You own a small practice. You know you are supposed to be marketing. You know that it could help your clinic grow, but like most small business owners, you aren’t exactly sure what the best and most effective strategies are for marketing your practice. Also, like most small businesses, I’m sure you have even deployed a few marketing tactics here and there. You probably have read a few articles on what your business should be doing to grow, and even done a few of the things on the list, but haven’t really seen much of a difference in your schedule. The problem is not with your clinic, or the services you offer, but in the way you are marketing your practice. The DIY approach to marketing is not working and probably will continue to not work and here’s why:
#1 You’re too close to the situation.
As a business owner, you spend countless hours creating and building a business, often pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into it. This passion has fueled your business to where it is currently at and will continue to be the driving force in building your business; it can also be a disservice to the overall growth of your business, because decisions tend to be made from an emotionally-charged standpoint, instead of what might be best for the business from a marketing perspective. Your business is an extension of yourself, and sometimes the lines are blurred to where you end and your business begins. It can make seeing what is right in front of you hard to see.
Allowing an outside perspective to help you with your marketing ensures that you will be able to connect with your ideal clients, giving them what is best for them and not for what you think is best for them.
#2 You didn’t go to school to be a marketer.
You went to years of school to be trained in your area of expertise and have spent countless more treating clients and increasing your knowledge in that area. You are the expert in that field, but understanding the best ways to market your business is not in your wheelhouse and that’s okay. With our training and years of experience in marketing, we have successfully helped practices, like yours, grow.
Sure, you could learn to market your practice. All the skills and knowledge to become a successful marketer is on the internet, but where does that leave the rest of your business? Do you stop seeing clients, the reason you went into the field in the first place? Do you take the time to learn this outside of working with clients and running a business? Only you can answer this question for you and your practice, but if helping people was the reason you went into this field, where is your expertise best served?
#3 You don’t have time to dedicate to marketing your business.
As a practice owner, you wear many hats. Accountant, customer service representative, human resource manager, and landlord are probably just a few to name. Running a clinic takes countless additional hours outside of actually seeing clients.
The problem is marketing your business takes a lot of time. Making a consistent and calculated effort requires time each day to create, engage, strategize, and build a strong marketing campaign. Doing this day in and day out is rigorous to say the least and could leave you feeling spread pretty thin, possibly leading to burnout.
Teaming up with a marketing expert, leaves you more time to create, develop, and train a healthy in-office culture that will better serve your staff and clients.
#4 You get too technical when talking about your area of expertise, curse of knowledge.
Being an expert in your field allows you to effectively treat clients. You draw from that knowledge day in and day out to solve and alleviate your clients’ concerns. They find solace and trust in knowing that you’re the expert. This is exactly why they have come to you. The problem is sometimes when one has a wealth of knowledge in a particular area, they tend to overwhelm others when talking about it, which includes the way they talk about their business and services in their marketing. They get too technical, using terms and jargon that their clients are not familiar with. They suffer from what is known as the curse of knowledge, meaning because they have an expert level of knowledge, and they are no longer familiar with what the average person would know and understand about their area of expertise. When marketing their business, they tend to talk about their business like they are writing a thesis or white paper rather than explaining in simple terms what services are offered, how this will improve the client’s life, and the steps that need to be taken to start working together.
#5 You don’t have the resources to properly market your business
Most businesses have attempted some kind of marketing and afterward felt like it was a waste of their time and money. The problem is that they did not have the proper tools to help them create content and then gauge that it was working properly. Marketing can be expensive and we are not just talking about the expense of running ads on Google or Facebook. Having the necessary tools to ensure that your marketing is reaching the right people and not wasting money, takes additional resources such as SEMRush for SEO and Canva or Adobe for creating graphics are just to name a few.
The Good News
The good news is we can help you with all of this. We walk our clients through a step-by-step process to help their businesses grow intelligently and methodically. This ensures that the cart is not put before the horse and that their marketing is built on a solid foundation that starts with core messaging and then extends to all their marketing efforts. This holistic approach to marketing ensures that money is not wasted on fruitless marketing attempts and that their efforts are compounded, creating real growth for their business.