How to Grow a Successful Medical Practice | Vividus Healthcare Marketing

How to Grow a Successful Medical Practice – Part 1

Growing a successful medical practice - Vividus Healthcare Marketing

Whether you’re a well-established practice or a one-person practitioner, to be successful, you must have a marketing strategy and you must implement it consistently.

The key is developing a marketing system that forms a solid foundation for your promotional efforts. Implementing promotional activities such as advertising, direct mail or even networking and one-to-one sales efforts without a marketing strategy is like buying curtains for a house you are building before you have an architectural plan.

Effective marketing, using a proven methodology and trackable system can be considered a risk reduction strategy.

At Vividus we believe in creating a marketing system, which is a more profitable way to communicate with your patients.

This evidence-based marketing system includes 4 basic principles using proven strategies:

  1. Putting the right combination of strategies into a powerful plan: A marketing plan in a healthcare practice consists of internal marketing and external marketing strategies, referral strategies and a good branding strategy to communicate what makes you different. But remember, your marketing plan needs to be specific based on who you are, the community you practice in, your goals and your competition. The right combination of ideas and proven concepts prioritised synergistically to give you the outcome you want.
  2. Follow an effective implementation process: No matter how good your strategies are in theory, without effective implementation, you’re not going to get the desired results. Effective implementation as a system is not only about having a conceptual plan, but an action plan. This means that you need the right processes and systems in place to help support you and give you an infrastructure for ongoing consistency. Having the resources internally and externally in your practice will help you achieve ongoing success with your marketing.
  3. Tracking and evaluating your marketing results: Part of a successful marketing system is having a strong accurate tracking system, so you can identify and track your results, push what works and cut what doesn’t, to increase profitability as you go along. But remember, there’s no point in keeping good tracking notes if you’re not analysing the data regularly to learn from it to make adjustments.
  4. Consistency and repetition: This may sound very basic, but it works! Effective marketing is a constant consistent process, not a “when I have time” thing. It all comes down to repetition. You need 5-7 repetition of something for someone to become aware of you. But that’s just the beginning. You need another 5-7 repetitions for that same person just to recall you. And 100s more repetitions, depending on the quality and consistency of your marketing before they truly value you and begin developing a trusting relationship that results in a new patient. If you stop reminding people of your value, they will forget who you are, even if they like you.

Before you consider doing any marketing activities, begin by mapping a path to success through the development of a consistent, focused marketing plan.

Speak to Vividus today for a successful marketing system that suits your practice. We’ll help you analyse your practice like you would when you’re consulting with a patient. We’ll help you establish meaningful goals, assign a budget to successfully achieve those goals, identify and prioritise strategies and provide an implementation plan that you can consistently action.