The 7 P's of Marketing (Let me explain)

Marketing is a huge subject, you can after all do master's degrees in marketing, it's enormous.

Where most healthcare practitioners make their first marketing mistake is assuming that advertising or promotional marketing is all there is to it.

They throw their time, money, and energy at promotional marketing activities, without really understanding all of the building blocks of effective marketing.

 

The 7 P’s of Marketing

The building blocks of marketing have evolved over the years. When I first worked in marketing in the early 1990’s I was taught the 5 P’s of marketing and now we are up to 7.

Through watching this video, reading, or listening to this blog post I hope you will get a better understanding of the now 7 building blocks of an effective marketing strategy, and that that in turn will help save you time, money, and energy and make your marketing much more effective.

 

OK let’s dig in

 

P No.1 – Product

In healthcare, this is basically the service or the full patient experience that you’re selling not just the clinical outcome you achieve for your patient

Many healthcare practitioners focus on the fact that they're selling a clinical outcome, and that is not the case. The clinical outcome is part of the picture but is by no means the whole picture.

What you need to grasp is that you’re selling a patient experience. From the moment a potential patient comes across you, whether that’s from word of mouth, an advert, a social media post, or a Google search result they are having an experience with you and your practice. That continues all the way through to them becoming a patient, having some therapy, and achieving the outcomes they were looking for and any follow up that comes from that.

The journey you take them on through that process is what you’re selling. It's the whole thing.

Your patients a buying an experience not just a clinical solution in isolation.

Once you understand that the tone of voice on your out of hours voicemail has power when it comes to your marketing, just as much as the way your receptionist greets people, how thorough they feel you've been, and how quickly you follow up after their first appointment, all of that encompasses that patient experience. Your clinical talent and your qualifications are an important part, but only a part of the overall experience.

I know as a clinician, that hurts, but it's the truth.

So, your product or service development is a big part of your practice marketing, ignore that at your peril.

 

P No.2 – Pricing

Pricing is something I know causes a lot of practitioners sleepless nights. Well, anything involving money is a delicate subject for many, but how you structure your pricing is going to influence people's buying decisions, and remember marketing is all about the activity you do to influence people's buying decisions. So, your pricing is an important part of that puzzle

Now, your pricing is dictated primarily by two things:

• Your patient's perceptions
• Your perceptions

 

Your Patient’s Perceptions

No matter how affluent, pretty much all patients are looking for value. They are looking to attribute value to the price you're charging.

When it comes to healthcare this is significant because most people value their health (especially since COVID). When we feel unwell or physically in pain, we would do almost anything to go back to being pain free and not sick, feeling vibrant and full of life. So, being able to deliver that transformation for somebody has enormous value to that person. You’re not just selling your time.

 

Your Perceptions

The two things you must juggle are your profit and what it is you want the business to give you financially. Some practitioners are in private practice because it's lucrative and it will give you a great quality of life, but that all depends on the money you can make in the business. So, your pricing is influenced by what you need to make a profit, but also what you want the business to give to you in way of remuneration.

So, when you’re thinking about your pricing, those are, are the influences.

Now the other thing that will influence how you price is rooted in money mindset, yours and your patient’s.

Some people may find this controversial, but it's important to say.

Discounting and competing on price is a really bad idea in healthcare.

Number one, private healthcare and discounted rates do not sit happily together in most people's minds because discounted rates come cheap and cheap is not what you want to be associated with when you're working in private healthcare.
When you‘re looking at what your competitors are doing with their pricing and you’re thinking

 “Well, if I just go a bit under them, then I'll get more patients.”

But doing that has two negative effects:

1. You enter a downward spiral competition because somebody is always going to try and undercut you. That is not the way to build a strong, robust clinical business.
2. When you start to aim at a cheaper price point, you start to attract a very different kind of patient and what you don't want to attract are the bargain hunters. Bargain hunters will never be loyal. They are not people who see the real value in the service that you’re offering. They will go somewhere else next if they find a lower price.

 

So, if your pricing is based around competing with somebody else and undercutting them, you’re going to start to attract the wrong kind of patients into your practice.

When you’re thinking about your pricing, think about the kind of patients you want to attract, the price they will pay to be well again and pain free, and how much you need to charge to make a profit and take a good salary.

 

The other thing to decide when you’re thinking about your pricing is how you structure your offer to make it obvious that you are providing great value.

