predictable "systems": These must be engineered to be affordable, easily learned and used, efficient, and deliver high-quality patients in predictable quantities
each month.

2.  Select the ideal prospective patient to target: It requires, knowing that group of patients, how they live, what they buy, what they want, what they’re looking for medical-wise, and how best to
approach them.

3.  Select the media those medical patients use: Is it email, direct mail, certain magazines, newsletters, conferences, educational events, places they frequent, hobbies, sports interests, or a
combination of them?

4.  Pick relevant information: Means to meet those patients on their own ground. You need to be knowledgeable about their interests and find a way to appeal to their interests while incorporating your pitch at the same time.

5.  Provide access to your practice: This includes phone numbers, office street address, website, fax number, email address, and any convenient means of contacting you.

6.  Teaser follow-up efforts (short term): Curiosity and interest may bring them to you for more information, but follow-up tactics and strategies using multi-steps of communication is how you capture them as a real and loyal patient.

7.  Management of “hard to get” patients: These are those prospects or leads that don’t initially respond to your enticing messages. These “maturing” prospects need a bit of coaxing and an occasional contact message to remind them you still are available. Patients change doctors for many reasons...and you are right there in their memory when that happens, waiting for them to make an appointment at your office.

Overcoming the initial frustration of, “How do I accomplish all that?” 

These steps in the marketing of your medical practice take time and work to reach a level of knowledge you are comfortable with proceeding further along. Marketing consultants are happy to help you do these things, but their fees are quite high ($30,000 and up, per year).

You are actually able to get started yourself with marketing your practice for as little as $200 to $500 per month. Marketing methods and efforts do not have to be done at the same time. It’s much better to start with one marketing method, see how effective it is, and then add another method
to the first one. Proof of good marketing results first, then you can trust using it long
term repeatedly.

You need to calculate how much monthly income from your practice business that you can afford to apply to your marketing methods. Once you have that dollar amount, then you can select a marketing strategy that will be affordable for you to try.

A means to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and identifying the number of new patients you see as a result of that marketing effort is necessary to see if your strategy works and how well it works. “Start small, think tall” is the inspirational provocative of the late Dr. Robert H. Schuller, renowned author and leader of Crystal Cathedral Ministries.

Consider this one example... "postcard marketing" of your medical practice and business to start with... 

Beginning with the concept and belief that you have the capacity to accomplish far more than you presently give yourself credit for, you can put yourself to the test using something as simple as “postcard marketing.” It's the least expensive marketing method.

Design your message to fit a postcard, have a printing business print 500 to 5000 postcards for you, send them to a mailing list of potential patients you purchased from a “list broker” in your area or obtained from another source, and keep score of the results. By placing a referral code number on the card, and a phone number to call for information or for scheduling an appointment, you’ll have a lock on the number of patients you acquire from that one mailing process. Each contact person must provide the referral code on the postcard, which you keep a record of along with the patients name, address, etc.  

Next, you isolate the mailing list of those who never responded at all, even those who just wanted some information when they called. Send a repeat postcard mailing a month later to that segment, change the code referral number, and check the results. Then, repeat the process every 6 months or so to pick up those potential patients who have become dissatisfied with their present doctor, those who are slow to make decisions, and those who thought they would never need your medical care and now do.  

That’s the easy part of this marketing process and method. Where you will need some expert help is with the challenges of setting up the necessary framework or “system” to be used over and over again for years to come. It's a method that you can do by yourself.
 

That “system” will require...

• Setting objectives you expect to accomplish. How many new patients do you want or need to join your practice each month? How many patients left your practice that month... are you growing your practice or losing?
   
• Decision on what type of patient you want to attract. An OBG doctor would want female patients. A pediatrician would select parents of children under _______ age bracket.
   
• Most “list brokers” you find have a minimum list order of 5000 people (cost about $500 plus). You need to tell the listing broker the characteristics of the list and respondents you want such as age range, sex, salary income level, married or not, belong to certain organizations
  or not, etc.
   
• Figuring out the budget you can spare to pay for these services each month, and know the cost of those services.
   
• Recognizing that this whole marketing process is a never-ending responsibility you accept if you want it to work for you.
   
• Creating the copywriting needed for your marketing. What makes it work is the ability to put words, phrases, colors, design, graphics, and information in a pattern on the postcard that almost forces potential patients to read the information whether they really want to or not. It gets into behavioral patterns that always work in marketing. You can try it yourself, or pay a copywriter to do it for you. (try www.elance.com )
   
• Most physicians would benefit by having one person (staff member) in the office assigned to do the marketing follow-through for you. The same person should be assigned a part of the day, or day of the week, to do this work. The same person should manage all new patient contacts from the marketing efforts and record everything.
   
  If budget limitations are present, start with an office staffer you trust to do this work. Hire a full-time person once you see that your marketing is working well. I do not recommend hiring your wife to do this work within your office, home office OK.
  
• Marketing your medical practice is the one and only reliable and credible way to grow your practice. It means that you must begin marketing when you start practice and continue it forever. If you stop, there is a great danger of your practice slowing down rather quickly. And it might take years to get back to where you were when you stopped.
   

