You love your practice and are passionate about providing great patient care. However, you have no time for the business and marketing side of it all. But not knowing any creative marketing strategies may leave you with no practice to enjoy.
In our previous blog, we talked about creative marketing strategies like patient education, which may add value to a patient’s overall experience. It also involves your staff engagement to be more receptive and empathic to your patients.
As part of a marketing strategy, you need to continually ask yourself: what exactly are you trying to develop in your practice?
Is it a culture of giving? Is it a culture of excellence? Or is it a culture of improvement and change?
Organizational culture is an essential tool for healthcare marketing. Defining your culture can help your organization move as a single unit with a shared mission to provide the best care to your patient. Luckily, your marketing strategies can be streamlined to promote this culture.
How Do You Define the Culture of Your Practice?
According to an article on health care quality, the following are some of the questions you can ask:
1. Does your organization encourage innovations or stick to traditions?
Asking this question can help in hiring the right staff to your practice. People who want to improve your systems continually will feel frustrated if your culture is traditional and would like to stick to the status quo.
On the other hand, people who like predictability could possibly resist all your efforts at organizational improvement. You might get resistance when introducing new ways of doing things to improve your systems and processes. Your efforts at social media marketing, or creating vlogs and podcasts could be met with indifference.
But if you define the culture at your practice from the beginning, everyone can get onboard with it, or at least determine if they are a good fit.
2. Does your practice encourage autonomy or centralized authority?
Establish your management style from the get-go.
If you prefer to micromanage your staff, you may want to hire those who are comfortable with that style. This way, you can avoid conflict and tension, which may get in the way of a pleasant patient experience. We know even today how word-of-mouth marketing can be helpful or detrimental to your practice.
3. Does your organization prefer a professional and formal atmosphere or a laidback family-oriented type of interaction between patients and staff?
Establish the kind of culture with which you are most comfortable. Mirror this in your marketing strategies, from the set-up of your waiting area to the newsletters you send to your patients.
This way, you keep the type of staff and patients who resonate with your culture. The positive atmosphere will reflect in the quality of service you provide. Hence, you will have higher chances of meeting your patients’ expectations.
4. Does your organization value outcomes or processes?
When you value outcomes, you want to check with your patients on how your practice made a difference in their daily lives. This may mean follow-up phone calls or emails from you or your staff. Such a strategy will reflect your caring culture.
On the other hand, when you value processes, you may want to know, through patient surveys and reviews about your patients’ experiences from scheduling to registration, the waiting time, the billing and payment. Constantly wanting to improve your processes will show your passion for a great patient experience.
5. Does your organization focus more on internal or external issues?
Sometimes having too much focus on a great patient experience may whiplash on your staff who may have to extend office hours to accommodate emergencies. Or too much focus on employee satisfaction may compromise meeting your patient’s needs.
It’s best to talk this out within the organization and be consistent with the kind of culture you want to establish. This way you attract the kind of staff who will stick it out to meet reasonable patient’s expectations.
Today more than ever before, clients, customers and patients can sense an organization’s culture almost immediately. And with all the choices they have, you want your practice to stand out as having a consistent, positive culture throughout the whole patient experience and beyond.
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Not sure how to develop a marketing strategy? Schedule a practice review here to find out how we can help!