Marketing For Physicians

 

Do physicians need marketing?

Just as most people don’t know the difference between a splenectomy and a splenotomy, many physicians don’t know the difference between advertising, marketing and public relations. You either have other people doing it for you or you aren’t doing it at all (if you had us doing it, you’d have a guarantee, but more on that later).

Here’s a quick way to get the difference:

Advertising is paying for placement in media. You control the message and the timing. Not many doctors feel comfortable advertising. And I think that’s a wise thing—for doctors. Car dealers, have at it. Most physicians should probably avoid advertising, just as they would not start conversations by saying, “Hi, I’m a great doctor. Really, a great, great doctor.”

Marketing is getting your message out to your target audience either through advertising, non-paid means or a combination of both. Non-paid means include a newspaper story, a TV report, a website visit, and a glowing (one hopes) review on Yelp or Facebook.

Public relations (PR) is the discipline of obtaining those non-paid means of getting your message out. A successful public relations effort might prompt a website visitor to book an appointment with you, or get a reporter to write a story about something genuinely interesting that you are doing.

Branding is communicating the distinctions of your services and is the result of any of the above, or more likely a combination of them.

I think the primary reason physicians don’t engage in more marketing and public relations is because they don’t know what the return on their investment will be. And that’s fair, just as I would want to know my chances of having a successful splenectomy.

Public relations professionals don’t even know what PR is worth. But they’ve been trying to come up with a formula, as espoused by the 2010 Barcelona Principles.

Point is, public relations and marketing are not easy to measure. One of the main thrusts of the Barcelona Principles is that they need to concentrate on measurements, which probably sounds like a fine idea to a doctor.

There’s no dearth of theories, like Advertising Value Equivalences and formulas that claim a news article is worth three times what a like-sized advertisement would cost. The PR pros at Barcelona reject those. So do we– they just don’t add up.

We have our own metric for marketing and public relations. We’re so sure of our methods that Vanguard guarantees practice growth in the first year a specialty medical practice hires us to do its public relations and website.

You can take that to the bank—in Barcelona, if you like.