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

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Electronic Marketing for Naturopathic Physicians, Part Four

Using the POWER OF MEDIA to Your Advantage

By Dicken Weatherby, ND

In the first three articles in this series, I covered two of the three all-important M's: your message and your market. Now, it's time to delve into the third M: media.

By media, I mean the avenues for your marketing; i.e., where you decide to place your message. Examples include print ads, the Internet and radio commercials.
Learning the Hard Way
When I first started as a practicing naturopath, I thought I could skip over the whole marketing thing. Just before I graduated from NCNM, I was asked to join a well-established naturopathic practice as a junior doctor. This doctor had more than 50 patients ready to come see me, so I was off and running as soon as I walked in the door. I felt extremely fortunate and assumed that the need for marketing wouldn't arise – thank goodness, as I didn't like the idea of selling myself. Plus, I'd just spent six years cramming my brain full of new things, and it seemed a lot to ask of me to have to learn the complex world of marketing on top of everything else.
Things were going fine until the doctor whose practice I'd joined suddenly decided to move away. He offered to sell me his practice. I considered it, but soon realized I wasn't ready to go into considerable debt and pilot a big practice on my own. I'd joined the practice to get a mentor and guidance, not to sail the ship on my own after three months of apprenticeship. So, I declined the offer of the practice and decided to set up a new practice with a different doctor. This doctor also had considerable experience, but she was new to the area and didn't have a big patient base. I couldn't bring my patient lists with me since I hadn't bought the practice from my original mentor. Thus, this new doctor and I had to market our practice from scratch.
I learned a lot by making mistakes. I've already discussed some of my initial resistance to marketing and my misconceptions about my message and my market. Another part of the learning curve involved media choices. I hoped I could get by with a Yellow Pages ad and lovely-looking business cards to hand out when I got up the nerve. When not much happened, I did a lecture series at a local food co-op and waited for the calls to come pouring in. I got some patients, and word-of-mouth referrals from them helped, but the practice limped along anemically for months. This didn't help my confidence as a practitioner (or help pay off my student loans). Looking back, I realize my lack of success had little to do with my naturopathic skills. It was a failure to market myself successfully. And a big part of that was thinking I could choose a few media venues and rely on them to bring in enough business.
Media Choices: The Sky's the Limit
There are scores and scores of media choices to consider: everything from the more common options, such as Yellow Pages ads and direct-mail brochures, to telemarketing, e-mails, billboards, car window signs, all the way to less common options – skywriting, custom-printed chocolate bar wrappers, etc. There are thousands of approaches. The main thing to remember is that none is intrinsically better than the others. The most important things to keep in mind are that you must find what fits your unique situation best and that for the most part, the more approaches you have, the better. The general rule is to use more than one or two forms of media. Many alternative practitioners (myself included, at least in my early years) overly rely on one form of media, such as the Yellow Pages. This can limit your exposure, because there are plenty of potential patients/clients who don't use the Yellow Pages. Also, research has shown that many people need to see or hear your ad three times or more before they'll register your name and make contact, so getting it out there in more than one place really increases the chances that someone will see your name multiple times and remember it when they need your services.
Consider Your Target Market
When considering your media options, it's important to ask yourself what your target audience pays attention to, because as I've said before, marketing is really another word for communication. And what we want to do is communicate what we do and what we offer to people who are potentially interested. If you're a nutrition expert and find that many of your patients are weightlifters, then advertising in a gym's monthly newsletter could be an excellent strategy. But advertising in a retiree community newsletter may not be your best bet, although it could be for someone who is a geriatric specialist. So pay attention to who your ideal patients/clients are, and choose media they are likely to come across.
Applying This to Internet Marketing
From this point on, I'm going to leave the other types of media marketing alone and concentrate on my specialty, Internet marketing. (There is plenty of information out there on the other types of media marketing, if you spend a little time doing research. For example, check out my marketing mentor's Web site, www.dankennedy.com.) For alternative health practitioners, there are three basic options when it comes to Web marketing:

Market online for an offline business.
Sell your services online.
Develop a line of information products.

OPTIONS 1 and 2: Selling Your Practice or Services
One of the things you can use the Web for is to drive prospective clients and patients to your clinic. This is basically online marketing for offline businesses. The other thing you do with the Web is market your consulting practice. This could be either an offline or an online consultative practice. Many clinicians are able to earn good income consulting with patients and/or doctors via phone or e-mail. Either option almost invariably requires a good online marketing plan.
OPTION 3: What to Consider if You're Developing a Line of Information Products
Many of you have ideas and information gathered from years of experience, study and research. These days, it's easier than ever to get these ideas into marketable products and distribute them, far and wide, using the Internet. It can take quite a bit of front-end time and effort, but once you have everything in place, a little maintenance can keep your products selling, making money and getting your personal tools out into the world for years. I sell books, e-books, audio CDs of recorded lectures, medical-exam pocket guides and other diagnostic material from my Web site. I also have a side business as the Web designer and Internet marketing director for a small company that sells information products and building products, specializing in straw bale building (www.strawbale.com). It's very nice to be able to go away for a few days and come back to find that orders have been made. In other words, I've been making money while I've been gone. It makes me less dependent on my hourly earnings. It also means my work is getting out to a wider audience, which is gratifying.
Many people come to me lacking the confidence to develop their own products, but I find that with a little coaching, most of them come up with excellent ideas and have all the passion they need to get the project rolling. It's worth getting over your resistance to this, believe me. The rewards, personal and monetary, can be huge.
In my next article, I'll introduce my three-pronged approach to effective Internet marketing.

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.