BLOG: Leverage your 2021 marketing plan with the 7R strategy
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In my last post, I offered a different approach on developing a marketing plan, one more concentrated on premium services and sources of revenue that can help bolster your practice’s resilience, particularly during difficult times.
Although not a “must do,” your marketing plan should be driven by your practice’s strategic plan: Where do you want to be next year? X years from now? What revenue model? How big a practice? How many locations? You know the drill.
If you want a nice overview of developing a strategic practice plan, check out John Pinto’s multipart blog series.
The premise is that you should allocate budget to specific service lines — general ophthalmology (branding), premium cataract, refractive, aesthetics, optical, dry eye and hearing — and, as best as you can, track every dollar spent on marketing those services across the various expense categories used by your marketing department. Sometimes called “channels,” these include traditional broadcast media (TV, radio, newspapers, periodicals), social advertising, search advertising, email, SMS, direct mail and others.
The most trackable spending is done by using direct response marketing messages as opposed to branding. Branding tries to establish name and perhaps patient experience awareness (“Serving our community since 1950”), whereas direct response asks for an action on the part of the audience (“Download ‘How to pick a LASIK surgeon’ report now”). Direct response marketing has these rules:
always have an offer;
always have a call to action; and
always collect the prospect’s information.
Next, we calculate how much revenue those marketing dollars produced. Then we can increase the budget allocation for a service line per an agreed-upon formula. If we know, for example, that we spent $3,000 on a LASIK website funnel campaign and it generated $15,000 of revenue, then we might feel comfortable “risking” $6,000 of that on that same campaign, knowing that it produced a 5:1 return on investment (ROI).
Additionally, your marketing plan should be strategic as well. Always know why you are doing what you are doing. In order to help guide you on this, I propose following the 7R marketing strategy from my book The Ultimate Ophthalmic Marketing Guide.
Every premium service expense (channel) can have a portfolio of campaigns tied to one or more of these strategic marketing results. Each can have a desired goal (for example, four five-star reviews per doctor per month) or key performance indicator (average cost per lead). If your process is “intelligent” enough, each channel will be trackable from end to end so your campaigns even have ROI calculations.
The 7R marketing strategy
Reputation. The foundation of your marketing efforts, your practice’s reputation should not only be built and nurtured, but also marketed.
Reviews. Reviews are needed by physicians in addition to your practice reputation. These should also be managed and marketed.
Retain. The lowest of the low-hanging fruit, retention of existing patients, is often overlooked. It looks like authentic communications on topics each of your patient segments finds important. The days of a Christmas card or a Black Friday sale as your outbound effort to retain established patients are over.
Resell. The best time to “sell” a prospect is when they have just bought; if patients aren’t aware of the other services your practice provides, they will seek them elsewhere. Find ways to open a new conversation about premium or ancillary services beyond only offering information when they directly ask. Look at your messaging strategy for the various cohorts under your care and crosswalk services that deserve a resell effort (presbyopia and facial refresh, LASIK and dry eye, etc).
Reactivate. Another neglected group is patients who forgot to return for an annual visit, and it’s easy and inexpensive to bring them back into the fold.
Recruit. Marketing for new patients is what most practices seek and what most agencies sell you; it’s also the most expensive marketing. It’s often done in a one-off campaign that more resembles a stab in the dark than a marketing process. Your patient recruiting strategy should consider various levels of buying readiness as well as the ways new patients decide on who to call based on their demographics and psychographics.
Refer. Word of mouth, the pinnacle of marketing success. Referrals let your satisfied patients do a lot of marketing for you, but they won’t do so unless they are asked and asked in the right way.
As you’ll see in subsequent posts, some of these 7R strategies lend themselves to certain kinds of premium services, demographics or campaigns. But if you begin by mapping marketing spending and marketing projects to these seven marketing goals, you can leverage every one of your marketing efforts more effectively than just having a calendar showing a monthly budget with planned vs. actual spending totals across a list of marketing channels not mapped to any result or any premium service. Using this methodology, results can be measured in return on marketing investment and not merely the thorough spending of the annual marketing budget.
This link takes you to a 7R marketing tool.
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