Nine Steps to a Strategic Marketing Plan

Here's how to brand sure both you and your patients know what makes your practice special.

Fam Pract Manag. 2001 November-December;8(10):39-43.

This content conforms to AAFP CME criteria. See FPM CME Quiz.

Article Sections

  • Introduction
  • Why should you lot marketplace your practice?
  • The elements of a plan
  • As good every bit you make it

For many physicians, marketing is simply a matter of putting an advertisement in the local newspaper, redecorating the waiting room or conducting a direct mailing to people in the community. Simply this is a haphazard approach that will accomplish lilliputian more than for your practise than draining its marketing budget.

The key to successfully marketing your practice begins with developing a strategic marketing plan in which each activity is based on solid research and specific goals, and is implemented and advisedly evaluated in a timely manner. The plan serves as a road map to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Why should you market your practice?

  • Abstract
  • Why should yous market place your exercise?
  • The elements of a program
  • As practiced every bit you arrive

Some physicians nevertheless feel that marketing is at best unprofessional and at worst unethical. In fact, good marketing is no more than educating your patients and your customs about your expertise and services, and there are a broad range of reasons for doing it, not all of which have a purely fiscal basis. However, if you do want to make up one's mind the value of each new patient to your exercise, calculate the average of the revenue that 10 new patients generated during their first 12 months with y'all.

You might consider marketing your practice for any or all of the following reasons: to increase your income, aggrandize your patient base, discourage contest, improve your practice image, promote electric current and new services, introduce new providers, enter a new market or gain or retain marketplace share. Whatever your motivation, make sure to become your staff involved correct from the kickoff. Share your reasons for marketing with them, and ask them for their ideas. If your staff is not involved early, information technology will be difficult to convince them to support the marketing plan and have on whatsoever additional work that comes with it.

The elements of a plan

  • Abstruse
  • Why should you marketplace your practice?
  • The elements of a plan
  • As good as you lot make it

There are nine major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic marketing program: fix your marketing goals, conduct a marketing inspect, comport market place inquiry, analyze the research, identify your target audience, determine a budget, develop specific marketing strategies, develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and create an evaluation procedure.

one. Set your marketing goals. Once you've decided to market place your practice, you need to set realistic and measurable goals to achieve over the next 18 to 24 months. This fourth dimension span allows you lot to program activities around community events that are in line with your marketing goals. For example, you might help sponsor an almanac walkathon for breast cancer or speak at your community'south annual health fair. Because of the rapid changes occurring in the health care surroundings, we don't recommend planning specific activities more than than two years in accelerate. I manner to define your goals is to dissever them into the following three categories: firsthand, one to six months; short-term, six to 12 months; and long-term, 12 to 24 months. Here are some examples of measurable goals:

  • Increase the number of new patients seen in the exercise by 5 percentage within the starting time half dozen months and x percentage by the end of the kickoff yr.

  • Shift your patient mix by expanding the pediatric and adolescent patient base from 15 percent to 25 percent of total patient visits within 18 months.

  • Increment your gross revenue past 30 percentage inside 24 months.

  • Meliorate your exercise's image, which may be measured by "before" and "subsequently" scores on a community survey or by reviews from focus group participants.

Information technology'due south important to share these goals with your staff members. They can tell you from their perspectives whether they believe the goals are reasonable. If you want your marketing plan to be successful, your staff needs to support your efforts to achieve the marketing goals.

KEY POINTS

  • Marketing can increment your income, introduce new providers or improve your practice paradigm, amidst other things.

  • A strategic marketing plan requires you to define your practice in terms of what it does for patients.

  • Every goal, strategy and action in your marketing plan is subject to change as you evaluate your progress.

2. Deport a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a review of all marketing activities that have occurred in your do over the past iii years. Be as thorough as possible, making certain to review every announcement, advertisement, phonebook advert, open up house, brochure and seminar and evaluate whether it was successful.

3. Conduct market place research. The purpose of marketplace research is to draw a realistic picture of your practise, the community you practice in and your electric current position in that community. With this enquiry, you lot tin make adequately accurate projections about future growth in the community, identify competitive factors and explore nontraditional opportunities (such as offering patients nutritional counseling, smoking-abeyance programs or massage therapy). Your inquiry may even bring to calorie-free some problem areas in your practice besides as solutions you tin implement correct abroad. (Encounter "A guide to market research" to find out what kind of information you lot demand to gather and where to find information technology.)

