Marketing is the answer! Maybe not

Marketing will save your business! Do it now with us!

By Geoffrey Cooling

I received a circular the other day, I am a terrible signer up-er, I swear all you need to do is wave a mailing list sign up at me and I am in. Anyway, back to the point, the circular was aimed at hearing healthcare professionals and Practice owners in particular. Basically the premise was, your business is knackered, down the tubes we tell you, but our marketing advice will save your ass!

Marketing alone will not save your ass

I don’t doubt the veracity of the company, nor do I doubt that their advice may lead to a marketing campaign that delivers sales. In fact I believe that marketing, intelligent, strategic marketing will play a part in the ongoing health of your Practice. So what’s the gripe fatty?I hear Miller say. Its simply this, marketing alone is not going to save your ass and I think the belief that it will, hurts a Practice.

I see it many times, a Practice has a slow month, panic ensues and an advert is arranged. Said advert is often rushed, often has some special offer which reduces margin and often brings middling results. That type of marketing is of little use to your Practice and its sustainability. Marketing should be planned out in a twelve month structure. It should be designed to assist the reduction of seasonality in your cash flow. It should assist your bottom line, not hurt it through lower margins during busy times.

Your key focus should be Patient retention and customer referral 

The key thing that irritates me though is that everyone tends to focus on marketing. When the key to their survival and sustainability is often overlooked. Marketing is and should be a major concern for every Practice owner, but it should have slightly less focus than Patient retention and customer referral. Your key focus, with every other element being secondary, should be proper Practice management designed to deliver retention and referral.

Designing and implementing strategies that deliver retention and referral will pay off almost immediately. They pay off by ensuring that you take care of your Patients. That makes them happy, in fact if you do it right it will make them damned ecstatic. Ecstatic is what you want in your existing Patients. Because that is what will deliver sustainability to your Practice.



About Geoffrey Cooling



  1. Good article. Last minute ads are a gut reaction when the month is not going well. Branding your practice with a long term plan that creates awareness and educates your community is a better solution so that you can maintain a steady stream of patients rather than hoping a quick ad provides you with a shot of adrenaline to keep your heart going. Staying healthy to begin with is the better option, with an annual calendar so that you’re maintaining that stream of patients.

    As Geoff indicated, this is first and foremost accomplished by providing the best service possible, and THEN by making sure everybody knows about it.

  2. Right on Geoff! The best executed ads will still fail in the long run if the practice fails to deliver. It will always come down to the patient experience. A good ad can’t make up for a lousy experience. Happy patients = referrals.

  3. Great article! I get frustrated when I see so many practice owners trying to get new patients while virtually ignoring their existing patient base. They are wasting such a great opportunity spending so much time trying to convince strangers that they can help them when the practice owners have a list of people that already know how good they are.

Let me know what you think
