Basic Principles of Medical Practice Marketing

1. Offer treatments that people actually want and can afford.
2. Have a few unique treatments that your competition does not offer.
3. Develop trust among patients and prospects.
4. Develop good relationship with all sources that may provide publicly available information about your practice and you. Hearing about you from a third party is more believable and goes much further in attracting new patients than hearing it from you (paid advertising).
5. The number of prospects having heard about you is directly related to the size of your customer base.
6. Repetition! People need to hear about you on an ongoing basis.
7. Cost! To be able to own your market exposure  you need to keep costs low but you can’t do it for free.
8. The way people evaluate whether they want to go to a particular doctor has more to do with personally liking that doctor than with how good that doctor is as a professional in the field. Be nice to your patients and make sure that your staff is friendly and caring.
9. Public Relations. This is and inexpensive but powerful tool of spreading your name, which endorses you as a person through the media and the community leaders talking about you on a social level.
10. Social endorsements by the media and community leaders must be supported by professional marketing and advertising activities on a consistent basis.

The mechanics of how to implement all of the above are numerous and many doctors are familiar with most of them. They range from brochures and flyers to coupons, TV and radio ads on local channels, newspaper and magazine ads, health fares, local events, visiting referring doctors, doing speeches at schools and rotary clubs, telemarketing, asking patients to refer, sending health reports, Yellow Pages, billboards, websites, blogs, forums, e-mails, e-newsletters, etc, etc.

The list could be so longer but you must have skipped a few components even is it was presented above. There are  hundreds of marketing tools and venues. They are very important, but they can and do have different results in different areas and for different types of medical practices.

It is the right synergy of several of these tools together, aligned with the above principles, which will bring in more business. MedMarketing Team’s job is to identify the tools, which will produce results, set them up and operate them consistently to fill up your sales funnel and bring more patients to your medical practice.