How to Draw a Strategic Marketing Plan

May 10, 2022 Post a Comment

Ix Steps to a Strategic Marketing Programme

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

Fam Pract Manag. 2001 Nov-Dec;eight(x):39-43.

This content conforms to AAFP CME criteria. Come across FPM CME Quiz.

Article Sections

Introduction
Why should yous market place your practise?
The elements of a plan
As good equally you make it

For many physicians, marketing is simply a matter of putting an advertisement in the local paper, redecorating the waiting room or conducting a straight mailing to people in the community. Just this is a haphazard approach that volition attain little more than for your practice than draining its marketing budget.

The central to successfully marketing your exercise 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 y'all marketplace your do?

Abstruse
Why should you market your practice?
The elements of a programme
As good as y'all make information technology

Some physicians still 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 at that place are a wide range of reasons for doing it, not all of which take a purely financial ground. However, if you do desire to determine the value of each new patient to your practice, summate the average of the revenue that 10 new patients generated during their first 12 months with you.

You might consider marketing your practise for any or all of the post-obit reasons: to increase your income, aggrandize your patient base, discourage competition, ameliorate your practise image, promote current and new services, innovate new providers, enter a new marketplace or gain or retain market place share. Whatever your motivation, make sure to get your staff involved right from the kickoff. Share your reasons for marketing with them, and ask them for their ideas. If your staff is non involved early on, information technology volition exist difficult to convince them to support the marketing plan and take on whatsoever additional work that comes with it.

The elements of a program

Abstruse
Why should you market your practice?
The elements of a plan
As skilful as you make it

At that place are nine major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic marketing programme: fix your marketing goals, behave a marketing inspect, conduct market inquiry, clarify the inquiry, identify your target audience, determine a budget, develop specific marketing strategies, develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and create an evaluation process.

1. Set your marketing goals. Once you've decided to marketplace your practice, y'all need to ready realistic and measurable goals to achieve over the next 18 to 24 months. This fourth dimension span allows yous to plan activities around community events that are in line with your marketing goals. For example, you might assist sponsor an annual walkathon for chest cancer or speak at your community's almanac wellness fair. Considering of the rapid changes occurring in the wellness intendance environment, we don't recommend planning specific activities more than two years in advance. One way to ascertain your goals is to carve up them into the following three categories: immediate, one to six months; short-term, 6 to 12 months; and long-term, 12 to 24 months. Hither are some examples of measurable goals:

Increase the number of new patients seen in the practice by five percent within the first six months and 10 percent by the end of the first year.
Shift your patient mix by expanding the pediatric and adolescent patient base from 15 percent to 25 percentage of total patient visits inside 18 months.
Increase your gross acquirement by 30 percent within 24 months.
Improve your practice's epitome, which may be measured by "before" and "after" scores on a community survey or by reviews from focus group participants.

It's of import 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 program to be successful, your staff needs to support your efforts to achieve the marketing goals.

Primal POINTS

Marketing can increase your income, introduce new providers or meliorate your practise image, amongst other things.
A strategic marketing programme 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 every bit you evaluate your progress.

2. Bear a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a review of all marketing activities that have occurred in your do over the by 3 years. Exist as thorough every bit possible, making sure to review every declaration, advertisement, phonebook advertizement, open house, brochure and seminar and evaluate whether information technology was successful.

three. Carry market enquiry. The purpose of market research is to draw a realistic picture of your practice, the customs you practise in and your current position in that customs. With this enquiry, yous can make fairly accurate projections about future growth in the community, identify competitive factors and explore nontraditional opportunities (such as offer patients nutritional counseling, smoking-cessation programs or massage therapy). Your inquiry may even bring to light some problem areas in your practice as well as solutions you can implement right away. (See "A guide to market research" to observe out what kind of data you lot demand to gather and where to find it.)

Conducting market place research is often the most time-consuming stride in this process. However, it's as well 1 of the most important steps. It'southward from this research that you lot're able to find out what your practice does best and what y'all demand to work on, what the needs of your community are, who your exercise should be targeting and how you should go about it.

four. Analyze the research. Side by side, y'all demand to analyze the raw data you collect and summarize information technology into meaningful findings that volition be the foundation for determining which marketing strategies make the well-nigh sense and volition become the best results for your practice The research will identify the wants and needs of your current and potential patients and will help y'all to define your target audience (for more on target audiences, come across step v, below). This is also a good fourth dimension to look back at the goals yous've chosen. Based on your enquiry findings, you may demand to modify some of your goals.