Why you may need a mentor or coach to nudge you along...

• Most physicians do not have adequate knowledge about medical practice marketing and don’t choose to obtain the marketing knowledge necessary to make it work. Physicians, who get into the marketing process and fail to see results because they have no measurements to judge it by, therefore, believe marketing is a rip-off. Any marketing method requires 3 to 6 months to begin seeing results. If you see results sooner, you have a gold mine strategy.
   
  Those who discover that it works well for them (with some backup professional help) by doing things the correct way with the right tools, find the truth about marketing exciting and
  quite profitable.
   
• Marketing is similar to Bible knowledge in one important and beneficial way that increases your
  depth of inspiration.
  
  If one decides to believe that marketing works, it will. For example, based on the undeniable value it has to businesses around the world, one then is able to “see” and “know” in their mind that the concept and profitability of using marketing to benefit their medical practice business works. That physician will be able to see much deeper into the marketing strategies and tactics than they otherwise would.
  
  It all becomes much clearer and understandable to them because belief opens your subconscious brain interaction not available otherwise.
   
• Copywriting is a full time high-paid profession for thousands of people. Some have an endowed talent for it, some don’t. It’s a career that requires time and study to become
  an expert.
   
  You may have that unrevealed talent lingering in your inner-self without knowing it. The copywriting expertise improves over time if you choose to try it, similar to the expertise
  of a field goal kicker in football.
   
• Once you understand that marketing only works well with persistence of the process, the new part of your responsibility for your medical practice business may become more than you can
  manage on a continuing basis. In that case you will need an expert to help you or handle
  it all for you.
   
  Big business, big medical care facilities, and big group practices hire full time trained marketing personnel to do it all. Large numbers of private and solo practice physicians often can’t afford to hire it done. If you are in a group, assign one physician to do the marketing and rotate to another medical doctor in 1 to 3 months.
   
  So, bottom line, small medical practice businesses are at a great financial disadvantage, but can employ the principles of successful business along with the reasonable cost of mentoring or coaching successfully. If you do nothing, you stay exactly where you are and watch your medical practice gradually disintegrate. Think I’m kidding?
   
• What kind of marketing method or strategy should you use? You have to have a basic knowledge of various marketing methods and a significant understanding of your own practice business functions to make those decisions.
  
  Then there’s the problem of deciding which marketing method best fits your medical practice style and personality—can you do that? Which of the marketing methods are the most efficient for drawing in new patients? That’s important because you don’t want to spend a load of money on one that produces lousy results (no increased income, no additional patients).
  
   

These are just a few of the factors that will challenge you on your way to maximizing your medical practice potential, expertise, and value to your patients, hence, higher income enables
you to do that.

It seems quite clear that private practice is becoming a disappearing entity under the present restrictions and controls on healthcare today.

Private practice will and can continue inside the profession when it is totally separated from the ever-increasing egregious governmental controls. Concierge (cash only) private practice is the one medical practice method that escapes most of these detrimental issues. The hooker in this debate is that politically appointed Medical Licensure Boards will continue to control much of medical practice and remain a robotic pawn of the governmental control system. 

I have described above only one of the marketing methods easily adaptable to your medical practice. There are many others. Business and marketing experts all seem to agree that using as many marketing methods as is appropriate for your medial practice, provide the best results.

Finally, knowing which marketing methods are best for you in your medical practice, which have the highest degree of profitability for your practice, and which are those most advantageous to the practice environment you work in, is what business and marketing experts are there to do for you.

Medical practice business and marketing is what I know, teach, and consult with medical doctors and other professional medical care providers about.

----Professional Probe----

"A targeted marketing
plan is unique to your
own medical practice."

Every physician in private medical practice has his or her personal agenda for starting a medical practice, a desire to manage it in a way that makes dealing with their medical patients easier, fulfilling, and profitable. The problem with that is--how to make it happen?

Maneuvering through the process of creating a medical practice marketing plan for your private medical practice permits you to think your way through the aspects of your practice that for you are three important things.

1. Will it be profitable?
2. Will it grow the practice persistently?
3. Can I tolerate the efforts to make these happen?

The marketing plan you decide to use not only has to be compatible with your desires and commitments, but also compatible with the amount and time you are willing to spend insuring that it will be successful.

Then, there are many different marketing plans that are widely available to choose from. You can do one at a time, or you can use more than one plan at a time. Each marketing strategy accomplishes different approaches that may fit into your personal agenda for what you want to do with it.

Your focus might be to recruit one new patient a week. You might choose to aim at long term marketing for maximum income. You may decide to promote your skills, knowledge, expertise, reputation, or integrity now that you already have enough patient flow.

Just remember that once you gain a loyal patient, you have to know how to keep them satisfied. So, a concentrated effort to promote how you treat your patients (the primary reason patients stay with you and come to you) should be prominent part of any marketing strategy you become involved in.

Articles©2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #101, 3-16-22