Packaging your services and products together can often make the service seem much better value for money when in fact it is just the same but setting everything out that your patient will get for their money will make the value appear more obvious and therefore the buying decision will feel easier.
Spending time to consider how you can package services together along with some physical products is going to help your pricing appear less daunting for some patients and your services more attractive.

 

Hopefully, you can see then, that pricing, how you price, and how you enable people to perceive the value is a worthwhile marketing activity.

 

P No 3. – Places

These are the “places” where people make the buying decision. This is either your physical office or clinic or digitally your website or Google Business profile (where often people can book directly).

You need to think about developing both in a way that will encourage people to make that buying decision.

 

Your Physical Place

Your physical place doesn’t just need to meet your needs as a clinician, but it should also be a place that reflects the values and vision you have for your practice as well as being a space where your dream patients feel right at home.

Who your dream patient is will dictate to a large extent the layout, the décor, the facilities, and the feel you create. For pretty much all patients I want to suggest that it doesn’t want to be too threatening, sterile, corporate, or bland.

I see a lot of what I call Magnolia healthcare practices, where they all look the same. There's no uniqueness and no personality, just bland, same as everyone, type practices.

Your practice needs to be something that attracts people and enables people to feel like they're in the right place. They belong there. They feel safe. They feel confident. They feel comfortable in that environment.

If you want to do some research on this, a great thing to do is:

1.  Set a timer on your phone for say 20 minutes (because you’ll get sucked in for longer otherwise)
2. Go onto Pinterest and search
1. Healthcare interiors
2. Healthcare clinics
3. Healthcare design

 

Any of those three searches will bring you up the most incredible eye-popping interior design and ideas that you can think of. A great way to look for inspiration is when you start to really consider the physical environment that you're putting your patients in.

Of course, this is your clinical environment too, so it has to suit your needs BUT it is also the environment in which your patients are going to be making that buying decision and experiencing your services.

You need to start asking yourself does your reception or your office match up to your dream patient’s expectations? Does it need to be more personable, more relaxed, less sterile, less clinical etc. You can have plants, you can have ornaments, you can have soft furnishings. You can make people feel at home and feel comfortable and confident and still have a workable clinical space.

 

Your Digital Place

After your physical space, you need to consider your digital space. Your website, Google Business Profile and social media accounts also need to be somewhere people land and immediately feel like they are in the right place. When people land on your digital spaces, sorry to say but they don't want to hear all about you all about your experience, all about your qualifications, all about your CPD. They don’t.

That does not make people feel at home and in a place where they will be heard, understood, and appreciated.

 

So you need to make sure that your website Homepage, your social media bios, and your Google Business Profile reflect things that relate to your dream patient, the transformation they are looking to realise, examples of results you’ve already achieved, or stories of the solutions you are providing.

So your digital places need to be somewhere people land and immediately feel at home, much like your office. No jargon, no horrible ugly graphics, no outdated technology or equipment. Just smiles, light, confidence inducing images, and great stories of success.

 and, and horrible big ugh just text and awfulness, something, you know, some white space, some good quality photographs of you. They want to see your face. They want to look you in the eye and decide whether they can trust you or not.

Also remember you are not developing these places for you, as tempting as that might be, you are doing this to attract your dream patients so you’re not the person to judge. When you’re developing a website, for example, get a small group of patients together and get them to use it and look at it, and give you feedback before it goes live.

Okay, so that's just some ideas for your Places.

P No.4 – People

There are a lot of people connected to your practice but in relation to your marketing, we are specifically interested in the people responsible for delivering the patient services. This is not anybody who's behind the scenes that nobody ever sees like your accountant but the people who are responsible for delivering the patient experience we have been talking about.

So, that’s you, other practitioners, clinical support, and admin support staff. Anyone who is patient facing.

Having the right people in your practice is so important. You can have the best systems in the world in place but if the people in your team and not onboard with your vision and what you want to create in your practice you will never get there.

 

In his fantastic book “Good to Great” James Collins develops the idea that the business is like a bus. He goes on to explain that when it comes to the people on the bus . . .

 

“ . .trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time… if you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. . . . .if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes.”

 

He goes on to say that most of the great business leaders he has worked with or observed . . .

“first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and then the right people in the right seats”

 

What he means by that is have you got people in your business, in your practice that get your vision that feel genuinely aligned to the values you have embedded in your business and can see where you’re taking it, and are excited about going on that journey with you on that bus?

Because it’s not until you are in that position that the members of your team will be delivering the best possible experience for your patients.
Disgruntled or unsettled team members can very easily start to rock the boat, pull the practice in a direction you don’t want it to go, and even start to develop a toxic environment, which patients are going to pick up on.

