naturopathydigest.com -- Electronic Marketing for Naturopathic Physicians, Part Three

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Electronic Marketing for Naturopathic Physicians, Part Three

How to Know Your Market

By Dicken Weatherby, ND

I had a doctor call me last year to consult with me about marketing. He was a successful marketer; however, one small gap in his knowledge got him into trouble – not knowing his market.

You see, he had worked for more than 10 years in a large Northwest city. He had a great message and never had any trouble getting as many new patients as he needed. The thing is that he and his family recently had moved to a small community about an hour's drive from the city. He knew it would take quite awhile to build up a new practice in his town, so he committed to commuting back to his original practice for a week every month for a couple of years while starting the new one. Meanwhile, he applied his usual marketing strategy to his new practice: a Yellow Page ad along with print and radio campaigns. He figured his advertisements represented him well enough that they would work anywhere in the world. An easy assumption to make. The trouble is, he didn't stop to think about his new market.
You Need to Know Your Market
Most practitioners spend their marketing energy thinking about what they do, what they offer and what their message is. These are all-important considerations, but if you don't think about your target audience at all, you can waste a lot of time, money and energy. You can love your message (and you should), but it's just as important that your audience loves it. The good news about finding your market is that you don't need to hire anyone to do it for you. You just have to consider the right questions. When you create a marketing campaign, make sure you ask yourself these questions:

Whom do you hope responds?
Who is your ideal customer?
Who are your current customers?

When looking for your target market, your own experience is key. Think about working with the patients you have. Look for trends. Is there a type of patient you especially enjoy working with? Is there a type that has more success with you? Do you find you work best with patients who have advanced cancer? Are you more successful with patients who are already following healthy lifestyles? Are you especially able to connect with elderly patients, or maybe gifted with children? Do pregnant mothers seek you out and find success? As you can imagine, knowing the answers to these questions would call for much more specialized marketing. If you happen to cater to body builders, there are specific Web sites, magazines and gyms in which to advertise. If you're a pregnancy or infant specialist, you would consider birth centers, midwives, magazines and Web sites that cater to this population.
You Already Have the Answers
I asked a naturopathic doctor recently, "So, what kind of people make up your client base?" She answered, "Oh, I get them from all walks of life." I asked her to look at her patient database more carefully and to really study them. She came back a week later and said, "I did what you said and was amazed to find that 80 percent of my patients are middle-aged, well-paid women who live in a specific area of the city. And I noticed that most of them mentioned yoga on the intake form, which asks about exercise."
This information, readily available to most of you if you pay attention to it, is gold. Instead of advertising to a whole city of people, this naturopath can narrow her focus to a much smaller target group. She can advertise her practice in specific places, like gyms that offer yoga classes; or use Web marketing that takes advantage of factors such as zip code.
Look in your patient records and see who sticks with treatment. It might surprise you. I used to steer my marketing toward a certain type of patient, the high-functioning professional type, but when I actually looked in my files, I found it was retired, sicker people who actually ended up being my most rewarding patients. This surprised me, and I realized how little I really knew my own practice. So, sometimes our own preferences or assumptions about patients aren't actually accurate. Get the facts; don't just trust your hunches.
Once you know whom you like to work with and more importantly, whom you have the most success with, you can tailor your message and deliver it to the right audience.
New Territory
If you don't have a client base yet, either because you are just starting out or because you've moved, the thing to do is to discover your market by looking around you. In the case of the big-city doctor who moved to the small community, he made the mistake of not considering the importance of knowing his market. When I pointed out that his new community was nothing like his old one, he said, "You're right. Maybe this is the wrong place to be trying to do what I do. It's much too small."
I told him that wasn't necessarily true; it was probably more a case of him not communicating his message specifically to his new community. I coached him to get out there and find out who lived in his town. Walk or drive around; use your eyes to gather information on what people are like in the neighborhoods. Go to open mics, school plays, libraries, civic meetings. Read the local papers; be extra friendly with check-out clerks.
It didn't take him long to get a feel for the place. What he found was that there were two main populations: retirees and young professionals who commuted to work in the city. His old marketing material targeted professionals, but we figured that with most of them in the city five full days a week, plus hours of commute time, few of them had a chance to get to his Monday through Thursday office hours. So, he changed his schedule to include a Saturday. He also highlighted the geriatric medicine side of his training and experience in his marketing material to include the retiree part of his new market. And he started some basic Internet marketing, which can be very effective if you have a small target location. He e-mailed me about a month ago to report that his practice was building slowly but surely.
Save Your Resources by Knowing Your Market
I used to think of everyone in the world as a potential patient, because I believe everyone in the world can benefit from naturopathic medicine. There's nothing wrong with a little wishful, idealistic thinking. But when it comes to marketing, it's important to remember that every product and every service actually appeals to, or has the potential to appeal to, a very specific group of people. These can be sorted by geographics, demographics or affinities/associations. Once you narrow them down, you can easily get your message to them without wasting your time and money. Your marketing becomes a much more effective and efficient system of communication.
In my next article, I'll explain where to go from here – i.e., what media to use once you know your message and your market.

About the Author: Dr. Dicken Weatherby is a naturopathic physician based in Southern Oregon. A graduate of NCNM, Dicken is co-author of the best-selling book Blood Chemistry and CBC Analysis – Clinical Laboratory Testing From a Functional Perspective. He is involved in research, writing and consulting, with a particular emphasis on teaching Web marketing to health practitioners.