Your Marketing Black Bag
Effective marketing starts with practice
fundamentals. Make
sure you have them in the bag if you want your
practice to grow.
Are you starting a new practice? Wanting to be
busier? Trying to attract a different type of patient population?
Perhaps you are simply interested in improving your professional
reputation. Regardless of your objective, having a “marketing
black bag” in which you carry numerous “tools” can
help immensely. In your black bag you will want to have both some
tangible and intangible tools.
When I interviewed Jay Lipe who is
the CEO of Emerge Marketing and the
author of The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Business, he listed the intangible
tool of an outstanding bedside manner as the first and most important
tool for your bag. “Superior service has always been, and will
always be, at the core of successful marketing,” Lipe says.
“If your service doesn’t place a high value on listening,
empathy, and solid communications, you can just pack up your bag
now.”
Assessing service
Before you decide that you have this one covered,
let me ask whether you have some measurable way of assessing how you
are relating to patients and what their experience is in your office?
In my office, we send out “satisfaction surveys,” and I am
always surprised to see what people like and don’t like. While
not everyone fills them out and those who do may not tell you
everything, the fact that they are anonymous helps to insure that we
get legitimate feedback. One thing that consistently comes up on our
surveys is that patients complain that they wait too long in the office
to see me. Another doctor in my office is much better at sticking to
his schedule, and he gets higher ratings on this than do I. On the
other hand, because he is so time conscientious, it is not uncommon for
patients to write that they feel “rushed” during their
appointments. Our styles are different—I want to answer every
last question that a patient has and this often causes me to run late.
This other doctor, in order to stay on track, will sometimes leave
patients with unanswered questions.
If you asked either one of us,
we’d likely tell you that we have a terrific bedside manner.
However, the surveys reveal some legitimate issues that we need to
consider. Both of us are working toward finding middle ground wherein
we answer as many patient questions as possible but don’t run
impossibly late. So, regardless of how you would rate yourself, ask
your patients for their input.
A marketing plan
The second most important tool for your bag,
according to Lipe, is a marketing plan. Lipe cautions, “Without a
marketing plan in place, any marketing effort is as uncontrolled as a
swift tide with a strong undertow. Every physician practice must
clearly identify who it is targeting, how it will reach them, and what
it will say to them once it reaches them.” Lipe tells readers
that there are six key reasons why they should develop a marketing
plan. They are:
1. A marketing plan lays the groundwork for
action.
2. You can hang it in front of your nose.
3. A plan breaks down your effort into
manageable chunks.
4. A plan gives you hope.
5. Your marketing plan acts as an
“idea sifter.”
6. A plan gives you something to go back to
in slow times.
Keep in mind that a good
marketing strategy is to keep what you have (this is the concept of
retention) and get what you don’t have. It is important to note
that keeping current patients happy is important for a variety of
reasons (besides the most important one, which is that it is the right
thing to do). For example, physician practices with a high patient
turnover rate will have to spend considerably more time marketing than
those which are able to maintain a steady clientele.
In his book, The Rainmaker’s Toolkit, marketing consultant Harry
Mills suggests that readers take the “retention test.” Here
I have modified this test to be applicable to physicians:
1. Do you measure the lifetime value of each of
your patients?
2. Do you regularly survey your patients to test
the strength of the loyalty bond that
exists between you and your
key patients?
3. Do you know what impact a five-percent
increase in retention per annum would
have on your practice
profits?
4. Do you know what percentage of your
practice profits come from loyal patients
who have been with you
for over five years?
5. Do you have a high value patient
marketing program specifically aimed at retaining
and growing the
key area of your practice?
6. Are your frontline staff trained and
empowered to solve patient complaints quickly?
Consider your current practice
situation and put pen to paper and list some measurable ways that you
can keep your patients happy. Next, consider how you want to grow.
Again, commit to paper strategies and measurable goals to achieve this.
Lipe suggests a terrific pneumonic for the A-R-T of setting goals:
A-attainable
(realistic)
R-responsible
(to someone)
T-trackable
(with a deadline)
A marketing plan is tangible
and you can easily refer back to it. Lipe believes this is a tool you
can’t do without. “A good marketing plan commits [your
goals] to paper, so the implementers are clear about what must be
accomplished,” he says.
Cultivate your referrers
The third thing that Lipe lists as a crucial tool
in your black bag is a referral system. He explains this with an
example from his consulting business, “When I helped a radiology
firm develop a marketing plan recently, one key part of the plan was a
system for rewarding its most productive referral sources. It turned
out that only a handful of doctors referred the lion’s share of
business to this practice, and we took great pains to treat these
people differently.” You may be thinking that you want to treat
everyone the same, which means you are a fair-minded and ethical
person. However, you likely have limited time and a limited marketing
budget, and because of this you really do have to choose how to
allocate those resources. It just makes sense to allocate them in the
direction of your best referral sources. This also goes back to the
concept of “retention” that Mills writes about.
In order to develop a strategy
to nurture your referral sources, Lipe says, “First identify your
“Champions,” those who refer the most business to you.
Then, treat them like royalty. Take them and their spouses to dinner.
Give them tickets to the opera or ballet. Contribute to their favorite
charities if they can’t accept gifts. Do whatever it takes to
earn their continued loyalty; your practice may depend upon
it.”
One interesting tip that Mills
offers is to stay in touch with former workers and treat them well.
Mills writes, “The best professional services firms treat their
former staff like alumni—because they know that former staff are
one of the best sources of referral work.” Mills suggests
developing an “alumni program” as part of your marketing
plan.
There are other things that you can
place into your marketing black bag such as a Web site, newsletter,
business cards, brochures, and much more. However, as Lipe recommends,
if you start with the three essentials (terrific bedside manner, well
thought-out marketing plan, and close attention to your referral
system), you have the tools to achieve your professional goals. g
Julie Silver, MD is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical
School and the author of several books including Chronic Pain and the Family.
She is also directing the new Harvard CME course, “Publishing
Books, Memoirs and Other Creative Non-Fiction” (for more
information go to http://cme.med.harvard.edu/.)