At its core, marketing is building connections. It requires understanding consumer’s needs and presenting relevant solutions. To market successfully, you must evaluate your current marketing performance, set effective marketing goals, allocate resources toward your goals, define your target audience, choose appropriate messaging, select the methods of marketing best suited for you, and pull your plan together into a marketing calendar for execution. By the end of this guide, you will have the knowledge to attract new patients, increase referrals, and grow your business!
Create a list of the sources for your new patients and their current performance. Your list should include;
This exercise will give you a solid understanding of what is currently driving your new patient volume and help you identify important trends. Measure the percentage of your new business that comes from each source and keep in mind important benchmarks. For example, if any doctor represents greater than 5% of your referrals, your business is over-reliant on that physician. When a business represents over 15% of referrals, you are too reliant on that business. Heavy reliance on a referral source makes your practice vulnerable to changes that may occur in the relationship. This could include scenarios such as a physician’s retirement, the business bringing therapy in house, or acquisition of the business by a hospital system.
Determine the specific goals for your marketing program. If you are too dependent on a single referral source, one goal could be diversifying your new patient sources and increasing the performance of the others.
Additional goals may include:
You’ll want to determine what type of performance you would consider a success. How many new patients equate to a return on your investment? Be specific when creating your goals so you can identify the resources available to help you achieve them.
When identifying available resources, consider people, time, and budget. Create a list of people in your practice that can assist with your marketing tasks. Consider all team-members, but make sure that their skill sets match your needs. Evaluate if the people on your list have the time to assist without vacating their current responsibilities. This will help you determine how much you can do with your current team and if you need additional assistance.
Finally, determine your available budget. The budget plays a key role in selecting the appropriate style and frequency of marketing for you.
To market effectively, you must be able to identify your target audience. As a physical therapy practice, you will market to two major client segments – referring physicians and consumers (patients or non-medical influencers). These are your target audiences. Within each audience exist three sub-segments; existing physicians & consumers, new physicians and consumers, and past physicians and consumers.
Your messaging - the words and images you use, should be tailored to the audience segment you wish to reach. As an example, with a new patient or new referring physician, messaging should introduce who you are, what you offer, and why it’s beneficial to them. For an existing consumer or referral physician, messaging should reflect new development or additional services that provide them reasons to continue participation. Keep your messaging specific to the particular audience you are trying to reach to increase effectiveness.
OWNED MEDIA is any marketing you have direct control over or own responsibility for, including:
Pros: Minimal or no monetary investment. 100% under your control.
Cons: Requires time investment and content creation to achieve success.
EARNED MEDIA is the awareness that you receive rather than broadcast yourself, such as public relations and third-party validation. Examples include;
Pros: Lowest monetary investment, often free!
Cons: Requires time, relationships, and generally something “unique” to activate.
PAID MEDIA is marketing that you pay to activate and includes both traditional and digital media. Examples of paid media are;
Pros: Wide audience reach and less time-intensive.
Cons: More expensive than other forms of marketing and requires content creation.
Focus on maximizing your owned media first. Optimization in this category looks like:
You have determined messaging for each marketing channel and the methods you will use to get those messages to your consumer segments. The next step is to create a schedule for when you will execute this marketing strategy. The best method is a marketing calendar. A calendar can be as simple as an excel worksheet or more robust, such as a complete wall calendar. You can find free templates for these online.
A Marketing Calendar should include:
A MONTHLY FOCUS:
“I use these messages with these forms of marketing to reach this audience”
A MONTHLY BUDGET:
What amount is allocated to each form of marketing for the month?
A LIST OF NECESSARY CONTENT:
These items must be created to execute the marketing plan for the month. This may include videos, printed materials, emails, images, etc. Be sure to plan time for content creation.
Marketing your practice doesn’t end at executing the marketing plan. Monitor your marketing efforts and make adjustments, execute again, and evaluate those results. Marketing requires continuous adjustment to receive maximum return on investment.
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