To improve on your success over the last year, you need to plan your marketing strategy for the next 12 months. Look ahead to your long-term business goals – perhaps this includes early retirement – and align your short-term marketing plan with this. Let’s help you get started.
Start small and build up
A marketing and communications plan is incredibly important for every practice. Only with this can you work towards achieving your practice’s business goals and objectives over a set time.
A short, one-page document is fine to begin with – build it up as you figure out where you’re heading and which promotions will help you get there.
There are certain elements that every marketing plan should contain:
- A list of your practice goals for 2019
- The characteristics of your target audience
- Details of your competitors and what they’re doing differently, or better?
- A realistic budget
Think about your target audience
In the past, marketing tended to have a scattergun approach with the assumption that if you reach enough people you’ll convert some of those into clients. The same isn’t true these days.
It can help to take a more targeted approach. There is a huge benefit to figuring out who your niche audience is before you work on how you’re going to communicate with them.
Answer questions like:
- Where do they live?
- What are their age groups?
- What jobs do they have?
- What do they value?
- Where are their life goals?
- What are their key concerns?
- What health issues could they be experiencing?
- How could this be affecting their quality of life, their relationships and their peace of mind.
Once you have the answers, your strategy can focus on how to reach them and what kind of campaign will resonate.
Where to begin
Let’s look at some key points to keep in mind when planning your marketing strategy:
- Think about the services you offer and work out how your target market will value them. What makes your practice unique?
- Use your online presence (website, social media) to get that information out to your potential patients – tell them how they will benefit from coming to you
- Involve other members of staff in the planning
- Keep your business goals in mind at all times
- Schedule time to review the progress – quarterly is ideal
Of course, you won’t want to run your promotional campaigns at the expense of patient care. While the success of your practice is paramount, your strategy will need to be considerate of your ethical responsibilities and practice values.
Reinvest to grow
Reinvest a % of your new patient income back into your marketing and you’ll see your business continue to grow exponentially.
Marketing should never be seen as an unnecessary business expense – far from it. Rather, it should be treated as an investment. If it’s done well, a marketing strategy will pay for itself.
Think about how much new patient enquiries are worth to your practice.
Keeping track of the return on investment will help you to see the benefit of putting money into your marketing and promotional endeavours.
We’re here to help
If you haven’t written a marketing plan before, it can seem overwhelming. We’ve helped many medical professionals like you to create engaging and successful marketing campaigns.
If you don’t feel your marketing plan is up to scratch or you don’t know where to start, contact us to discuss how we can help you achieve your 2019 goals.
For January we are also offering a FREE marketing plan template to our readers. Just contact us using our enquiry form and we will email it to you.
