Marketing Focus
By Stacy M. Menz, PT, DPT
This month is all about marketing.
I’ll be honest—I read and reread these articles hoping to take in all the nuggets I could. We have been building our marketing plan over the last two and a half years and always look for tips and tricks, as well as how to capture data on results. The data part is what I find the hardest. I felt better about this during a marketing talk at the Women In PT conference last fall, when we were told that capturing marketing data is like capturing fog. But even capturing a little bit of fog is better than no fog! Luckily for me, and you, this month’s Impact includes great articles on how to capture data that will help you assess your marketing. I will definitely make sure my clinic is tracking those numbers.
In addition to tracking marketing, this month’s authors discuss how to use social media. I get the sense that people tend to have a love/hate relationship with social media. It can be time consuming, and may be harder to measure your return on investment (ROI), but there is a pressure to maintain an online presence on the various platforms that are out there. I think what can be helpful is to follow Michelle Collie’s advice in this month’s marketing column and figure out who your ideal target customer is. This will help you get started with what is best to post and on which platforms. And you don’t have to do it all at once! I have found that keeping a planning spreadsheet for each month, adding to it as ideas pop up, and then scheduling out our posts helps me to maintain consistency in tone and approach as well as timing on each of the platforms.
One marketing concept that we’ve been doing lately is marketing to referral sources. We are slowly refining our plan and gathering data consistently about who refers to us and what pediatricians our clients see so that we can expand our primary referral source list. Since this is new to us, issues like this one are really helpful for my business.
I just spent a bit of time relaying why this issue was so useful to me and my business, but really I hope that you find it just as helpful! I’d love to hear which pieces of advice you found beneficial, as well as what you would like to know more about. I look forward to hearing from you!
