As you are passing between your clinic's examination rooms on a tiring Thursday evening—your back still sore from the previous afternoon's surgeries— your assistant grabs your shoulder to alert you that tonight is the deadline to renew your clinic's ad placement. Half laughing at your feelings of uncertainty about the advertising's relative effectiveness, you give your assistant the go-ahead and jump to examination room 2 with chart in hand. Your concern regarding the allocation of expenses is swiftly brushed aside as you realize someone has messed with your slit-lamp oculars yet again!
Does this scenario sound at all familiar? In my last 15 years in the ophthalmic device market (both in engineering and marketing), I have always stood in amazement at the absolute complexity of ophthalmologists' business models. Unlike in most industries, as an ophthalmologist, you must juggle complex relationships with referring optometrists (practitioners you hope never find out about your other referring optometrists), referring physicians, and your greater community. These relationships are complex and extraordinarily difficult to nurture to the level you wish you could. Despite these complexities, why do some clinics experience more than a 20% annual growth, whereas others track the population's growth? In a recent survey I conducted,1 80% of the ophthalmologists polled spent more than 5% of 2010 medical revenue on marketing. To add context to these figures, the top seven US-based pharmaceutical companies in 2004 spent 32% of their revenue on marketing and advertising. 2 If the majority of practices are investing the same amount of money in marketing, what are the high-growth outliers within your industry doing differently?
FRAMEWORK FOR PRACTICE MARKETING
Outliers in any industry have one thing in common: a consistent and planned methodology. As the saying goes, a soldier with a plan can beat an army with none. Therefore, in the ophthalmic market, I suggest a framework for your allocation decisions in what I call the practice marketing pyramid (Figure 1). You want to be proportionally mindful of your efforts within internal marketing, referral-channel outreach, and community outreach.
INTERNAL MARKETINGNever underestimate the power of word of mouth in the waiting room; the key to harnessing this is to keep your staff fully engaged. There are innovative ways to keep your entire staff highly motivated and almost behaving like your personal public relations team. As an example, I was recently sitting in the waiting room of an ophthalmology office. I had scheduled time to meet with a physician I knew. His assistant had no idea of the purpose of my visit, yet she immediately initiated a conversation with me. She was so excited to share with me, unsolicited on my part, that their practice had just purchased a new optical coherence tomography system that very week. She explained to me purposefully and loudly enough for others to hear in the waiting room how “wonderful it is, and the 3-D images are amazing.” With my curiosity piqued as to what triggered her excitement, she continued her story that Dr. X “even scanned my eye and said everything looked great!” Whether Dr. X realized it or not, he was hitting the core of great internal marketing— consistent communication. Educating his staff on the practice's latest technology kept everyone connected.
Can you identify ways to create consistently better staff communication in your practice? Are you participating in a clinical study? Let your staff know. Did your surgery center buy a new microscope that has incredible clarity? Let your staff know. Did you just post a complex case on EyeTube.net and a surgeon you highly respect posted a positive comment on it? Let your staff know. Waiting room conversation is a powerful marketing tool, so do all you can to help steer it in a constructive way.
Here are two examples of ways to improve internal marketing.
Staff Education on Equipment.
Let your entire staff
know about new equipment purchased, both for your
office and for the ambulatory surgery center or hospital. If
possible, let them sit in on the in-service demonstration.
Internal Newsletter.
ConstantContact.com is a costeffective
($30 per month) and easy program that can be
used to develop a professional-looking newsletter. It actually
serves two purposes by communicating with both patients
and the staff.
REFERRAL-CHANNEL OUTREACH
The most valuable investment of time or money, according to the surgeons I polled, is optometric education and outreach (Figure 2).1 You will likely make a lot of effort on this front in the traditional way, but I want to offer a few creative, inexpensive ideas that buy more goodwill and cost you nothing.
Group Purchase.
You as the physician hold incredible
bargaining power when it comes to purchasing equipment.
If you are considering the purchase of a new diagnostic tool,
call some of your preferred optometrists and physicians and
see if they want to buy one, too. You will not only all save
money, but you will also gain tremendous goodwill through
your collaboration.
Never Miss a Follow-up Letter
Whether you realize it or
not, many optometrists' staff members grade you on how
well you follow up. As someone who has sat in many
optometrists' waiting rooms and watched the dynamics
play out, I urge you not to forget that follow-up letter or
phone call.
External Newsletter
The exact same (or a slight variation
of the) ConstantContact.com newsletter you create to communicate
with your staff can be repurposed for external
outreach. With minor editing, it is simply a second click of
the send button.
COMMUNITY OUTREACH
Typically, community outreach refers to your traditional advertising campaigns, but there are ways to extend this service without spending a dime. The bottom line is the great Google lottery. Growing numbers of patients, their extended families, and even industry representatives will perform an online search regarding your background. Be aware of this and learn the basic rules of the game to improve your search engine ranking. A fast and extremely effective way to start is by blogging, which is keeping an online journal where you post relevant commentary that is intended to be participatory. Whether you start your own blog on your practice's Web site or participate in the dialogue on others' (eg, making comments on Eyetube.net), this activity immediately increases the chance that someone will index that posting, and every index throws another ticket in the Google lottery. Wordpress.com offers a tutorial and easy setup to get you started on creating a blog. It has incredible built-in metrics to monitor your progress, and it is very scalable as your needs expand.
You can also engage local newspapers, as they are very receptive to offers to write an article and/or contribute medical quotations. Proactively offer to write commentary on recent national press relating to eye care. As a bonus, most newspapers publish online as well, thus throwing another ticket in the Google lottery.
CONCLUSION
When it comes to marketing, you can stretch a penny into copper wire if you simply maintain consistency. Be mindful of all aspects of the practice marketing pyramid— internal marketing, referral-channel outreach, and community outreach. There are simple and creative ways to market your practice and give your personal brand the momentum it deserves.
Timothy Buckley, MBA, BSME, is a senior marketing manager at Transcend Medical. He is a consultant to the American Glaucoma Society. Mr. Buckley may be reached at (650) 766-5341; timbuckley@calalum.org.
