Relationship Marketing

Junk Food Marketing

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! Hot dogs

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.

Junk Food Marketing

Cheap and easy and not good for you seems to be the way some practices approach marketing. Good marketing, like good cooking, takes time, and there are no shortcuts. So while you might initially tempt some people with cheap and easy “junk food” marketing, it’s not sustainable.

Have Something to Say

Regular engagement is important, but make sure you have something meaningful to say every time you communicate with your patients. Don’t send out a communication for every little holiday. Your patients won’t mind if you don’t Donut wish them a Happy National Donut Day (yes it’s real, it’s June 3!).

If you’re a veterinarian, though, your patients might get a giggle if you wish them a Happy National Puppy Day (also real, March 23!). But things like that are a special case and just meant to give your patients a little laugh. The other 99% of the time, you should have something informative and engaging to communicate whenever you reach out to your patients.

Make it Professional

All your marketing materials should look professional. It’s easy to take shortcuts like printing out brochures on a regular old office printer or to take your own photos for your website, but those are perfect examples of junk food marketing. Those kinds of things stand out to potential patients; it makes your business look cheap and unprofessional. Have your marketing materials professionally done.

Quality Over Quantity

There’s a fine line between marketing and spam. Even the best quality content will be ignored if it’s too much. You want to engage your audience and keep your practice on their radar, but people are bombarded 24/7 by information. It can be overwhelming. You don’t want your marketing content to be thought of as spam.

You Only Promote Services

It’s understandable that you want to use your marketing to promote your services, but make sure that isn’t the only thing you’re doing. People want to read information that’s helpful, funny, or interesting. Consider your demographics. Do you have a lot of athletes in your practice? Write a post or newsletter about ways athletes can avoid injury. Do you have a lot of families in your practice? Write a post about fun summer activities coming up in your area.

People don’t want to read constant self-promotion, they want to feel like you’re writing for them. You can feel free to add a few lines about your services at the end of a post, but it shouldn’t always be the entire focus of every post.

Set a Schedule and Stick to It

It’s frustrating when you find a blog you like and it’s not regularly updated. It seems unprofessional. If you worry that you can’t keep up a regular writing schedule, batch several articles and schedule them regularly. This not only helps to keep the readers engaged, but it also helps with SEO ranking too. Frequency matters, but it matters less than consistency.

Get in the Kitchen!

Don’t feed your patients and potential patients junk food marketing! Get in the kitchen and cook up something good for them. No one can live on a diet full of sugar forever, and your business can’t survive on a diet of junk food marketing.

For more information on building community connections, I encourage you to read my new book Community Connections! Relationship Marketing for Healthcare Professionals. If you want more valuable information about how to Connect with YOUR Community, you can find FREE healthcare practice marketing content, PowerPoint Presentation Jumpstart Kits, workbooks, blog articles, and my FREE “Practice Marketing Planner” Now!

Choosing Membership Services

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

Once you decide to become a membership practice, the next step is choosing membership services for your patients. We know the benefits for providers: A smaller patient load, reduced overhead, and less record-keeping. But what services will you offer your patients?

Ask Your Patients What Membership Services They Want

When some people think of a membership practice, they think of fluffy robes and private waiting rooms. Those things are nice extras, but they don’t do much to make a patient’s experience better. Ask your patients what would improve their experience. The most common things patients are looking for all relate to time: Faster access to appointments, longer appointments, and a practitioner who listens (which takes time!).

How Available Do You Want to Be?

From a patients’ perspective, one of the most attractive things about a membership practice is the increased access they have to their provider. What used to be handled with an in-office visit can now be handled on the phone or over email. Simple follow up questions that used to take days to get answered can now be answered in hours or even minutes.

But this kind of access means that the provider no longer leaves work when he or she leaves the office. You’ll be tethered to your practice in a way that traditional providers are not. And while most patients won’t take advantage of this 24/7 access, there are bound to be a few who do pick up the phone for every little thing. So consider if you can handle providing that level of availability. Open

For patients used to the old model, simply being able to schedule same or next day appointments, and not having to wait once they arrive for that appointment, will be an incredible improvement. So if you’re unsure about 24/7 access, you can still provide much greater access than what your patients have been used to.

