Let’s be honest.
There are dozens of reasons why you should be marketing, but you already know that. There are even more agencies out there willing to help, but you probably know that too. In this article I wanted to boil it down and discuss the main 4 reasons to get help when marketing your medical practice and share a bit of insight with you (pun totally intended).
Let me start by sharing a quick story.
Last month I had a meeting with a medical practice looking to increase and revamp their overall marketing efforts. I met with the practice administrator who shared with me that she was unhappy with their current arrangement, partly due to the work output of their marketing agency, but mainly because of a general lack of communication. Her frustration was deepened by the fact that she felt as though she was always having to come up with new ideas to market the practice and her agency never took the initiative to present, discuss or try new ideas.
In short, her blood boiled every time she looked at her out of date website and lackluster social media presence.
We discussed her frustrations and she asked me what it would cost to work with us. I told her about our values and our key differentiators, put together an outline and followed up in about a week. In the meantime, she met with the physicians and they decided to go in a different direction. No big deal. The docs decided they would just hire somebody in-house to do it all.
Heck, how hard could it be, right?
If you’re still reading, you probably know the answer to that. It can get pretty dang overwhelming.
All that said, here are the 4 reasons to get help when marketing your medical practice.
You Can’t Be Expected to Know it All
Sure, you can hire somebody to manage the marketing for your medical practice but what would you expect to pay to get somebody who can do it all? Is this new hire expected to understand your medical practice and represent you in the community plus film your patient testimonials, edit your videos, manage your social media, create marketing brochures, establish marketing funnels, manage digital advertising, etc.? The simple answer is that there are not enough hours in the day to know and do it all for most people.
Done correctly, the person you hire will serve as a coordinator with physicians, vendors, partners and patients while being representative of your practice out in the community. Expect them to work with outside vendors helping to navigate your internal approval process, online customer service and reputation management, etc. Your marketing coordinator is the one who communicates within the practice and makes sure the needle continues to move in the right direction to achieve your overall strategy.
Waste Less Time and Money on Trial and Error
It seems like we’re always competing against the clock. What will you run out of first, time or money? Why hire somebody to implement a robust inbound marketing strategy for your practice when you can just as easily and cost-effectively outsource it?
Think about it: your internal hire sits down to write a blog post and gets interrupted a dozen times and, therefore, takes days to complete one simple task. Your outsourced agency may cost 3x as much as your internal person, but they can churn out work in a fraction of the time, and oftentimes much better because this is what they spend all of their time and effort focused on. Plus, their blog post comes with custom graphics and social media posts whereas your overworked coordinator will likely spend day 2 of the project figuring out the next steps, deciding what audience to target, determining a social media budget, automation, follow-up, and the list goes on.
You Get to Take Advantage of the Best Ideas
Why pay for ideas when your receptionist has great ideas already, right? Maybe your receptionist does have good ideas. If so, you’d better nurture those ideas before she jumps ship!
The fact is, it’s not so much about the quantity of good ideas for marketing your medical practice as much as it’s about the execution of the quality ideas. If you’re working with the right partner, you’ll be working together to create a marketing strategy that is proactive, reactive and able to evolve on the fly for your medical practice as your needs ebb and flow. The key is to find a partner who can implement the best ideas and turn them into quantifiable, measurable results. Plus, if you’re working with an agency who specializes in medical marketing for independent physicians (now, who could that be?) and who has a proven track record, they’re going to advise you as to what works and what just feels good yet doesn’t actually produce.
Spend Your Time Focusing on the Things You’re Good at
We’re really good at creating inbound marketing strategies for independent doctors. We know our strengths and have years of solid results to back it up including thousands of videos, longform written content, infographics, marketing funnels, ad campaigns and on and on. On the other hand, we’re not the best when it comes to putting together physician-focused events for CMEs. Heck, we don’t even know where to start for that one.
When you hire an outside agency, you get to focus on what you’re good at and they get to do the same with the common goal of making the practice more successful while helping more people in the community be healthier and happier. Hire your in-house marketing coordinator to communicate your wishes and to make sure your medical practice and brand are well represented in the community, referral circles and with outside vendors.
What’s the Formula for Marketing Success?
We get asked this all the time from new clients.
If you’re serious about elevating your marketing activities this year, here’s the tried and true formula:
Hire an in-house coordinator (1) + Hire a specialized support agency (1) = Success (1,000%)
We work with a lot of independent medical practices and have seen success month over month in the programs we put in place to automate their marketing process. However, the most successful clients are always the ones where we have a point-person who is engaged, can move things through the pipeline and takes the time to understand how we can work together to achieve results.
Here’s a salary breakdown for comparison:
**Typical cost of an employee is 1.25-1.4x salary** **Insight Marketing Group Average Retainer – $1,800-$2,500 per month**
Written by: Jennifer Thompson