Healthcare marketing resources for private practices.
In order to gauge the success of your practice, you need to track certain data. In a sea of numbers, you need to know what metrics to measure by.
It’s never easy to raise your fees but sometimes it’s necessary. You don’t want to do it arbitrarily, on January 1 for example, because it will seem to your patients, well, arbitrary!
Junk food marketing works in the short term, but it’s not a sustainable way to grow your practice. Make sure you aren’t a junk food marketer!
Have you ever read ingredient labels while food shopping? Almost everything is filled with sugar, even savory foods like bread and tomato sauce are loaded with the stuff! Why? Because it’s a cheap, lazy way to make food palatable. Is it good for you? Certainly not, but it’s cheap and easy. The same thing holds true for practice marketing.
Healthcare practice marketing indecision can cripple your practice growth and stability. Wow, that’s a pretty bold statement…but it’s true. Indecision can result from a lack of focus, certainty, information, or confidence. Since most healthcare professionals receive little education in how to successfully conduct healthcare practice marketing, it’s no wonder they struggle to make strategic marketing decisions.
Healthcare practice marketing sabotage exists, and should be considered when reviewing your practice marketing strategy. Sabotage is the intentional destruction (or obstruction) of an action, process, or accomplishment. Most of us would be furious to discover someone sabotaging the healthcare practice we’ve worked so hard to build…yet sometimes we’re the ones unintentionally sabotaging ourselves. For example, you’ve probably seen a patient sabotage his own efforts to stick to a new exercise regimen, or her own efforts to lose weight. Self-sabotage happens in personal life, as well as in our businesses.
We examined the concept of internal marketing for healthcare practices in a previous blog. Let’s turn our attention now to the concept of external marketing for healthcare practices. Simply stated, [external marketing] for healthcare practices is any activity or event done outside the walls of your office to promote your practice. The most effective marketing strategies utilize a combination of internal and external marketing for practice success.
As Seth Godin, marketing genius, once commented, “Everyone is not your customer.” In the solo healthcare practice realm, this can be re-stated to say that everyone is not your patient. What?!? A healthcare marketing consultant and published author is telling you not everyone is your patient? It’s true. On a superficial level, of course every single one of the billions of people on this planet aren’t your patients. Let’s look closer and use a specific example.
A couple of weeks ago I attended several sessions of the virtual Influence and Impact Summit produced by Michael Hyatt of Platform University. It was seriously one of the best online summits I’ve ever participated in. (If it happens again next year make sure you sign-up for the free event!) The speakers were insightful, the topics were impactful, and the take-aways were truly meaningful. In my last blog, I reviewed several quotes by the legendary John Maxwell. (Missed it? Check it out!) As I mentioned in that blog, I actually had two favorite sessions. And because I couldn’t pick a winner, I chose to talk about them in alphabetical order.