Building your brand: A prescription for profitable practice growth
Another way marketing gets short shrift in the medical profession is less obvious but more pervasive. Re¬sponsibility is often handed off to someone with no marketing education or background — often a practice manager who already has too much on her plate. So marketing is once again relegated to “when I get time to deal with it” status.
But the main reason marketing gets so little attention in a medical practice may be a lack of faith. Medical professionals often see marketing not as a tool that can make a practice more profitable, but as a necessary evil (i.e., “if we need a brochure or a web site, let’s spend as little on it as possible”).
That attitude is most obvious in a phrase that’s oddly exclusive to the medical profession: “Now accepting new patients.” Not much of an invitation, is it? No other profession takes this approach to marketing and for good reason. Imagine a restaurant whose pitch is “Now accepting new diners” or a store proclaiming, “Now accepting new shoppers.” In this economy, that attitude is a luxury you can’t afford. And marketing is a necessity you can’t build your practice without.
When far fewer patients have either great insurance coverage or the means to pay for care out of pocket, mar¬keting is your most powerful tool in attracting patients who will keep your practice busy and in the black.
Answering Two Questions
All marketing starts by answering two questions. The first is the easier of the two: Who is your ideal customer? What do you know about them? Are they younger or older? Male or female? College educated or not? White collar or blue collar? What kind of income? Where do they live and work?
The answers to that first question let you refine your marketing so that you’re really targeting only those con¬sumers who fit the profile of your best patients. They need and appreciate what you offer, and they’re willing and able to pay for it. Why market to the masses if you can define your ideal audience much more narrowly and not waste marketing dollars?
The second question is much tougher to answer. In fact, most businesses can’t answer it in a meaningful way. Why should anybody choose you over your competitors? Before you answer, let’s add several degrees of difficulty. Answer it without using any clichés (like “excel¬lent patient care”), and without saying anything that your competitors would say about themselves and their practices.
Tricky, isn’t it? The ability to answer that question--why choose us-- is the difference between a brand and everybody else. But because it’s so difficult, most businesses--including most medical practices--just don’t bother. Unfortunately, that means they have to compete as one of many identical choices, rather than as the preferred choice.
Setting Yourself Apart
Here’s the irony. If a medical practice takes the time to carve out a true brand statement--a genuinely unique answer to the “why us” question-- it becomes so popular that it could indeed fall back on the “accepting new patients” theme, simply because it would be so busy that it would have to turn some business away or add staff.
So what if you can’t answer that question for your practice? If your answer would be nearly identical to your competitors’, there are two steps you can take.
The first is to schedule a day offsite with your staff, and maybe even a few patients, and use the time to identify what makes you truly unique. Maybe it’s something you already do, or something you could do dif¬ferently than you do now. But it has to be truly unique to you, and something (or some combination of things) that offers a genuine benefit to the consumer.
The other approach, if you can’t come up with something that makes you truly unique, is to differentiate your practice by the way you market it. One example is Absolut Vodka. Before they launched their now famous and long-running campaign, they were barely a player. They used marketing to separate themselves and rose to the top.
Either way, if you can find your brand, you can market it in cost-effective ways that add profits rather than expenses.
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