Conducting market place research is often the most time-consuming step in this process. Nevertheless, it'south besides one of the near important steps. It's from this research that you lot're able to discover out what your practice does all-time and what you need to work on, what the needs of your community are, who your practice should be targeting and how you should become well-nigh it.

four. Clarify the research. Next, you lot need to analyze the raw data y'all collect and summarize information technology into meaningful findings that will be the foundation for determining which marketing strategies make the most sense and will get the best results for your practice The research will identify the wants and needs of your electric current and potential patients and will help y'all to ascertain your target audience (for more on target audiences, see step five, beneath). This is also a expert time to look dorsum at the goals you've chosen. Based on your research findings, you may need to modify some of your goals.

A strategic marketing plan requires that your do be defined in terms of what it does for patients. The research analysis will reveal your practice's strategic advantages. Afterwards looking closely at your ain practice as well as your competitors', y'all can ask yourself some central questions: What are the similarities and differences between your practice and your competitors'? What sets your practice autonomously from your competition? Is your location more desirable than your competitors'? Exercise y'all offer a broader scope of services than the competition? Is there a service you provide that no one else in the community currently offers? Your competitive edge may lie in your style of do, the range of services yous offer, the ease of making an appointment or the way y'all and your staff communicate with patients.

A GUIDE TO MARKET RESEARCH

To gather the kind of information you demand to develop a strategic marketing plan for your do, you demand to conduct market research on your practice, your competition and your community. Yous can't rely on intuition, judgment and experience; your practice needs hard information. Although it will take some time to get together this information, a number of resources are available that tin brand the process easier for y'all.

Your practice

Much of the information yous need about your own practice can be plant through discussions with staff members and other physicians, or by reviewing your patient records. You tin also find out about your practice and whether it's coming together the needs of your current patients past asking them to fill out a patient survey about the practice. Hither are some of the questions y'all need answered well-nigh your practice:

  • What is the background and history of your practice? Has information technology been in the current community for a long time?

  • What are your practice'southward strengths and weaknesses? Are there problems with scheduling, cancellations, staff turnover or reimbursement management?

  • Who are your current patients in terms of their age, sexual activity, ethnic origin, type of insurance coverage, chief complaints and where they live?

  • What are the services provided by your practise? Who needs these services? Are these needs changing?

  • How is your practise perceived by your patients?

Your contest

You need to find out who your competitors are and what they have to offer. Check with your county or country medical order and your local hospital to find out how many other family physicians, nurse practitioners and general internists are in your service area, how long they've expert in that location and how many accept moved into your area over the past 5 years.

Once you lot've adamant who your competitors are, you need to appraise them. This information may exist a trivial harder to come past, but you can try to gather equally much information as you can past simply asking other physicians, listening to your patients, friends and neighbors when they talk about their physicians and keeping your center out for competitors' advertisements. To assess your contest, y'all need to ask the following questions:

  • What are your competitors' target audiences and niche markets?

  • Why exercise certain patients or groups of patients particularly similar or dislike your competitors?

  • How are your competitors viewed within the community?

  • What marketing activities take your competitors tried?

Your community

In addition to gathering information near your practice and your competitors' practices, you need to learn as much as you can well-nigh the people in your community. You can find answers to the post-obit questions by contacting your local Bedroom of Commerce, your state vital statistics section or the U.S. Census Bureau (www.demography.gov). Census data is available for every country, canton, city, Zilch code, neighborhood, etc.:

  • How many people live in your service surface area? Is the population expected to grow or compress? What are the demographic characteristics of the population in your area?

  • How is your practice perceived in the community? Are you known in the customs?

  • Who are your potential patients? Are their wants and needs being met elsewhere in the community? If not, how can your practice meet those needs?

5. Identify a target audience. With the help of your market research assay, you lot should be able to identify your practise's "target audition," which is the specific group of patients to which you lot'd like to direct your marketing efforts. Your target audience might include patients of a sure age, gender, location, payer type or linguistic communication/ethnicity and patients with certain clinical needs. Keep in mind that your target audience should non just exist the patients you desire to attract but also the people who can influence and provide exposure to that segment of the population. For example, if y'all wish to treat patients with arthritis, you might want to become involved in the local and regional Arthritis Foundation and explore senior organizations in the community. If y'all want to treat immature athletes, you might consider giving talks on sports safety and get-go-assistance tips to coaches and athletes at the local high schools, colleges and YMCAs. The primal to marketing lies in targeting the audition that your practice can serve better than your contest – and communicating this to that grouping.

vi. Determine a budget. Before yous can decide what specific marketing strategies you want to implement to achieve your goals, you need to examine your financial data and come up upwardly with a marketing budget. Marketing budgets vary by the type of market place a practice is in, the age of a do and whether the practice has marketed before. At that place'southward no standard for how much a practice should spend. However, in our experience, practices in open up markets have spent 3 per centum to 5 percent of their annual gross incomes on marketing. If your practice is new, in a highly competitive market or has never been marketed before, or if you intend to roll out an ambitious new program or service, you can expect to spend 10 percentage or more of your annual gross income the first yr you implement the plan.

