The increasing administrative burden, particularly documentation tasks, has significantly contributed to physician burnout. From tedious paperwork to complex electronic health record systems, physicians often spend a substantial amount of time on non-clinical tasks. Learn the impacts below. Need help? We have customized solutions for your practice. Get with us before you feel the burn out — and start 2025 STRONG.
Despite recent efforts to reduce the documentation burden in medicine — including the “Patients Over Paperwork” initiative and the 2021 changes to the documentation guidelines for E/M services — a large majority of doctors say they’re still spending too much time and effort on documentation.
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) conducted a survey of health care professionals earlier this year to capture their perceptions about documentation burden. Of the 1,253 responses, 452 were from physicians.
Survey findings
75% of physicians said they had not seen a noticeable recent decrease in the time or effort it takes them to complete documentation tasks,
83% said they did not believe the amount of time and effort they spent documenting patient care was appropriate,
84% said they finish work later than desired or have to do additional work at home because of excessive documentation tasks,
81% said the time and effort required to complete documentation tasks impedes patient care,
22% said they found it easy to document patient care using their EHR.
The AMIA plans to conduct the “pulse survey” twice each year — in the spring and fall. The deadline to take the next survey is Sept. 26.
For strategies to help address documentation burden, visit the “Coding & EHR Documentation” section of FPM’s “Administrative Simplification” topic collection
Simplify your practice, reduce administrative burdens, and focus on patient care. Let us handle your medical and dental billing, so you can spend more time doing what you love. Schedule your free consultation with Kevin Rausch to get all your questions answered. Bookhere.
Having a strong online presence is essential for healthcare professionals to reach a wider audience and attract new patients. By implementing effective digital marketing strategies, doctors can enhance their online visibility, establish credibility, and drive patient acquisition. Check our tips and tactics to help you grow your medical practice online.
Every business needs strong marketing if it wants to reach more clients online, and that also goes for the healthcare industry. Any doctor who wants to connect with their patients, share valuable health information, and build a perfect reputation, needs to invest in a good marketing strategy. However, most doctors don’t have much knowledge about the digital world and marketing strategies, so they find it difficult to go online successfully. That’s why we’re here – in this article, we will give doctors six marketing tips on how to reach more clients online and become the most searched topic.
Create a Good Website
You can’t have a good online presence without having a website. Keep in mind that the website is usually the clients’ first contact with you, so it needs to leave a perfect impression. It must be user-friendly, informative, and presented in a professional manner. It also must be simple to navigate, mobile-friendly, and load quickly. Make sure to include important information like your services, qualifications, office hours, and contact info, and give your patients a simple system for scheduling an appointment.
In addition to these essentials, your website can be even better with a blog section where you can share helpful health tips, medical news, and updates about your practice. Regularly update your blog with high-quality, relevant material because it will improve your blog’s visibility in search engine results and attract more visitors to your site.
Use Local SEO
Local SEO is a perfect marketing tool to attract local patients to your practice. Using local SEO for doctors will make sure that the practice is highly visible in search engine results for local people searching for medical services near them. Start with the Google My Business page – make sure that all information there (location, contact info, working hours) is correct and up-to-date. Add local keywords in the title, meta description, and content of your website – it will rank you higher in local search results. Ask satisfied patients to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, or any other platform you can think of because reviews are also an important part of marketing and can attract many clients. Having perfect information and reviews across different platforms will boost your local SEO efforts.
Use Social Media
Use social media – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn – because they are a great chance to connect and communicate with potential patients and build a strong online image. Make yourself a professional profile on each of these platforms and update it often with interesting, useful, and educational posts. Same as with your website, you can share health tips, practice updates, patient reviews, and sneak peeks into your daily operations. It’s also important to connect with your followers and present yourself as a trusted expert in your field – you can respond to their comments and join in relevant discussions, for example. Another low-cost marketing tip to reach a targeted audience and promote your services is to use social media advertising, such as Facebook Ads.
Consider Email Marketing
Using email marketing to stay in contact with current patients and reach out to potential ones is a perfect marketing tip. Build a strong email list that will allow you to directly communicate with your audience, sharing important updates, health tips, and promotional offers. Start by collecting email addresses from your website, social media, and personal, in-office visits. Once you do, start sending regular newsletters with informative and interesting content, such as articles covering common health issues, your practice’s updates, appointment reminders, and seasonal health concerns. You can even personalize emails to make them more interesting and related to the recipients. Email marketing is a great marketing tip because it will help you keep in touch with patients, which usually leads to them returning and recommending your practice to others.
