At this point the in the process, we’ve been through the process of identifying locations, getting financing, determining where to start in the process and establishing systems to monitor how the everything is going. We’ve covered what you need to know about building those offices in our podcast on new office development. Now, we turn our focus to some operating issues.
The way you look at general practice operations will necessarily change in a group practice setting. Effects of decisions are now multiplied not just by the number of offices you have, but by the staff people working the practice and the enlarged patient base positioned under your umbrella. Just as your role changes, so must your way of approaching operational decisions.
In this post, we focus on marketing and how strategy and decision making shifts from a 1-2 office practice to a larger scale. Here are 3 major considerations now for your marketing campaign:
Your scope changes and economies of scale become available
Now, instead of marketing for just one or two locations in an immediate radius, the population of potential patient and the geography of the homes for those patients grows significantly. The same, hyperlocal type of advertising that may have benefitted an office in the past may become too time consuming and expensive to implement. Here’s one example: let’s say you visit the other retailers in your strip mall, work out individual deals with them and then design a promotion just for their customers. Now, you’ve got 5 strip malls to deal with and because you are now distributed throughout a city, your radius of influence may include the regional shopping mall. Even if you have an excellent marketing director or handle it yourself, handling everything on such an individualized basis can get very time consuming and difficult to track. To combat that, your program to market to these vendors will have to be more systematized and streamlined. Obviously, a monitoring system must be in place to allow you to easily track results without digging into the deep details of your practice management software.
Also, consider a practice in which a lot of business gets generated via referrals from other local doctors. If you are an orthodontist, you may rely on building and maintaining strong relationships with general dentists to send you referrals. If you are working on 6 dentists in your one office model, you are looking at 30 doctors to entertain. Unless you plan to meet with one every single day of the month, that old way of doing things becomes unsustainable. You need to rely on other methods of communication like utilizing your staff to meet with the general dentist’s staff, or more significantly, developing your advertising to refer patients TO the general dentist. Then, you have a mutually beneficial arrangement that develops organically. This point segues nicely into our next point.
New types of media open up to you
When you started this process, you may have had an office located in a suburb or on one side of town. If you advertised via a medium like television or radio, your ad reached patients across town. Those patients would not be inclined to drive to your office for ongoing treatment unless your call to action was very, very strong. Even with a strong call to action, trying to attract patients to drive a distance in large, traffic-snarled markets is an extraordinarily difficult proposition. As a result, a lot of the spengin on electronic media is completely wasted. You may be spending to market to 100% of a media market to attract 15% of the people who might be interested in your ad. Now, in a group practice setting you have locations convenient to everyone in a market. That changes what you can do.
In addition to that, now you can spread the cost of marketing over multiple offices. If I’m located in Atlanta with a marketing budget of $2,000 per month for one office, television advertising is prohibitively expense. With that, even without the cost of production, I can maybe get 4-5 spots per month on a lower rated show or cable. That’s not enough to get in front of potential patients. But with 5 offices, your rock bottom minimum advertising goes to $10,000 per month. Now, we can do some things with media marketing. We can get a couple of spots on higher-rated shows directed to working moms or get more frequency on the airwaves to create a greater opportunity for people to see us. Either way, TV advertising is now a viable, preferable means of advertising.
To our point in the last section, electronic, advertising markets directly to the patient, including a material number that do not already have a general dentist. When those patients come in and need dental care before starting orthodontic treatment, you can refer those patients to the local general dentists and build a relationship.
What this means is that you can diversify your marketing activity further among social media, local relationships, building referrals, electronic media, etc. Use them all.
Branding becomes more important
If I am a patient in a one office practice with a friend who lives across town, I am not likely to refer that friend to you because I know that person is not going to drive to your office. Now, with a group practice, that referral becomes a real possibility. It is incumbent on you and your office staff to make sure that patients know that your original office and the office across town fall under the same umbrella. In other words, you need to make sure that I, as a patient, know that you have more than one location.
So, how do you accomplish this? Some answers are obvious. When you run a TV ad, include all locations. In your rack cards and other promotional material, make sure to include all locations even if the card is just for a business next door to yours. On top of that, within the office, make sure you proclaim all of your different locations through a banner or front desk sign and make sure that your staff let people know that your practice is now found throughout your market and in brand new markets. You never know where a referral will come from so let people know about it.
This is where the concept of “branding” comes into place. If you are in Atlanta and you ran your one office practice under the name of John Smith, DMD, PA, consider a switch to a more descriptive term like Greater Atlanta Orthodontic Specialists. This lets patients know that you can be found throughout the greater Atlanta area and that you are specialists in the area of orthodontics (please note that this name is just an example – it may already be reserved – but you get the point). This is just one way that you can convey your presence and convenience to a larger patient base.
And I apologize for giving branding such short shrift here. Obviously, it is a broad, important concept on which an industry has been built, but this is just one concrete example for you.
Of course, if you have any questions about the process or other marketing concepts, please do not hesitate to contact us.
No comments:
Post a Comment