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Are you spending too much or too little on marketing? Part 4
To help make the need for marketing less of an emergency and more planned, it may help to install an early warning system in your practice.
One of many examples is this: Each month look forward 90 days out in the clinic and surgical schedule and plot the number of patient visits and surgical cases currently scheduled on a month-by-month graph. This forward-looking trend data will give you a little more time to react and may keep you from overshooting or undershooting what’s needed to keep the practice growing.
Of equal value, it will keep the doctors from panicking every time there’s a lull in the surgical schedule if they can see a repeating seasonal pattern each year.
Marketing, as a department within your practice and as a business discipline, is annoyingly resistant to cost-benefit analysis. The old saw is dead on: “I know that half of my marketing budget is wasted … I just don’t know which half.”
Experience has shown that we can perhaps decrease the “wasted” factor to 25% or less if we stick to activities shown empirically in other setting to work well. The premium you pay to be able to use syndicated marketing materials proven effective in other markets can be far less expensive than inventing the wheel yourself.