Offer Telehealth Services
Telehealth has become extremely popular, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. If you offer telehealth services, you can reach more patients who might otherwise have difficulties visiting your practice (because of distance, mobility issues, or any other concerns). Try to promote your telehealth services on your website, and social media – wherever you can – and put a light on the convenience and accessibility they offer. Make sure that your telehealth platform is secure and easy to use, and give your patients a perfect experience. Offering telehealth services will not only attract more patients but will also show that you are committed to providing accessible and flexible care. This will improve your practice’s reputation and popularity.
Analyze Your Online Performance
If you want to improve your online marketing, you should constantly monitor and analyze your performance. For that, you can use different tools like Google Analytics, or any other tool that will help you monitor your website traffic, user actions, and the success of your marketing strategies. This is important because you will know which strategies are working well and which are not so you can change them. Create a list of clear goals for your online marketing – it could be higher website visits, more leads, or better patient engagement. Review your analytics data regularly to see if there are any trends, measure the success of your strategies, and change your strategies when needed. This step can keep you ahead of the competition and make sure you are communicating with potential patients effectively. Also, try to always stay in line with the latest trends and changes in digital marketing to improve your tactics and achieve better results over time.
As you already know (and we already mentioned), presenting yourself well on the Internet is a not-so-secret formula for success. Almost every person will go and Google the practice they think of visiting, so it’s important that you have a perfect online presence that will draw their attention. Create a good website, use local SEO, social media, and email marketing, offer telehealth services, and regularly analyze the data you get from these. These tips will help you create and keep a strong online presence, attract more clients, and improve patient care. Remember, communication is key, so communicating with your clients both online and offline will greatly help you.
Boost your online presence and attract more patients. Our expert marketing team can help you develop a customized strategy to grow your medical practice. Schedule your free consultation with Kevin Rausch to get all your questions answered. Bookhere.
Primary care providers play a pivotal role in delivering essential healthcare services to communities. By empowering these frontline healthcare professionals, we can improve patient outcomes, enhance access to care, and strengthen the overall healthcare system.
Primary care is essential to the care of the population, yet fewer people are accessing it due in part to an increasing shortage and maldistribution of primary care physicians. That was the focus of an Oct. 20 virtual briefing hosted by Primary Care for America, a diverse collaboration of key partners (including the American Academy of Family Physicians) focused on educating policymakers and health policy influencers about the value of comprehensive, continuous, and coordinated primary care.
Aside from training more primary care physicians, the health care system must do two things to solve the primary care workforce crisis, said Yalda Jabbarpour, MD, director of the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Primary Care, who presented at the briefing.
1. Create and pay for high-functioning teams, which can expand the capacity of primary care. (See “Taking Team-Based Care to the Next Level” and “Making a Business Case for Team-Based Care.”)
2. Adopt technology to expand access and efficiencies in primary care — without adding to physician burden. Virtual visits, asynchronous care via patient portals (if team managed), and artificial intelligence show great promise in this regard.
“But teams and technology take money and more investment in primary care,” said Jabbarpour, citing data showing that, for every payer, investment in primary care has been too low and falling over the last decade. “Higher investment in primary care can result in practice changes such as more robust teams and better integrated technology that can expand the workforce we have.”
Invest in the success of primary care providers and transform your patient experience with innovative solutions. Schedule your free consultation with Kevin Rausch to get all your questions answered regarding your practice: billing, sales, marketing, practice operations strategy, & more! Book here.
Nurse triage is revolutionizing patient care by improving efficiency and accessibility. Nurse triage systems help alleviate wait times, enhance patient satisfaction, and optimize healthcare resources by prioritizing patient needs and directing them to the appropriate level of care. Check the benefits of implementing a nurse triage model, highlighting its impact on patient outcomes and healthcare delivery.
Prior to widespread implementation of the electronic health record (EHR), non-face-to-face patient contact with the primary care clinician’s office was traditionally limited to telephone calls during office hours or patient voicemail messages after hours. Practices used telephone triage and medical advice protocols to ensure that patient calls or messages would be managed in a standardized way by the appropriate person in the practice.
