Marketing Your Private Practice
Marketing is one of the most misunderstood and frustrating areas of practice development. Many doctors struggle with merchandising and very few have an organized merchandising action plan in place.
It is easy to see why merchandising can be difficult. It is rare to find doctors who are effectively utilizing a practice development plan, and even less have a calendar of planned merchandising events and procedures. Without careful provision and timing, your merchandising may not unfold in a rational or effective way. Non-systematic, scattered merchandising attempts are ineffective and yield very few results. This lack of succeeder may lead doctors to conclude that attempts to market their practice will always be met with the same lackluster outcome, and may cause the doctor to think that merchandising is an exercise in futility, or unnecessary.
If you want your practice merchandising to succeed, you must ensure that your efforts are part of a big strategic plan. There must be provision and foresight. Your merchandising approach must be organized, relevant, and plainly visible to employees and patients alike. You must make an effort to create a coupled series of merchandising events. Marketing efforts must not only have individual impact, they must also have impact when considered as part of the big plan.
Plan for Success
Before you begin provision your merchandising strategy, you need to sit down and decide exactly what rather practice you would like to have. Will you center on activity care? Chiropractic care during pregnancy? Sports Injury? Will you have a blending focus? Envision your ideal practice as you would like it to exist in five years.
Think about the types of patients you would like to treat. Who are you most comfortable treating? Unless you can clearly define and target your market, you will have appreciable difficulty developing and communication a content that prospective patients both understand and respond to. If you don't know who your target audience is, how will they?
Before you begin actively working to reach your target market, have a look at your practice. Are your practice systems developed relevant that your entire team can process new patients in an organized, efficient manner? It is pointless to spend time, money and energy looking your new patients, unless you will be able to process and care for them once they come to you for care.
Once you are absolutely sure that your practice will be able to effectively care for new clientele, you are ready to work on the next phase of your merchandising plan development - computation out how to reach your desired target market. Think once again about the type of patient you would like to work with. Once you have the patient in mind, think of what types of merchandising would be likely to reach and attract this rather patient.
Perhaps you would like to have a significant sports injury component to your practice. Where power you find these patients? You power consider things such as speaking before the local PTO, putt on an injury bar seminar for local coaches, sponsoring local teams, and buying advertising in the school newsletter and yearbook. Initially, you may simply need to show up and introduce yourself at local athletic events with business card game so people actually know who you are, where you are, and what you do.
Taking the time to thoughtfully consider each of these areas will help you to develop a merchandising plan that is much more likely to deliver the results you desire.
Make the Time
Even the best merchandising plan will not be effective if you don't set aside dedicated time for implementation. Set aside a minimum of one hour per week where nothing else but calendar development and merchandising implementation takes place. This time must be protected - it is non-cancelable and necessarily to be viewed as essential to practice development. Make sure that staff knows not to disturb you - no phone calls or interruptions should go on during this time.
Begin provision your merchandising efforts. Brainstorm about merchandising initiatives that add up for your practice and target audience. Take a paper desk-size calendar and docket the exact days and multiplication when each step should be executed. Calendar only the items that you are sure you will be able to do altogether and effectively, not halfway.
Plan your merchandising so that it occurs around simultaneously, and not necessarily in a consecutive manner. The reason for doing this incidental the principle of massive action, which is often neglected in camera practice merchandising. This principle says that massive action equals massive results. In merchandising, too many doctors try a haphazard step here or there. When they fail to produce the desired results, they become disappointed and actually abandon their merchandising program. A much better way to approach merchandising is without doubt that coupled stairs are performed simultaneously. You will be much happier with the end result approaching your merchandising in that manner.
Creating a Loyal Following
An essential component of private practice merchandising involves maintaining close contact with those who have used your services in the past, on with members of the community you may have met at civic events and social functions. Maintaining steady contact helps to ensure that all of these potential clients and referral sources translate into more patients for your thriving practice. Never forget that patients (and their families) who antecedently used your services are much more likely to not only refer their family and friends, but to actually see you once again as well. Make them feel valued by staying in touch. Seek to build long-term relationships with every patient and potential patient you come into contact with.
Create a database where you can track each of these important people. In this day and age list maintenance is simple and can easily be handled by a sure employee. There are hundreds of different database tools you can use to track your clientele, and there options available in every price range. You power also choose to work with a posting house that can create and distribute newsletters and bulletins on your behalf. For example, you may decide that each calendar month your list of coaches will receive a newsletter focused on preventing sports injury, including tips and ideas for making their lives easier. Your merchandising database can be used not only to cost-effectively send back newsletters and promotions, but to inform your clients about practice changes such as hours, new partners, and more.
Each time you treat a new patient, find out how they arrived in your office. How did they find you? Where did they first hear of you? Who referred them? Enter this information into your database, so that you have a written account of new patient sources. This tracking is essential so that you know in the short term and in the long-term exactly where patients come from and which merchandising efforts are producing the best results. Periodically analyze the results and adjust your merchandising plans as needed.
You should only consider outlay money on external merchandising (such as extensive newspaper advertising) if you are sure that you have enforced procedures that will ensure you can stay in touch with existing patients and referral sources, and effectively track which of your merchandising efforts is delivery in results.
The implementation of an organized merchandising program is essential to the succeeder of any private practice. It may seem like a discouraging task at first, but once you have established it, it becomes much easier in succeeding years to maintain a thriving practice. You will have a strong foundation of loyal, repeat clients upon which to build. Paying attention to these simple principles will in the end result in the development of the practice of your dreams.
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