 

So step one of People is getting the right people onto your bus.

 

So have you got the right people on the bus and have you got them in the right seat on the bus?

Step two is making the most of the assets and skills that they bring to the business. Are they in a seat on the bus that lets them play to their strengths?

Are you utilising their skills, interests, their natural abilities to the benefit of the patients and the practice?

So, once you’ve got the right people in the right seat, they need to be given opportunities and invested in so that they have all the clinical skills they need, and they understand marketing, and customer service as well as the systems and processes in your business to deliver the best possible service.

Investing in the right people will also make them feel valued and part of the dream, and the future of the practice. They will also be able to see clear career progression which is a great part of retaining your best talent. Once they are so invested in you and what you are doing, they are going to hands down deliver the best patient experience possible.

Investing in your people is investing in your business because those people are becoming assets. They are both a linchpin in the experience that your patients are going to receive as well as in the success of the practice.

 

If They are Not Employees

Sometimes there are difficulties because you don't own those people. If your practice is located in another healthcare facility like a private hospital or general practice, the reception team may have nothing to do with your business, so having an influence over how they interact with patients, and the systems they use can be tricky, but you need to acknowledge that and do the best that you can with what you have in those situations.

 

Trusting and Letting Go

The other thing to maximise the impact of people in your team is to work hard to enable them, rather than control them. If your team is well trained and they really understand what you are all working to achieve then you should be able to trust them to be autonomous and do their job to the best of their ability, within the parameters laid down in the practice, without you micromanaging everything they do.

Empowering your team is such a gift. For them (because they feel trusted and empowered), you (because you have less stuff to think about), and the patients (because they receive the best possible service). It’s a cliché but it really is a win, win, win.

A great example is, imagine you are running late, and you've kept a patient waiting, and now they're running desperately late. Is your reception team enabled to book a taxi for that person (at the practice’s expense) to get them more quickly to their next appointment? Or if someone lets you know that another patient is really sick, are your staff empowered to take it on themselves to write a card from the team to send to the patient or to get a bunch of flowers delivered on your behalf?

Empowering them to be the best version of themselves inside your business is how you make the most of having them in your business.

Having a conversation that goes something like

“I trust you, you get who I am. You get the values by which we operate. You understand the vision that we've got for the business, I trust you and I want to enable you to take these kinds of decisions without referring to me"

Give them free rein to make great customer service decisions. After all, they are in the best place to do that.

 

Difficult Conversations

Sometimes you will need to have a very difficult conversation because sometimes people don't act in the right way, don't say the right things, or stick to the systems. So sometimes you have to have difficult conversations with team members to either get them back on the bus and going in the right direction or to introduce the idea that actually they're probably on the wrong bus and, they would be better suited working elsewhere.

 

Interestingly in many practices, I have worked with the team members not suited to being on the new bus (when a practice is changing and going in a slightly different direction) often deselect themselves and leave of their own accord, but often not until there have been a few difficult conversations.

But this is all part of the process of getting things right in your practice.

 

P No.5 – Processes

Your business will be full of all kinds of different processes, but here, we are specifically talking about the processes that pertain to the experience your patients have. The processes within the business that your patients are part of. From your initial inquiry process, your appointment booking process, or your canceling, and rebooking processes through to the attending for a first appointment process.

What do you do the first time somebody comes into your practice? Do you have a documented and trained meet and greet process? If not, you need one. Firstly, to ensure a quality experience but also to create consistency for every new patient coming for the first time.

Next, there is your consultation process. The process you take every new or returning patient through when they come into your treatment room. Your history taking, assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning system, and so on. I’m sure you get the idea.

 

Every process needs to be documented to ensure quality and consistency across every patient interaction in the clinic.

These processes need to be simple, and the language needs to be non-technical non-jargony. If the process requires the patient to do something, those processes need to be clearly communicated and very straightforward to achieve. So, you need to be thinking, “have I got a video that explains this? Have I got a written document that explains this? Have I got an audio file that somebody can just download that will explain this”. People like to be communicated to in different ways, so enable that process, make it easy for people to learn these processes and understand what they need to do to book their next appointment or get their next supply of drugs or whatever it might be.

Hopefully, you can see that your processes dictate what your patients experience and that the experience is so positive that by the end of all of this, they go away thrilled to be your patient and they become huge advocates for the practice.

 

In short, they become your marketing team. They become the people who become evangelical at dinner parties or when they see friends, saying, oh, you must go and see Dr. so-and-so because they are awesome at the thing that they do.

