Become a Marketing-Driven Practice

A simple fact about marketing: You could be the best in your field and offer top-notch services, but if no one knows who you are, what you do, or when, why, and how to see you, your business may struggle.

With marketing, you can reach the people who need you the most and can provide them with information that will help them lead healthy, happy lives—and will help your practice thrive. Remember, marketing isn’t reserved for the largest companies in the biggest cities—it is a sound investment for your small business.

The Basics

In the simplest terms, marketing is when your practice has an ongoing conversation with a particular group of people—the audience. How you do that can vary and may include advertising, public relations, branding, brochures and newsletters, a Web site, hosting or supporting community events, and other options. As you consider how to market your practice, approach the process as you would a new patient visit by following these steps.

Assess the Situation

This involves all of the background work you need to determine the best way to reach your target audience. Assessing your practice’s situation by:

• Determining what you want to achieve and what success will be. Do you want to grow your practice by 5% or increase primary care physician (PCP) referrals by 3%? Set goals and objectives and determine what will be considered success.
• Looking at where you are now and where you’ve been. Have you tried to market your practice in the past? If so, gather any materials from past efforts and review what worked and what didn’t. Look at what you are doing now and determine if you and your staff are ready, willing, and able to make marketing a priority for your business.
• Deciding who you want to speak to, and learn more about them. You may be marketing to potential patients, current patients, or lapsed patients, or you may be reaching out to managed care companies, PCPs, hospitals, or lawmakers and community influencers. Once you identify your target audience, take the time to learn about them.
• Finding out what the competition is doing. Are there other rheumatologists in or near your area? Are there nontraditional or natural treatments being offered to your target audience? Are PCPs treating potential patients? Determining who your competition is and what they are doing will help you tailor messages to your target audience. You may even find ways to work with your competition.

Identify the Best Treatment Options

Now that you know what you define as success (your goals and objectives), who you are speaking to (your audience) and who might interrupt the conversation (your competitors), you need to plan your messages.

Identify your marketing strategy—what you need to do to break through the noise, stand out from the competition, gain the attention of your target audience, and make them act. Marketing strategies are the broad approaches you will take to reach your main goal. To determine your strategies, keep your target audience—and what they want—at the forefront of your mind. If your goal is to increase appointment booking by 3% over the next six months, some potential strategies might be:

• Become a go-to rheumatology practice in the minds of referring physicians;
• Regain the business of lapsed patients; and
• Maintain good relationships with current patients.

Implement Treatment

Once you have defined your goal and marketing strategies, focus on short-term, measurable, action-centered tactics to successfully implement your strategies. For example, tactics to implement the strategies above include:

• Provide PCPs with patient fact sheets about rheumatic diseases that share information and reinforce the importance of working with a rheumatologist;
• Plan personal visits to PCP offices;
• Reach out to lapsed patients with direct mail pieces touting any exciting changes you’ve made to your practice; and
• Provide patients with a monthly newsletter that gives advice on managing rheumatic diseases and information on how your practice can help.

There are many tactics you can use to reach your target audience. Some are more expensive than others, and some take more time and personal involvement from the practice owner, but it is important to implement treatment, or your great plans will go to waste.

Gauge Success, Next Steps

Once you implement a treatment, it is important to determine if it was successful. If you achieved success, ask yourself which tactics helped the most and which were less helpful. If you didn’t achieve the success you hoped for, don’t give up! Just do what you would do with a patient who didn’t respond to a particular treatment—try another approach. Marketing plans may not be successful for many reasons, including:

• Lack of planning;
• Choosing the wrong audiences; and
• Setting unrealistic goals.

Creative, well-planned marketing efforts will benefit your practice and should be part of your overall business plan. Even in these tough economic times, there are economically savvy ways to reach out to different groups in your community and build a practice that is recognizable by name and sought after by patients and partners.

Marketing in Rheumatology

Many rheumatologists are already seeing the benefits of marketing, and those who understand that patients are consumers will successfully use marketing to leverage that relationship. “Because I do not participate in any insurance plans or Medicare, I definitely have to market my practice,” explains Scott Zashin, MD, a practicing rheumatologist in Dallas. He depends on community involvement and word of mouth to help get patients into his practice, but he also uses more traditional marketing. “For the past eight years, I have been selected as a Best Doctor in Dallas, so I pay for advertising to promote that honor,” he explains. “While it may or may not attract new patients, existing patients are certainly happy to see that their physician is being recognized.”

Dr. Zashin also takes opportunities to speak to other physicians and the general public about arthritis, and he welcomes the chance to speak with the media about the issues affecting rheumatology. These activities not only help market Dr. Zashin’s practice, but also help build his personal brand as a go-to expert in his community.

If you have questions about marketing your practice, contact Itara Barnes in the ACR’s practice management department at [email protected]