Duty and Obligation
It is your DUTY and your OBLIGATION to be as successful as you can be. If you find you’ve generated a surplus, you can certainly find charitable ways to use it. This is not greed. In fact it is the opposite. OK, comfortable with that concept?
Now, there’s another idea we need to discuss.
The most important thing you must do in your business is MARKETING. Everything else is driven by this function. Of course you have to do accounting, legal, regulatory, supplies, scheduling, billing, and so on. But if you don’t have patients, none of these other functions are applicable. Marketing is job one, now and always.
Does that make you uncomfortable?
It’s OK if it does. The purpose of this report is to make marketing comfortable, understandable, and easy. You really can do this. It’s not as bad as you might fear. In fact, once you understand marketing, you’ll find it can be one of the most rewarding and exciting parts of your practice.
So, to begin our discussion of marketing, we first need to define the concept. And to describe what marketing IS, we must start by discussing what marketing IS NOT.
Marketing is NOT advertising
As you might imagine, when I begin a coaching program, one of the first questions I ask is, “What are you currently doing to market your practice.” It’s a loaded question because I know the sort of answer I’ll get. It opens up the discussion we need to have. The responses almost always revolve around advertising.
It is your DUTY and your OBLIGATION to be as successful as you can be. If you find you’ve generated a surplus, you can certainly find charitable ways to use it. This is not greed. In fact it is the opposite. OK, comfortable with that concept?
Now, there’s another idea we need to discuss.
The most important thing you must do in your business is MARKETING. Everything else is driven by this function. Of course you have to do accounting, legal, regulatory, supplies, scheduling, billing, and so on. But if you don’t have patients, none of these other functions are applicable. Marketing is job one, now and always.
Does that make you uncomfortable?
It’s OK if it does. The purpose of this report is to make marketing comfortable, understandable, and easy. You really can do this. It’s not as bad as you might fear. In fact, once you understand marketing, you’ll find it can be one of the most rewarding and exciting parts of your practice.
So, to begin our discussion of marketing, we first need to define the concept. And to describe what marketing IS, we must start by discussing what marketing IS NOT.
Marketing is NOT advertising
As you might imagine, when I begin a coaching program, one of the first questions I ask is, “What are you currently doing to market your practice.” It’s a loaded question because I know the sort of answer I’ll get. It opens up the discussion we need to have. The responses almost always revolve around advertising.
Advertising is NOT Marketing
Typical perceptions of what Marketing is.
When I ask clients what marketing they are doing, I get the following answers:
The worst part about all this is that its possible to spend LOTS of TIME and MONEY on these activities with little to show for your efforts. Nobody likes to waste time and money, yet nearly every practitioner I talk to is doing just that.
Advertising is the process of communicating your message.
It is HOW you get the word out. All of the activities in the above list are really just methods of communicating something to others, in hopes that they will be attracted to become your patient.
Typical perceptions of what Marketing is.
When I ask clients what marketing they are doing, I get the following answers:
- I pass out business cards and brochures around the community
- I have a website and I pay for ranking on Google
- I work with other practitioners to get referrals
- I rely on foot traffic that sees my sign
- I put up flyers at the grocery store
- I have an ad in the yellow pages
- I have an ad in the local paper
- I go to a networking group
- I have an ad on Craigslist
- I have an ad in Valpak
- I did a GroupOn
- I do health fairs
- I do public speaking
- Etc.- Etc.- Etc.
The worst part about all this is that its possible to spend LOTS of TIME and MONEY on these activities with little to show for your efforts. Nobody likes to waste time and money, yet nearly every practitioner I talk to is doing just that.
Advertising is the process of communicating your message.
It is HOW you get the word out. All of the activities in the above list are really just methods of communicating something to others, in hopes that they will be attracted to become your patient.