20 Must Do Marketing Techniques

  While repletion and communication may be the cornerstones of effective marketing; it is the use of relevant, focused data that relates to specific target markets that provides results. The following are 20 tips for your clinic in the area of marketing.

  1. There are literally thousands of giveaways that will help referring practitioners with name recognition and contact information.

  2. Answer these questions: What do referring physicians remember about a clinic or its services? Do they remember the case study information and clinic services?

  3. For most wound clinics and wound specialists, marketing budgets tend to be relatively small. Billboards, radio spots, newspaper ads, and television spots do not typically fall within the allotted dollar amounts for the budget.

  4. To focus a large portion of the budget on giveaways is not practical.

  5. Direct-to-physician marketing provides the largest number of patient referrals for the wound care specialty.

  6. The greatest challenge is the retention of referring physicians. This becomes crucial as the specialty of wound care takes a larger presence in most communities.

  7. Competition for patients and physicians is more difficult with the number of facilities and physicians increasing. Focusing resources in this area will allow your marketing dollars to stretch further.

  8. An established open line of communication between the referring physician and the clinic allows an increased level of trust from both sides. This flow of information removes one of the largest barriers that prohibit physicians from referring patients to a wound clinic—the fear that the patients will leave and go elsewhere.

  9. If the lines of communication are flowing openly, the referring physician will feel confident that they will retain the patient in addition to the patient receiving a higher quality of care.

  10. Each referring physician should receive standard pieces of information from the clinic. These include wound healing progress that contain pictures of the wound at different stages of healing, types of treatments being used to heal the wound, and patient compliance.

  11. It is important to communicate patient compliance to a new referring physician or a physician that rarely refers. If not, the clinic could lose credibility if the proper documentation has not been provided.

  12. It is not enough to rely on copying the physicians alone. It is best to set up an office policy so that referring physicians will receive their patient’s information.

  13. Some physicians may want a different frequency of reports. It is always recommended to discuss this with the referring physician and include it in the patient’s profile.

  14. The marketing of a center is the collaborative effort of several individuals including the clinical director, physicians, nurse managers, and office support. Each has his or her own areas of expertise so for the sake of the center; it is best to play on the strengths of each professional.

  15. The clinical director and/or nurse managers are best at building a rapport with the office and nursing staff at the clinic.

  16. It is always beneficial for these individuals to begin to develop the physician relationship, but at some point it is recommended to involve one of the physicians from the wound clinic.

  17. Once a new relationship has been established with a potential referring physician, it is time to introduce the information that will establish the wound center’s position as an expert in the community.

  18. Generating case study information from the wound center with the help of the EMR serves as a powerful tool when presenting clinic credibility. This shows successful wound cases that have been healed by the center and allows the presenter to introduce advanced modalities.

  19. The two largest advantages that specialized wound centers have over traditional physician practices are that the centers focus only on wound healing and they carry advanced wound healing products.

  20. The more the advantages for the physician referring to the wound clinic are discussed and expanded on, the more likely a comfort zone will be established, allowing the referral process to begin.