Is your Marketing really working? Do you know where your money is being spent?
How are you marketing your private practice? I talk to my clients and prospects at conferences or at my coaching sessions. They say:
“TJ, I allocate $3000 a month for my marketing. I think I’m doing okay.”
“I’m spending $5000 but I don’t know if this is working.”
Most doctors say it blindly; either it’s working or not working. As a doctor, as private practice physicians, you increase your knowledge level in marketing because most doctors are obviously not good in marketing. I just want to make sure you don’t get taken advantage of by marketers.
If you’re currently using a marketing service, next time you talk to your marketer guy or gal or company ask them, “What is my marketing objective with your company or with your current campaign?” They’re gonna be, “Shoot! This doctor knows what he is talking about.”
There are different objectives in marketing, not just sales.
Have you heard about brand awareness? There are different categories in marketing. Are you doing brand awareness marketing? Are you doing, for example, social media post engagement, objective marketing, website traffic marketing?
All the things that I’m telling you right now have a different objective. So you can set different expectations and go for different results based on your marketing objectives.
One objective I haven’t told you is conversion. Have you done or ran a marketing campaign for conversion? That’s where you’re converting a prospect into a lead or even paid. That’s where it counts for patients coming to your door. That’s the conversion. It’s called CPL or CPC (cost per lead or cost per conversion).
These are the acronyms that marketers use. I want you to know this so you can ask your marketer, “What’s my CPL right now?” That means how much do you have to spend to get one actual patient coming to your door.
Do you know what is LTV? That’s the lifetime value that one average patient can bring to your practice, the revenue scale.
What’s your current marketing campaign running? It could be simple generic post or generic articles in social media. It could be Google SEO marketing. SEO means search engine optimization.
I want you to be aware of different kinds of marketing campaigns. Now, have you heard of a retargeting campaign? I’m throwing a lot of different terms out here so that you know.
Equip yourself is some digital marketing knowledge
If you say to your patient about first metatarsal, second metatarsal or any kind of surgical angles and other surgical terms, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. Same goes true when we talk about marketing with doctors.
The more equipped you are with terms and knowledge about marketing, the less likely you’ll be taken advantage of. And then you can utilize your budget more efficiently as far as marketing goes. You know where you are spending and how to spend your marketing budget properly.
That’s what I wanted to point out. So hopefully you’ll figure out where your money is going as far as marketing spend.
TJ