Day: 27 June 2018

People like choices. Everyone chooses when it comes to a service or product they buy, and primary care is no exception. For nearly all treatment situations, there are a lot of alternatives available out there. This is the reason why it is so important for a physician to market and promote his or her medical practice.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean advertising your service. Many people often consider marketing as a fancy term for advertising. However, a good primary care physician marketing strategy can bring more benefits than mere advertising. Here are 3 reasons why marketing is so important in primary care services.

1. Satisfied customers

The key success for any services providers, in health-related fields like primary care, is the customer satisfaction. It doesn’t only include the satisfaction level of the current patient base but also the number of physicians who are willing to refer a patient to your business.
Most people often choose a primary care physician based on the advice of their family and friends. But when it came to selecting a specialist, nearly all use primary care physicians as the main source of reference. In other words, when a primary care physician recommends a specialist to his or her patients, the decision on whether to keep referring to this specialist might be dependent on the feedback from the patients.

2. Training & trial runs

Since word of mouth and satisfied customers play such an important part in primary care marketing, it is necessary to provide a patient-centered service by training the staff properly. A doctor might have a great manner, but if the receptionist is rude when answering the phone or talking to the patients, that is where the dissatisfaction might occur. In these cases, a physician should use his or her own services to access the experience of a real patient. For example, call in to check how quickly your call is answered as well as how polite the staff is.

And if you are planning to create materials for marketing communication, such as pamphlets or brochures for distribution to the patients, make sure to test them first on a small scale before implementing. A plan that seems reasonable and feasible on the surface could either prove ineffective or back-firing.

3. Financial evaluation

Marketing budget needs to be examined as for any other activities or business expenditures in which your medical practice involves. It needs to be created with return-on-investment basic, just as any other expenditures. In other words: make sure to quantify the expenses.
The most important thing is that the allocation of money will help you retain the current client base or attract new patients or both. A better perspective to see this can be what is the possible lifetime value of a satisfied client? And what is the expense of losing a client, or making a client become dissatisfied?”… Read the rest