It’s not common for physicians, or even staff, to pay much attention to traditional business marketing. It’s out of their purview and it certainly wasn’t addressed in medical school. I suggest there is a direct relevance associated with quality marketing tips. These can lead to ideas on how to better care for patients throughout the time they are in your office. Quality marketing ideas might influence how you communicate on your web site or blog. Today I want to share some tried and true tips from an article by Matt Heinz entitled Eight things your mom taught you about marketing.
I’ll take one of Matt’s points and extrapolate as to how this can be beneficial for a practice:
“Call when you get there.”
Tracking has always been important to marketers, but it’s especially vital now with budgets & resources tight everywhere. If you don’t know what happened after the marketing started (which prospects ended up buying, which lead channels are most efficient), it’s near impossible to optimize everything you’re doing to maximize sales & revenue output.
The application of this principle might not be obvious at first glance. However, it’s just as important for a physician to know where his patient referrals are coming from as it is for Amazon.com to know who their top customers are. If there are select colleagues who are responsible for a large portion of your referrals, for example, you might want to acknowledge this directly from time to time in whatever manner you deem appropriate. A simple thank you accompanied by an understanding that the colleague can reach out to you anytime go a long way to ensuring the referral stream is maintained. This doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple method might include the office manager keeping a list of top referring colleagues by month in an Excel spreadsheet for you to review at month’s end.
Take a look at some of the other points from the article. How might these influence your practice operations?