Some of the initial marketing activities can be expensive. For example, information technology tin cost more than than $5,000 to have a corporate paradigm packet (i.e., logo, jotter and collateral pieces) adult by a professional and equally much as $10,000 if you lot add a brochure. On the other mitt, some of the best marketing activities cost practically cypher. For instance, to build your referral network, you might try meeting with new physicians in your community and sending follow-up/thankyou notes to referring physicians. Big or small, these are all worthwhile investments that will give the community a positive image of your practice.

vii. Develop marketing strategies. With your upkeep in place, you can begin to ascertain specific marketing strategies that will accost your goals, reach your target audience and build your patient base. Remember to focus your strategies on the elements of your practice that can exist used to create a special value in the minds of patients and referral sources. Each strategy should be related to a specific goal and should be fabricated up of numerous deportment. For example, one strategy related to the goal of increasing patient satisfaction might be to make the role more patient friendly. The actions required for that strategy might include the post-obit:

  • Provide patient satisfaction training sessions to staff;

  • Develop a patient cocky-scheduling organisation within the practice Web site to eliminate the need to phone the role for an appointment;

  • Amend the reception-room decor;

  • Provide name tags for staff;

  • Crave staff to introduce themselves to each new patient;

  • Conduct post-meet telephone interviews with new patients within iii days of their appointments.

[Picket for an upcoming commodity in FPM about specific, price-effective marketing actions you can attempt in your practise.]

8. Develop an implementation schedule. An implementation schedule is a time-line that shows which marketing actions will be done when and by whom. The schedule should also include the cost of each marketing action and how it fits into the budget estimates for the 24-month period. When creating the schedule, carefully consider how the activities will affect the current practice operations and whether there are sufficient resource (such as staff, time and money) to reach the necessary tasks. In some cases, information technology may be necessary to whittle downwardly the listing or postpone some activities. In other cases, it might be best to go alee with total implementation of your plan. If you want to fully implement the plan but don't quite have the staffing resources, you might consider bringing in a consultant to coordinate the marketing activities and/or calculation a part-time staff member to handle the majority of the marketing tasks. The implementation schedule volition also give you a basis on which to monitor the progress of your marketing plan.

ix. Create an evaluation process. The value of a marketing plan is its effectiveness, which requires deliberate and timely implementation and monitoring and evaluation of results. It's of import to measure your results confronting the standards you ready in establishing your goals. Review your programme periodically (we recommend quarterly) by comparing your progress with the implementation schedule. In that location are several ways yous can mensurate the results of your progress: patient survey scores, referral sources, increased income, increased new patients and decreased complaints.

If at whatever fourth dimension you find your progress does not measure up to your expectations, you need to decide why. Mayhap the advert near a new service you are marketing has not attracted new patients. If the ad entrada has been carried out equally directed without results, dump the campaign and attempt other actions. Perhaps you'll desire to endeavor giving a series of seminars specifically targeted to the group you want to attract or developing a new segment on your Web site for patients that describes the benefits of the new service. You may even find that if each physician in the exercise talks about the new service with his or her patients as only informational conversation, favorable results will follow. In other words, the actions – and even the strategies and goals – in the marketing program are not written in stone. By regularly monitoring and evaluating each action, you can always alter and try new approaches.

As good as yous brand information technology

  • Abstract
  • Why should y'all market place your exercise?
  • The elements of a plan
  • As adept equally you lot brand it

A good marketing plan outlines realistic marketing goals, strategies and actions based on sound information and research about your practice and your community. Merely the program is simply as good as your commitment to implementing information technology, dedicating sufficient resource to the try, involving your staff and communicating openly with them. The marketing program should non only be written, reviewed and put abroad on a shelf. Instead, your practice marketing plan should exist an evolving blueprint that guides your efforts and monitors your success. Marketing works when the dedication is there. It's up to you!

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Dr. Anwar is firsthand by president of the National Association of Healthcare Consultants. Judy Capko is the director of practice management for the Professional Association of Wellness Intendance Function Management. They are senior consultants with The Sage Group, Inc., a national health care firm specializing in strategic planning, restructuring, practice management and marketing.

Conflicts of interest: none reported.

Send comments to fpmedit@aafp.org.

Copyright © 2001 by the American Academy of Family Physicians.
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