Below are the fundamental steps required for the scientific method of basic medical research. Virtually anyone who has studied science or medicine is familiar with this process and yet very few recognize its application when marketing their medical practice.

– Ask a Question
- Do Background Research
- Construct a Hypothesis
- Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
- Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
- Communicate Your Results

Let’s try to apply it to marketing here:

Ask a question:  How can I increase my preferred patient volume into my medical practice?

Do background research:  How do other successful practices do this?  What are they doing that we are not?  What type of preferred patients do I want to recruit?  Does increased volume affect my bottom line or is it lost in the mix of a complex medical practice?

Construct a hypothesis:  We propose that a marketing campaign composed of direct marketing, advertising, and symptom-specific mailers will have a positive impact of a 20% increase of referrals for patients with X disease and Y insurance.

Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment:  The practice begins a limited six-month experiment combining:

1. A monthly mass mailing campaign composed of six different letters discussing common symptoms related to my specialty all aimed at the same targeted group in the same zip code in an area recognized as high income, well-insured patients of a certain age and demographic.
2. A small quarter page, 3-color ad, detailing our practice with our website and contact information in bold print, published in our locally-focused upscale magazine.
3. A part-time practice liaison is hired to meet with PCPs and other targeted referral physicians in an effort to communicate the capabilities of the practice while building relationships and gaining important objective feedback on the practice.

Don’t forget to collect the data!  Work with your staff to poll every patient who calls or schedules an appointment to find out who referred them or how they heard of the practice. (This is the weakest link in most practices.  Make sure that your staff is on board and understands the critical importance of tracking your results!)

Analyze your data and draw a conclusion: At the end of six months, compile your results for the campaign overall as well as each component of the campaign, i.e., mailings, ads, and direct marketing, to determine which of these tools yielded the highest return on your marketing investment dollars.

Did you meet your goal?  Great!  Did you fall short? Why?  Either way you’ll want to analyze the results of each component of the campaign to see which you should use in future efforts.  Poor performing components should be abandoned in favor of newer ones, which are then combined with your proven component in future campaigns!

Communicate your results:  Tell your staff and your associates about the winning component of each campaign so that they can reinforce it and support these efforts in future campaigns.

Marketing is very similar to the scientific method.  The key is to try a campaign, measure it, track it, and adjust it as needed according to your goals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 2:52 pm and is filed under All Posts, Marketing Ideas, Referral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.