You are not going to achieve that if you don't think of all these little details in that patient experience and these processes that you expect your patients to go through.

 

P No.6 - Promotion

This is the one that everybody thinks of as marketing often at the exclusion of all the other things we have already covered. What I mean by promotion is all those activities that you do to educate people about what it is you do and how you can help. The activity that builds your presence on and offline and helps you become famous locally for the thing you do.

On top of that, it’s also the activities you do to build relationships with those people who have entered your world. In other words your internal promotional marketing.

In a nutshell, it's educating people about what you do and how you can help, and then nurturing relationships with people who start to connect with you

So your online promotional marketing includes things like your website, blogs, videos, social media profiles, your Google Business Profile, and any email marketing and advertising. There is so much from a promotion perspective that you can do online nowadays, and that has huge, huge power.

 

My Top Tip

If you only do one thing from this whole blog post about all of the 7 P's of marketing, claim your Google Business Profile. As an existing practice, there will probably already be a Google Business Profile on Google Maps for you and your practice. If there is, you need to claim it, and you need to start using it. If there isn’t one you need to create one. Head over here to get started.

 

 You need to develop a promotional marketing strategy so that you have a structured process of tried and tested systems and tactics instead of throwing time, money, and energy at random promotional activities that you have no clue will work and move you towards your goals.

Only really get stuck into your promotional marketing once you know what you're trying to achieve, who it is you're trying to target, how you’re going to target them, and what platforms you're going to use to reach them. Get clear on your objectives before you dive all in.

 

So, there are lots you can do with your online promotional marketing but then you've got offline promotion too. Offline promotion includes things like your business cards, and leaflets, presenting at conferences, and running workshops presenting health education sessions at local schools. You can also look at the front of your premises and how that could be helping you promote your practice, as well as taking time to establish relationships with other healthcare practitioners and local business owners who could become great referrers to your practice.

 

Hopefully from that brief overview, you can see that promotional marketing, is only one of the 7 P's of marketing, and yet it’s the one area that nearly every healthcare practice hangs their marketing hat on and spends so much time and energy focused on when all the other things are so important as well.

Hopefully, you're starting to see how this marketing jigsaw comes together and how all these things interrelate, but also how each one of them is an important part of the overall subject of marketing.

 

P No. 7 - Proof

Nowadays many people are booking their first appointments blind having never met the practitioners they are looking to see. But before people book most will do some form of due diligence, checking you out to see if you are who you say you are and that you can do what you say you can.

An important part of the “homework” is looking for evidence that it isn’t just you saying you can provide the transformation that you say that you can. This evidence comes in lots of different forms.

Evidence can come in the form:

• Showcasing facilities and technical equipment that you use
• Before and after images or videos of your patients’ transformations
• Case studies that tell the full story of a patient’s problems and their road to recovery
• Patient testimonials (when you ask patients to write or say a bit on video about their experience of being your patient)
• Online reviews (the stars and write ups on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Yell)
• Business awards
• Professional articles you’ve written

 

All these things provide evidence that you are a trustworthy practice with real credibility which help potential patients make their buying decisions.

 

Now, you will have noticed, that there is one thing I have not mentioned in all of this, and that’s your qualifications. Your qualifications although hard earned, sadly come right at the bottom of the list. There's a, a phrase in healthcare marketing that goes . . .

“People don't care what you know until they know that you care.”

 

People do not care about your qualifications until they know that you’re a genuine, caring, friendly person that people other than you are endorsing. They want to make that human connection first before they worry about what letters you've got after your name. So, when, when we're talking about providing evidence, your certification, qualifications, and CPD is part of that evidence trail, but be under no illusion, it is only a very small part of that evidence trail that people are looking for.

Include pictures of certificates on your wall and talk about going to CPD events but don't make it the main thing you talk about. Potential patients are much more interested in getting to know you and deciding if they like you as a person and trust you clinically because you’re providing evidence from other people before they are contemplating the qualifications that you have.

 

Hopefully from all of those 7 P’s of marketing, there is something that you have learned about marketing, something that gives you a different perspective and helps you strengthen your marketing activity.

Thank you soooo much for taking the time to stop by our Practice Momentum blog today.
I really hope you found value in spending some time here today.

 

I’d be so grateful if you could spare me just another few minutes (please say yes) to share your thoughts and anything that struck a chord with you from this blog. Just type straight in the box at the end of this page. I’d love to hear from you.

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Until next time.