Today, EHRs offer the use of patient portals, which allow unfettered patient-initiated messaging to the clinician at all hours of the day. This marks a major step forward in patient communication with the health care team but also marks a significant increase in indirect patient care needs. In primary care, these patient queries cover the gamut of health care needs, including appointment or referral requests, referral status updates, financial or insurance questions, result clarification, clinical advice requests, and medication requests (new or refill). Additionally, traditional phone calls are converted to EHR messages, which adds to the EHR message burden. While protocols and procedures on how to best manage patient telephone calls are well established, similar systems have not been widely adopted for electronic communication from patients.
This article describes how an academic family medicine practice designed and implemented a system for optimally managing electronic patient messages. Our multiple part-time clinicians comprise approximately 8.8 clinical FTEs managing a panel of 16,000 patients. The clinical team also includes 15 registered nurses (RNs)/certified medical assistants (MAs)/licensed practical nurses (LPNs), two triage RNs, two licensed clinical social workers, and one clinical pharmacist.
KEY POINTS
Patient portals mark a major step forward in patient communication with the health care team, but they also mark a significant increase in indirect patient care needs.
Practices should reconsider the clinician’s role in message management.
By clarifying rules for routing and replying to patient messages, workflows can largely be handled by nursing and support staff.
A NEW WORKFLOW FOR PATIENT MESSAGES
Before this intervention, all patient messages went directly to the clinician, who then decided whether to handle a message personally or forward it to another team member. As the volume of messages increased and response times increased, this strategy of having the clinician review all messages became non-viable.
Our first step in developing a new work-flow for managing patient messages was to assemble a small multidisciplinary work team with representatives from administration, nursing, and clinicians. The over-arching goal was to develop a consistent, systems-based approach to patient messaging and to get “the right message to the right team member.”
The group surveyed clinicians about their message preferences. Overall, clinicians preferred that all messages be reviewed and filtered first by a non-clinician team member. Clinicians only wanted certain messages routed to them — mostly medication questions about directions for use, side effects, or dose adjustments. For messages involving symptoms not improving despite treatment, their preference was to not have the message routed to them but to have the patient scheduled for a follow-up visit. Most other messages could be handled by staff or converted to a visit.
Using the clinician survey results, the team reviewed the different types of messages available in the patient portal (new complaint, medication refill, billing question, etc.) and determined which message types should go to which team members first. Input from nursing staff was essential in ensuring that the most appropriate message ended up in front of the correct person.
The next step was to expand the practice pools for message routing. (See a selected list of practice pools.) All patient-initiated messages would first land in a general practice pool, and an RN would read and review all messages from this initial pool. We used RNs as the first-line filter for two main reasons. The first is practical. Our MAs’ and LPNs’ main duties are related to direct clinical care provided to the patients seen in the practice, whereas our RNs have more of an administrative/supervisory role. The second is clinical. If patient messages include issues that are clinical in nature, the RN is able to appropriately triage these patients for clinical visits. The team considered whether message filtering should be done by nonclinical team members; however, after discussion, the group determined there were no available nonclinical staff to do this work and a clinical team member was better suited for it. This first-line filtering is critical since patient messages are not first reviewed by a clinician.
After reviewing a message, the RN routes it to the appropriate team member/practice pool to handle and notifies the patient of the expected response time. For example, if a patient is asking about an active referral request, the RN can route the message to the “referrals” practice pool, which includes nonclinical administrative staff who manage insurance and referrals. A member of the pool will then handle the message.
To assist RNs with message management, our project leader developed reference documents and Smart Phrases. These phrases, also known as “dot phrases,” allow staff to easily insert commonly used chunks of text into their responses to patient messages by typing a period (dot) followed by a short user-generated phrase. (See the list of Smart Phrases.) The project lead and nursing leadership also offered training sessions for team members who would be reviewing and filtering messages. The practice did not hire additional staff. The nursing staff was up-trained to do this work, and it has been incorporated into their clinical responsibilities. We piloted the new work-flow using select clinician EHR in-baskets. Once refined, it was rolled out to the entire practice.
LESSENING THE CLINICIAN IN-BASKET BURDEN
The following example contrasts the old and new workflows and illustrates how the change has positively affected clinician workload.
Patient message: “Dear Doctor, you saw me six weeks ago, and at that time you put in a referral to podiatry, but I have not yet heard back.”
In the old workflow: This message would have gone to the clinician, who would have done two things: 1) message the patient back, letting them know that a team member would look into their question, and 2) forward the message to the referral coordinators. The referral coordinators often-times would then send information back to the clinician, who would then notify the patient of the referral status.
