Smart medical marketing involves knowing what works and doesn’t work. It means not being afraid to try new things to generate patients. It is measuring the return on investment (ROI) of every aspect of your strategy. It means stopping something that is not generating new patients. Yet busy medical practices often fall short in truly understanding what is working and what is not in their marketing strategy.

To successfully market a medical practice, a variety of factors must be in place. One of the most important is defining your market. It is important to define who your target audience is – your ideal patient.

Once you have your target audience determined, you can then dive deeper and determine the demographic information related to this audience (i.e.: age, lifestyle, income level). All the research in the world cannot compare to knowing what is driving each lead to contact your practice. If you are going to invest in a marketing strategy, even one as simple as having a yellow page ad, it is vital to track where each lead is coming from. Having this information allows you to measure what is working versus what is not.

There are several ways to measure the efficacy of a marketing strategy. One of the most simple and unfortunately least used is asking callers and patients what prompted them to contact your practice. As marketing consultants, we often hear how challenging this can be when your lead may have heard about you a variety of ways. What you want to know is what made them decide to call today? It is as simple as that. They may have heard your radio ad, saw your yellow page ad and passed your office on the way to work. The thing that actually made them select your practice were the reviews they read on the Internet. The Internet would then be your source.

Don’t be afraid to pry to find the true source of your marketing efforts. Your patients will be happy that you care and can appreciate your interest in knowing.