One of the biggest sins in practice marketing is not being able to answer yes to the following question:
Is There Financial Accountability For ALL Of The Marketing In Your Practice?
Following are 3 of my top rules to make sure your answer to this question is a resounding, “Yes!”
Rule #1: Don’t Ever Spend Without A Plan
The majority of practices and businesses I’ve worked with have virtually NO marketing plan or strategy in place before implementing my systems. For the most part, everything they’re doing is scatter shot – some of the strategies getting results, some getting none. What’s interesting about this is that most of the time, practices without a sound strategy in place spend MUCH MORE on marketing and advertising, primarily because what they’re doing is not generating results. You must have a purposeful plan in place.
Rule #2: Don’t Do It If You Can’t Track It
If you’re considering spending money on something you really can’t track, then you don’t do it. Period. If you can’t track it, you’ll never know if it works so there is no point in spending any marketing dollars on it whatsoever. In reality, there really aren’t many things that can’t be tracked, it’s that most practices just don’t do it.
I recently worked with a plastic surgeon who had paid a lot of money to an advertising firm to have a commercial created for his practice which played on a big screen at a busy health club. Other than the fact that the commercial did not have a specific marketing message, any potential calls from this ad were not being tracked. He had no tracking identifier for the ad, and his front office staff didn’t know how to gather this information from potential new patient calls generated from the ad. The Result? NONE (except money down the drains). Which leads me to…
Rule #3: Track It!
Once you’ve spent hours and hours and a bunch of money on a marketing strategy, if you don’t religiously track it, you’ve wasted TONS of time, and TONS of money for nothing. Once you’ve created a message to your target patient, this is the most critical aspect of anything else you do. You absolutely must know where every call comes from, have a system in place to compile the information, so you can ultimately determine the return (or not) on your invested marketing dollars.
Tip: All of your tracking mechanisms must be in place BEFORE you initiate the marketing campaign.
Purposefully tracking all of your marketing efforts will allow you to follow your plan, focus on what’s working, and eliminating the waste.
Adam Arnette has been recognized as the “Master of Patient & Profit Maximization” for private medical practices across the country.