Consider Your Demographics

If your practice is in a very affluent area, then luxuries like fluffy robes and private waiting rooms may indeed be something you want to offer your patients. If your patients are seniors, they may want help navigating the healthcare maze, things like coordinating specialist referrals and appointments and medical records. For patients with limited mobility, house calls would be an attractive feature and something well worth paying a membership fee for.

If your patients are focused on wellness and preventative care, they desire services that cater to their healthy lifestyle. You might consider hiring alternative therapists like an acupuncturist, naturopath, or nutritionist and adding an on-site lab to provide simple blood tests for things like vitamin deficiencies and lipid levels. Phone

Tech-savvy patients will appreciate patient portals, so they can do things like make appointments, access medical records and get lab results on-line. Even better if you have a patient portal app so they can do all of that right on their phone!

A Perfect Match

Choosing membership services to include in your practice is a matter of finding the right balance between what is best for your patients and for you. This shouldn’t be too difficult because providers and patients often share many of the same frustrations with traditional practice models. Therefore, what makes your patients happy can make you happy too.

Healthcare Marketing and Zonkies [Dare to be Different!]

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

Healthcare marketing and Zonkies? Seriously, what’s the connection? Healthcare providers often do the same, old, tired events and activities for their healthcare marketing. Certainly there’s a place for those things…they became “standard marketing” (or “workhorses”) because they were effective or provided useful information. We don’t want to throw them out completely…but consider enhancing them with some new, fresh, and interesting healthcare marketing activities where you dare to be different! (The zonkey!)

That’s right! Think outside of the box. Pretend there is no box! Be clever. Be unique with your marketing. Stand out from the crowd of healthcare providers clamoring for the public’s attention…

But how?

That’s a great question…

And I don’t have a specific answer for you.

Why not? Because your marketing should be as unique in your community as you are…and I don’t know you personally to be able to give you the perfect answer. Instead, look for general ideas. Then see what resonates with you…what looks like it would be fun…what your community needs…and tweak it to fit your situation. For example:

Develop a unique twist on an old standard. For instance, if 5Ks are a favorite stand-by, freshen them up by creating a new theme. Some fun runs that have been popular lately include zombie runs, color runs, and bubble runs.

Ramp up your professional use of social media. There are an infinite number of ways to creatively use social media and market your practice. There are even ways to systematize and automate it so it doesn’t suck time from your busy schedule. Refer back to my May 2015 Marketing Tip of the Month Newsletter for more on this topic of social media automation.

One newer social media tool to make a splash is “Periscope” by Twitter. Set up a free account, then dive in to real-time video experiences. Sure…there are people “scoping” strange things…but it can be very useful from a professional perspective. Imagine hosting a patient dinner or delivering a healthcare talk and having people drop in from all over the world! They can see and hear you…and interact with you via chat. Viewers can even send “hearts” (by tapping on their screen) to give you applause or to show their agreement. Or imagine a patient “scoping” their appointment with you…how else could you use it in your practice?

What fun and unique practice marketing activities have been successful for you in the past? Please share them in the comments section so we can continue the conversation!

External Marketing for Healthcare Practices [Easy Definition]

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

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.

What are some examples of external marketing for healthcare practices? Effective and attractive business cards and brochures you give to prospective patients at events…a healthcare talk or series of healthcare talks hosted off-site…providing services at an athletic event…sponsoring a 5K…and so on. (Remember, don’t get caught up in the labeling because it is possible for an item or activity to be used for internal and external marketing.)

When establishing your marketing calendar each year, start by scheduling one external and one internal marketing event or activity each month. You may be tempted to schedule more than one of each, but resist the temptation. Consequently, you may overwhelm yourself, your staff, or your available resources. Then when the event occurs, you’ll likely be exhausted and unable to project the best image of your practice. You can always add more activities and events to your calendar throughout the year as your resources and energy permit.

Once the events are scheduled you can begin the planning process. Create a system to organize all your event information and materials. Try a 3-ring binder or a digital folder structure, depending on your preference. This way, the next time you host the same (or similar) event, you don’t have to start from scratch! Establish reasonable goals for what you hope to accomplish with your marketing activity (i.e.: New patients, increased awareness, raise money for a charity, etc.). Determine how you’ll track the progress of those goals. Research, collaborate, delegate, and modify as needed.