In the new workflow: This message is reviewed by an RN, who responds to the patient using standard language and forwards the message to the referral coordinator, per the routing rules. The referral coordinator reviews the file and contacts the patient with the referral status and any instructions. In this example, the clinician is only involved if there is an issue, for example, if the referral was never placed.
FEEDBACK AND LESSONS LEARNED
Informal feedback on the new workflow indicates increased clinician satisfaction, improved clinical efficiency, and improved staff satisfaction. Clinicians indicate that messages coming to them are more likely to be clinician-level issues and their individual in-basket burden has lessened. Overall, our team felt that message turnaround times decreased significantly and we were able to review and disperse more messages to the appropriate next location.
While we do not have formal feedback from patients about this process, we have found that the closed-loop communication from the RN has been helpful for letting patients know that their message has been received and what the next steps will be, which may include a visit with the clinician. Our nursing staff have noted some dissatisfaction from patients who felt they were receiving canned responses, so we encourage personalized messages as appropriate. Nurses can decide whether or not to use Smart Phrases.
If patients indicate that they want their message sent to their clinician, we do that and set expectations around a timeline for their response. Clinicians are free to respond however they choose. They often support the advice provided by nursing staff, which reassures patients.
This new workflow has put more onus on each team member at each step in the message management process. Nursing and clinical support staff have indicated that they now feel empowered to act on items they can own. This has resulted not only in better message management but also meeting patients’ needs in a timelier manner.
We anticipate that technology will continue to advance and improve additional aspects of in-basket management. Some EHRs may have an “auto-response” feature built in, which could help inform patients of expected response times or next steps. It is not hard to imagine that soon practices will be able to use “chat-bots” or other artificial intelligence modalities to filter or reply to messages, or to address patient needs electronically. Until such time, workflows such as ours can be used to relieve clinician burden and serve as a template to drive future change.
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Is your medical practice feeling the pinch? There are strategic steps you can take to reignite growth! Let us help you with effective revenue-boosting strategies specifically tailored for clinics and practices.
20 Strategies To Increase Revenue.
Increasing sales and revenue is a high priority for most companies. Focusing on your customers and how they respond to different sales and marketing strategies can help you decide how best to increase sales and revenue. Your marketing and advertising campaigns can attract new customers and maintain current ones, boosting your profits. In this article, we explain how you can increase the revenue and sales and ways to make sure that revenue helps you achieve your long-term goals.
What does it mean to increase revenues?
Revenue is the amount of money that a business brings in, including income from sales and any additional income from bank interest or investments. A company can increase its revenue by increasing sales, adding other sources of income and increasing the amount of money that each sale produces Related:What Is Revenue? Definition, Types of Revenue and Examples
What does it mean to increase sales?
Sales refers to the number of items or services that a company sells, so increasing sales means customers are buying more products. A company can increase its sales by reaching more customers, convincing customers to buy more often, improving its marketing strategy, offering prices that fit the market well and maintaining good relationships with customers.
How to increase revenues and sales
Here are 20 different ways to increase revenue and sales as a marketing or sales professional:
1. Set defined goals
Make quantifiable goals for how much you want to increase your sales and revenue. This way, you can decide how to approach your goals and which methods you’d like to use. You can also use these goals to motivate you and your sales team by tracking your progress and accomplishments.
2. Target repeat customers
Cultivate the relationships you have with dedicated brand customers. Increasing communication can remind your customers of your store and control the message that they receive. Consider reaching out by email or text to promote sales or inform them of new inventory. Many email systems also allow you to review metrics, like the number of recipients who opened your email or clicked on a link, which can help you determine how effective your communication choices are.
3. Target former customers
Bringing back former customers sometimes takes less effort than bringing in new customers. Maintain a marketing plan for former customers so you can target them differently than your current customers. You can appeal to them with specific incentives, like a discount for those who bring in outdated items when they buy a replacement or upgrade. Former customers can also give you referrals or reviews that bring in new customers.
4. Grow your geographic reach
You might expand physically by opening a new location. You can also expand the geographic range of your customers by increasing the distance you can deliver or provide services or adding advertisement initiatives in neighboring areas.
5. Refine your pricing plan
To increase revenue while maintaining the same number of sales, reevaluate your pricing plan. You may sell more items by lowering your prices and taking market share away from your competitors, or you could raise your prices if your brand is strong and customers believe in the value you offer. If you offer a subscription service, you might offer a pricing structure with just a few tiers to appeal to customers through a simpler shopping experience.