A strategic marketing plan requires that your practice exist divers in terms of what it does for patients. The inquiry analysis will reveal your practice's strategic advantages. Afterward looking closely at your ain practice as well equally your competitors', y'all can enquire yourself some primal questions: What are the similarities and differences betwixt your practice and your competitors'? What sets your exercise apart from your competition? Is your location more desirable than your competitors'? Do you lot offer a broader scope of services than the competition? Is there a service y'all provide that no 1 else in the community currently offers? Your competitive edge may prevarication in your style of practice, the range of services you offering, the ease of making an date or the fashion y'all and your staff communicate with patients.

A GUIDE TO Market place Inquiry

To gather the kind of information yous need to develop a strategic marketing plan for your exercise, y'all need to carry marketplace research on your practice, your competition and your customs. Yous can't rely on intuition, judgment and experience; your practise needs hard information. Although it will take some time to assemble this information, a number of resources are available that can make the procedure easier for you.

Your practice

Much of the data you need about your ain practice can be found through discussions with staff members and other physicians, or past reviewing your patient records. You lot tin likewise observe out about your practise and whether it's meeting the needs of your electric current patients by asking them to fill out a patient survey about the practise. Hither are some of the questions you need answered about your do:

What is the groundwork and history of your practise? Has it been in the current community for a long time?
What are your practice'due south strengths and weaknesses? Are there problems with scheduling, cancellations, staff turnover or reimbursement management?
Who are your current patients in terms of their historic period, sex, ethnic origin, blazon of insurance coverage, chief complaints and where they live?
What are the services provided by your exercise? Who needs these services? Are these needs changing?
How is your do perceived past your patients?

Your competition

Y'all need to find out who your competitors are and what they have to offering. Bank check with your canton or country medical society and your local hospital to notice out how many other family unit physicians, nurse practitioners and general internists are in your service area, how long they've skilful in that location and how many have moved into your expanse over the by v years.

Once you've determined who your competitors are, you need to appraise them. This information may exist a picayune harder to come by, just yous can attempt to gather as much data as you tin can by simply asking other physicians, listening to your patients, friends and neighbors when they talk about their physicians and keeping your eye out for competitors' advertisements. To assess your competition, you need to ask the following questions:

What are your competitors' target audiences and niche markets?
Why do certain patients or groups of patients particularly like or dislike your competitors?
How are your competitors viewed within the community?
What marketing activities have your competitors tried?

Your community

In add-on to gathering information about your practice and your competitors' practices, you need to acquire as much equally you can about the people in your customs. You can find answers to the following questions by contacting your local Sleeping room of Commerce, your state vital statistics section or the U.South. Demography Bureau (www.demography.gov). Census data is available for every state, county, urban center, ZIP code, neighborhood, etc.:

How many people alive in your service area? Is the population expected to grow or shrink? What are the demographic characteristics of the population in your surface area?
How is your practise perceived in the community? Are you known in the community?
Who are your potential patients? Are their wants and needs being met elsewhere in the community? If not, how can your practice run across those needs?

5. Identify a target audition. With the help of your market inquiry assay, you should be able to identify your practice's "target audition," which is the specific group of patients to which you'd like to direct your marketing efforts. Your target audience might include patients of a certain age, gender, location, payer type or language/ethnicity and patients with certain clinical needs. Keep in heed that your target audience should not simply exist the patients you want to attract but likewise the people who tin influence and provide exposure to that segment of the population. For instance, if you wish to treat patients with arthritis, you lot might want to get involved in the local and regional Arthritis Foundation and explore senior organizations in the customs. If yous want to treat young athletes, you might consider giving talks on sports safe and beginning-assistance tips to coaches and athletes at the local high schools, colleges and YMCAs. The key to marketing lies in targeting the audience that your exercise can serve ameliorate than your contest – and communicating this to that group.

