Eyeworld

OPHTHALMOLOGY BUSINESS 84 January 2017 by John B. Pinto and Corinne Wohl, MHSA, COE A marketing check-up list 1. Marketing needs forethought. You can't draw up a sensible, relevant marketing plan without the un- derpinning of a clear view of your broader goals. What's your service area? Desired growth pace? Service mix? Provider mix? Answering these questions first will make writing a brief, formal marketing plan much easier. Check to make sure you are doing these things: • Write a 5+ year strategic plan, even if it does little more than answer the questions above. • Hone in on your desired per- centile growth rate. If you want to grow faster than the baseline pace in most markets —about 4% per year—you will have to add proportionately more resources to your marketing mix. • Decide on a budget, which should be proportional to several factors: • Your desired growth pace • Level of local competition • The scale of your local market—small rural and suburban markets are much less expensive to market in than urban hubs "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself." –Peter Drucker To the point: Simple practice tune-ups for complex times A lot of practices see mar- keting as a mysterious, expensive administra- tive afterthought. This is especially true in the present environment where grow- ing regulatory burdens and clinical innovations leave precious little time to devote to marketing. But marketing communications is one of the most basic pillars of any successful practice business. While ignoring marketing won't kill your practice today (the way clinical neglect would), over time, marketing deficiencies will sap your practice's potential. Let's demystify marketing: Mar- keting is nothing more than estab- lishing and then maintaining an ex- change relationship with a customer base. An exchange relationship is just fancy biz-speak for, "I treat your eye problem, you and your insur- ance company reimburse us." Effective marketing is generally multi-pronged. Marketing executives have a term for this, the "marketing mix," the appropriate ratio of tactics assembled to achieve desired growth rates. Although "selling," "advertis- ing," "outreach," and the like are tools in the marketing tool box, none of them alone is sufficient. Here is a six-point marketing check-up list. By the time you get to the end of this list you'll have a good sense of where you may be fall- ing short. The first three are internal; the last three are external.

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