Like most of us, you probably spent a little time setting some patient number and marketing goals for your practice at the beginning of this year. And as we surge through the first half of 2011, this is a good time to step back and see if you are still on track with the goals you set.
If you find that you are not achieving the new patient marketing success you planned this year, there is one element that you may be missing that is critical for staying the course and accomplishing your goals.
After 15 years of marketing experience (both successful and unsuccessful) and chiropractic consulting for hundreds of doctors on how to build an annual marketing plan that truly creates a steady influx of new patients and reactivation, the missing link that I find most doctors have in common on my initial interview is a lack of detailed direction in their marketing plan.
For example, saying your goal is to establish a co-treatment and referral relationship with local medical doctors is not enough to accomplish it. You will succeed much easier and faster if you take it a step further and write out the details required to make it to your goal verses just stumbling toward it with random ideas and haphazard promotional attempts.
By breaking any larger goal into details, you make it easier to stay on course so you
don’t get lost within your own ‘big idea.’
What do I mean by details? The easiest way to define it is the specific steps that actually comprise any marketing strategy. These details or steps are what actually turn a marketing idea into a Marketing Action Plan (MAP). This MAP is what prevents you from piecing together a weak marketing strategy that you end up getting mediocre results from or stopping all together because of a lack or direction. It’s like if you lived in Texas and you wanted to drive New York. Sure you have a general idea of how to get there…you just go Northeast, but without some detailed directions, it would take you 5 times longer to get there if you didn’t just get bored or frustrated, decide it was too difficult and give up somewhere along the way.
In the case of setting a goal to ‘stimulate referrals from local medical doctors,’ your MAP may look something like this:
Make list of all new patients seen within the last 3 months and send out typed update summaries to the primary care physician listed in their file – Complete by ( date )
Flag patient files to let them know a report will be sent
Send a typed new patient evaluation summary report to the PCP of every new patient coming into the clinic whether referred directly or not – Begin by ( date )
Send out same day
Do a Special Treat Delivery day promotion to all medical doctors that have referred to me this year and an additional 10 that I want to develop a referral relationship with
Deliver the unique snacks during first week of December – Complete by ( date )
Attach full color marketing piece outlining benefits of using our practice
Call the office of the 10 medical doctors that I have the most patients in common with and schedule to take them lunch and introduce myself and a couple of staff members – Complete by ( date )
Create list of all medical doctors to whom I need to refer patients to help build the co-treatment relationship – Complete by ( date )
Begin credentialing for _____________ certification to help set myself apart from other DCs soliciting medical referrals – Begin by ( date )
Etc
Because you now have specific steps listed along with sub-bullets to help give extra guidance within each step, it is not only easy for you to quickly remind yourself of each detail within your MAP but it also makes it very simple to assign any part of your action plan to a staff member which takes a little of the load off you and helps get you to your goal much quicker by leveraging the efforts of your employees.
Notice at the end of most of the action steps there is a space to enter a date. This is just as critical as the specific steps themselves to ensure you and anyone who has a step delegated to them is held accountable to getting each component of your marketing campaign launched by the specific time period you set.
The importance of using a MAP holds true in virtually every type of marketing strategy you want to succeed with. And the more ‘involved’ the marketing goal is, the more critical it becomes to have that detailed action plan to follow.