Finally, with proper preparation, you can relax and enjoy the event when the day arrives. Afterwards, debrief with staff and volunteers. (If you can get feedback from participants that’s even better!) Discuss what went well, what could have gone better, and what to change for next time.

I’d love to hear from you! What types of events and activities does your practice do for external marketing? Share your most creative and successful ideas in the comments section below!

Healthcare Marketing Mindset I

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

Healthcare Marketing Mindset I

If you spend any amount of time speaking with healthcare professionals in private practice, it’ll quickly become clear as to their healthcare marketing mindset. In other words, what do they think about the concept of marketing their healthcare practice? I find this topic so interesting that I decided to write a series of blogs on the subject of practice marketing mindsets. This first installation will discuss the two main mental perceptions regarding the financial aspect of healthcare marketing.

We all know marketing takes time and money. The question is, how do you view that expenditure of resources? Some healthcare professionals focus on the expense involved, while others accept the cost as an investment into their practice. Have you ever had this conversation with a patient? Where they saw the cost of care in your practice as an expense and you tried to help them see it as an investment into their health and future?

When you view something as an expense – in this case, your marketing efforts – the tendency is to want to minimize the expense. Every decision becomes about the bottom line – dollars and cents – instead of how it could impact your practice or community in multiple ways. An expense is part of the cost of maintaining a business, but doesn’t necessarily help it to grow and thrive.

Conversely, when you view something as an investment, there’s a willingness to commit the necessary resources to make sure it’s successful. The hope is that the investment will pay off in some form in the end. An investment seeks a long-term outcome such as practice growth.

It can be easy to fall into the habit of seeing marketing as just another expense…dollars flowing out of your accounts, never to be seen again. And actually, that can be the reality if you aren’t monitoring, measuring, tracking, and modifying your marketing activities to implement the ones that work best for you.

A better approach is to look at your healthcare practice marketing from the perspective of an investment. Do your research. Determine your goals (what are you hoping to achieve with your healthcare marketing?). Consider your options carefully. Obtain expert guidance when necessary. Have a plan. Invest in the future growth of your practice and your life by financing those activities that successfully grow your practice.

A word of caution – not every marketing activity will produce spectacular results in terms of new patients or revenue. In fact, not every healthcare marketing activity is intended to produce patients or revenue, so be clear on your goals. (For example, perhaps you host an event simply to raise awareness of a serious health condition.)

I’d like to hear from you! How do you perceive the commitment of time and resources necessary to market your healthcare practice? Have you recently switched from seeing healthcare practice marketing as an expense to an investment? How did that happen for you? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below!

Are You Attractive?

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

Are you attractive? I don’t mean to get too personal with this question, so let me clarify. Are you “attractive” to other people in the sense that you draw people to you and your healthcare practice? This isn’t a discussion of the sort of attractiveness which includes cosmetics, clothing, accessories, or physique. Instead, I want to talk about your personal ability to interest and engage people.

I’ve heard it said that everyone has the ability to light up a room. The difference is some people light up a room when they enter…and others light up the room when they leave. (Be honest…which one are you?) This has little to do with physical build, clothing, or make-up and has everything to do with your personal charisma and personality. Do people want to be around you, or do they seem to take the first opportunity to leave?

In my experience, two things draw other people to you. The first is a sense of positivity – including a warm smile. No one wants to be around someone who’s negative all the time, but being around a positive person can help lift your spirits. The second item is a passion for what they believe in. Use caution here – this doesn’t give you permission to ram your beliefs down everyone else’s throats. Rather, a firm passion that’s evidenced by actions can be very compelling.

When someone is positive and passionate, they’ll constantly attract others to them. This provides them with the opportunity to meet more people and get to know them on a deeper level than someone who’s negative or apathetic. As part of your healthcare practice marketing plan, step back and check your attitude and passion. If they’re not where they need to be, make the necessary adjustments and create the best year of your practice.

What are your experiences with positivity and passion? Did you make an attitude adjustment that changed your practice or your life? I hope you’ll share your thoughts and ideas in the comment box below!

« Previous Page