6. Add products or services
One way to increase the number of sales per current customer is to offer more products that your customer needs. You can consider adjacent products that a customer would buy to use with your product or a service your customers might need. For example, if you have a specialty pen company, you might offer notebooks and stationery too.
7. Bundle products or services
Bundling products can encourage your customers to purchase more because they can save money by purchasing more than one item at once. You can bundle internally by packaging items together and marketing them as a set, or you could offer a discount when customers buy multiple items together.
8. Upsell products and services
Adding a specific plan to sell higher-priced products can help you transform a single sale into a more valuable transaction. Displays and informational materials can help with this by showing a more expensive or upgraded option first and emphasizing its benefits over less-expensive options.
9. Add new payment forms
You may be able to increase sales by offering new payment methods that customers find more convenient. Check which payment forms the leaders in your industry are using, then set up any infrastructure to accept whatever you don’t currently, whether it’s credit cards, a cash exchange app or secure quick pay options.
10. Offer delayed payments
You could see increases in sales by offering a delayed payment plan, like a layaway program or installment plan. Installment payment plans appeal to customers by showing lower monthly payments rather than one large sum. For example, a furniture company could offer an installment payment plan for a $500 couch, where the customer pays 10 installments of $50 each.
11. Change shipping or delivery charges
Some customers may be willing to pay more for a product if the shipping and handling is free. For online sales, you might consider ways to build shipping and handling costs into the overall cost of the item instead of including two line items in the price. If you deliver products locally, you may be able to try the same method.
12. Offer subscriptions
You could generate more sales by offering a subscription service and reminding people to buy a new product regularly. Consider offering a discount if a customer subscribes to regular replacements or refills, which can automate sales for you and help the customer save money.
13. Offer discounts, rebates and coupons
Perhaps the most classic method to generate increased sales, offering discounts, rebates and coupons can help bring in new traffic and generate a feeling of achievement for customers. Discounts and coupons generate customer loyalty and repeat purchases by allowing customers to try new products that they later buy at full price. Rebates have a low rate of fulfillment, so you may not have to take the rebate’s cost off of the revenue from every item sold.
14. Create special incentives
If you have regular communication with your customers, you can use any occasion to build loyalty by offering holiday sales, birthday rewards and discounts or registries for special occasions like weddings or births.
15. Survey customers to understand your market
It’s important to know your customer base well, so consider offering a survey to find out your customer demographics. When a customer makes a purchase, you can ask them to fill out a short survey that can help you define your target audience and refine your marketing strategies. You can also send surveys to potential markets through social media or online ads. To encourage people to fill out your survey, you can offer a discount or the chance of winning a gift card.
16. Keep sales channel current
Regularly update your sales channel, including your online presence and your in-store displays. Even if consistency is a strong appeal of your brand, consider ways you can make each visit or sale new for the customer to generate curiosity about later purchases.
17. Change sales incentive structure
Changing your incentive structure for your salespeople can increase sales numbers by making your sales team more motivated. Finding new metrics or rewarding different kinds of sales numbers can inspire your sales team by giving them a new challenge. You might consider inverting your commission plan to give higher incentives to a certain group or offering bonuses for achieving goals within a certain amount of time.
18. Develop a public reputation for quality and expertise
Consider building your brand’s public reputation for quality or your team’s reputation as experts in the field. External endorsements by magazines and public figures can introduce your product to new customers, and if you are willing to create your own podcast, book or informative articles, you can build up a reputation of providing value to your customers in multiple ways.
19. Develop a reputation in your industry and community
Being active in professional organizations can help you grow your visibility and can be particularly useful for business-to-business sales. As a prominent figure in the industry, you can also build partnerships with other businesses to offer shared promotions or build a common customer base.
20. Review your online presence
Optimize your website for sales instead of clicks by determining which search terms and website design aspects are actually bringing in sales. Consider how you can optimize your site or rewrite your online copy to maximize those attributes.
Perform Practice Solutions can help you run your business with more efficiency and less stress. Learn more about our medical billing solutions. Schedule your free consultation with Kevin Rausch to get all your questions answered regarding your practice: billing, sales, marketing, practice operations strategy, & more! Book here.
Marketing isn’t just about flashy ads or catchy slogans. It’s the strategic process of connecting your business with the right audience on the right platforms. It’s running Meta ads that connect with your newsletter that end with a call to action to your landing pages, supported by an updated website — and a million other things that convey your message of health and support in excellence. This involves understanding your ideal customer’s needs and wants, showcasing your medical practice, and ultimately driving them to take action. We want to help you manage these things so that you can run your practice. Learn more about it below.
