Why are some practices highly successful, while others are just plain mediocre? The incorrect use of marketing and advertising is often the key reason why practices fail.
As you recall from Part I, the top five reasons why ads don’t work were:
1. Patients don’t want to be sold
2. They’re boring
3. They lack credibility
4. The ‘Me-Too’ Approach
5. They’re tacky
This article covers reasons 6 through 10 of why most medical marketing underperforms… and what to do about it.
Reason #6: Not Keeping Track of Your Success
There are two main types of advertising — image and direct response. Image advertising is designed to repetitively ingrain a product or service into your consciousness. Image advertising is based on flash and repetition.
When Goodyear flies a blimp over a sporting event, they don’t expect everyone to run out of the stadium at halftime and buy tires for their car. But Goodyear knows that fans at a sporting event are usually excited and happy and Goodyear wants to be associated with those positive feelings.
Image advertising is expensive. Fortune 500 companies budget between $50 – 100 million and allot 5 years to build their brand via image ads. We can’t afford that and we shouldn’t try to copy the image advertising formula, yet many doctors do.
Direct response advertising is a better way to go. Direct response advertising identifies a patient need or want, offers a low risk solution and asks for an immediate response.
A direct response ad might feature a headline like, “47% of Patients With Chronic Back Pain Are Suffering Because of Their Shoes.” That headline garners interest, which is all it is supposed to do. The body of the ad describes a recent study detailing lower extremity issues in chronic back pain patients. Then it offers a free report that explains the problem and its solution in more depth.
This is a trackable, scaleable program. You can track the response immediately and test one ad against another. You can also measure your return of investment (ROI). Assume your ad receives 10 calls each week that lead to 3 new patient relationships. You now have a rational basis for an ad budget.
If each new patient is worth $1,500 in collected charges to your practice and you ad costs $500 per week, your ad returns at 9:1. Run that ad bigger, more frequently and in more publications.
Reason #7: Expecting Too Much From Your Ads
Some physicians place one ad, receive no calls and then falsely conclude that advertising doesn’t work. Your prospective patients need to be warmed up to you, a step at a time. Direct response ‘baby-steps’ your prospects through that progression. It’s better to send a targeted repetitive message to a small group than a one-shot, undifferentiated message to the masses.
Reason #8: Not Segmenting Your Market
Experts say that there are four categories of patient (or client or customer).
1. Your current patients.
2. Your past, inactive patients.
3. The friends, family and coworkers of your current patients.
4. Everyone else who has never heard of you.
As you move down the list, your influence declines. You get more complaints, more no-shows, more fee resistance and poorer compliance as you move down the list.
The Fortune 500 spends about 85% of their marketing budget on the first three groups. Shouldn’t you?
Reason #9: Being Tactical vs. Strategic
Running an ad is a tactic. The process of becoming the pre-eminent physician practice in your community is a strategy. Tactics are employed in the achievement of an overall strategy. Tactics, on their own, don’t lead to major change unless they are aligned with the correct overall business strategy.
For example, simply asking more patients to come in may not be in your best interest. You may need more of a certain type of patient. Strategic practice thinking challenges most clinicians because we’re focused on patient care. If you get help in only one area of your practice, this is the area I would most recommend. A practice that does not know where it is going will never get there.
Reason #10: Taking Your Eye Off The Ball
There are two key revenue statistics: patient encounters per month and average revenue per encounter. Your focus in growing your practice has to come back to two overriding questions:
1. How can we see more patients?
2. How can we collect more revenue per encounter?
Marketing works when it supports these two aims, it fails when it doesn’t. Every practice should have a marketing plan that describes measurable outcome(s) to be achieved within a realistic time frame.
Dr. David Zahaluk is a practicing physician and the founder of “Maximum Income for Physicians,” a coaching and consulting group for physicians only that offers innovative solutions to practice marketing and staff development. Visit the MIP website at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com. This website offers several free services, including practice-building tips, a diagnostic tool to identify what type of practice you have, and a free “Make My Practice Work Harder Than I Do” individual practice evaluation.
Look for Dr. Zahaluk’s new book, “The Ultimate Practice Building Book” on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com and Borders.com.
David Zahaluk, M.D
NPMA Director of Practice
Development
800-297-0711
zahaluk@ultimatepracticebuilder.com
Click here for a PDF of this article
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