6. Determine a budget. Before y'all can decide what specific marketing strategies you desire to implement to attain your goals, you need to examine your financial information and come upward with a marketing budget. Marketing budgets vary by the type of market a practice is in, the age of a exercise and whether the practice has marketed before. In that location's no standard for how much a practice should spend. However, in our experience, practices in open markets accept spent 3 percent to 5 pct 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 aggressive new program or service, you can expect to spend 10 percentage or more of your annual gross income the showtime year you implement the program.

Some of the initial marketing activities tin be expensive. For example, it tin toll more than $5,000 to have a corporate image parcel (i.e., logo, stationery and collateral pieces) developed by a professional and equally much equally $10,000 if yous add a brochure. On the other hand, some of the best marketing activities cost practically nada. For example, to build your referral network, you might endeavour meeting with new physicians in your community and sending follow-up/thankyou notes to referring physicians. Big or small-scale, these are all worthwhile investments that will give the community a positive image of your do.

7. Develop marketing strategies. With your budget in place, you can begin to define specific marketing strategies that will accost your goals, reach your target audience and build your patient base. Recollect to focus your strategies on the elements of your practice that tin be 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 made up of numerous deportment. For example, 1 strategy related to the goal of increasing patient satisfaction might be to make the office more patient friendly. The actions required for that strategy might include the following:

Provide patient satisfaction training sessions to staff;
Develop a patient self-scheduling system inside the practise Spider web site to eliminate the need to phone the function for an appointment;
Improve the reception-room decor;
Provide proper name tags for staff;
Require staff to innovate themselves to each new patient;
Conduct post-come across telephone interviews with new patients inside three days of their appointments.

[Watch for an upcoming article in FPM nigh specific, price-effective marketing deportment y'all can try in your practice.]

8. Develop an implementation schedule. An implementation schedule is a time-line that shows which marketing actions will be washed 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 menstruum. When creating the schedule, carefully consider how the activities will touch the current practice operations and whether there are sufficient resources (such as staff, time and money) to accomplish the necessary tasks. In some cases, information technology may be necessary to whittle down the list or postpone some activities. In other cases, information technology might be best to go ahead with full implementation of your plan. If yous want to fully implement the plan merely don't quite have the staffing resources, y'all might consider bringing in a consultant to coordinate the marketing activities and/or adding a part-fourth dimension staff member to handle the majority of the marketing tasks. The implementation schedule will likewise requite you a ground on which to monitor the progress of your marketing programme.

9. 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 against the standards you set in establishing your goals. Review your programme periodically (nosotros recommend quarterly) by comparing your progress with the implementation schedule. There are several ways you tin can measure out the results of your progress: patient survey scores, referral sources, increased income, increased new patients and decreased complaints.

If at whatsoever time you find your progress does not measure upwards to your expectations, y'all need to determine why. Perhaps the advertizing well-nigh a new service you lot are marketing has not attracted new patients. If the advert campaign has been carried out as directed without results, dump the campaign and try other deportment. Perhaps you'll want to effort giving a series of seminars specifically targeted to the grouping you want to concenter 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 practice talks about the new service with his or her patients as merely informational conversation, favorable results will follow. In other words, the deportment – and even the strategies and goals – in the marketing plan are non written in rock. By regularly monitoring and evaluating each action, y'all tin can always change and effort new approaches.

Equally good equally you arrive

Abstract
Why should you market place your exercise?
The elements of a plan
As good as you go far

A good marketing program outlines realistic marketing goals, strategies and actions based on sound information and research well-nigh your do and your community. Merely the plan is just as skillful every bit your commitment to implementing it, dedicating sufficient resources to the attempt, involving your staff and communicating openly with them. The marketing plan should not merely be written, reviewed and put away on a shelf. Instead, your practice marketing plan should be an evolving blueprint that guides your efforts and monitors your success. Marketing works when the dedication is there. It'due south up to you lot!

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Dr. Anwar is immediate past president of the National Clan of Healthcare Consultants. Judy Capko is the director of practise management for the Professional Clan of Wellness Care Role Management. They are senior consultants with The Sage Group, Inc., a national health care business firm specializing in strategic planning, restructuring, do management and marketing.

Conflicts of interest: none reported.

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Copyright © 2001 by the American Academy of Family Physicians.
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