Professionals who work in a corporation’s marketing and promotion departments seek to get the attention of key potential audiences through advertising. Promotions are targeted to certain audiences and may involve celebrity endorsements, catchy phrases or slogans, memorable packaging or graphic designs, and overall media exposure.
Understanding Marketing
Marketing as a discipline involves all the actions a company undertakes to draw in customers and maintain relationships with them. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work too and may include writing thank you emails, playing golf with prospective clients, returning calls and emails quickly, and meeting with clients for coffee or a meal.
At its most basic level, marketing seeks to match a company’s products and services to customers who want access to those products. Matching products to customers ultimately ensures profitability.
Formal Definition:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. ”
—Official definition from the American Marketing Association, approved 2017.
What Are the 4 P’s of Marketing?
Product, price, place, and promotion are the Four Ps of marketing. The Four Ps collectively make up the essential mix a company needs to market a product or service. Neil Borden popularized the idea of the marketing mix and the concept of the Four Ps in the 1950s.
Product
Product refers to an item or items the business plans to offer to customers. The product should seek to fulfill an absence in the market or fulfill consumer demand for a greater amount of a product already available. Before they can prepare an appropriate campaign, marketers need to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are substitute products in the market.
Price
Price refers to how much the company will sell the product for. When establishing a price, companies must consider the unit cost price, marketing costs, and distribution expenses. Companies must also consider the price of competing products in the marketplace and whether their proposed price point is sufficient to represent a reasonable alternative for consumers.
Place
Place refers to the distribution of the product. Key considerations include whether the company will sell the product through a physical storefront, online, or through both distribution channels. When it’s sold in a storefront, what kind of physical product placement does it get? When it’s sold online, what kind of digital product placement does it get?
Promotion
Promotion, the fourth P, is the integrated marketing communications campaign. Promotion includes a variety of activities such as advertising, selling, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing, sponsorship, and guerrilla marketing.
Promotions vary depending on what stage of the product life cycle the product is in. Marketers understand that consumers associate a product’s price and distribution with its quality, and they take this into account when devising the overall marketing strategy.
Types of Marketing Strategies
Marketing is comprised of an incredibly broad and diverse set of strategies. The industry continues to evolve, and the strategies below may be better suited for some companies over others.
Traditional Marketing Strategies
Before technology and the Internet, traditional marketing was the primary way companies would market their goods to customers. The main types of traditional marketing strategies include:
Outdoor Marketing: This entails public displays of advertising external to a consumer’s house. This includes billboards, printed advertisements on benches, sticker wraps on vehicles, or advertisements on public transit.
Print Marketing: This entails small, easily printed content that is easy to replicate. Traditionally, companies often mass-produced printed materials, as the printed content was the same for all customers. Today, more flexibility in printing processes means that materials can be differentiated.
Direct Marketing: This entails specific content delivered to potential customers. Some print marketing content could be mailed. Otherwise, direct marketing mediums could include coupons, vouchers for free goods, or pamphlets.
Electronic Marketing: This entails the use of TV and radio for advertising. Through short bursts of digital content, a company can convey information to a customer through visual or auditory media that may grab a viewer’s attention better than a printed form.
Event Marketing: This entails attempting to gather potential customers at a specific location for the opportunity to speak with them about products or demonstrate products. This includes conferences, trade shows, seminars, roadshows, or private events.
Digital Marketing
The marketing industry has been forever changed with the introduction of digital marketing. From the early days of pop-up ads to targeted placements based on viewing history, there are now innovative ways companies can reach customers through digital marketing.
Search Engine Marketing: This entails companies attempting to increase search traffic through two ways. First, companies can pay search engines for placement on result pages. Second, companies can emphasize search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to organically place high on search results.
E-mail Marketing: This entails companies obtaining customer or potential customer e-mail addresses and distributing messages or newsletters. These messages can include coupons, discount opportunities, or advance notice of upcoming sales.
Social Media Marketing: This entails building an online presence on specific social media platforms. Like search engine marketing, companies can place paid advertisements to bypass algorithms and obtain a higher chance of being seen by viewers. Otherwise, a company can attempt to organically grow by posting content, interacting with followers, or uploading media like photos and videos.
Affiliate Marketing: This entails using third-party advertising to drive customer interest. Often, an affiliate that will get a commission from a sale will do affiliate marketing as the third party is incentivized to drive a sale for a good that is not their own original product.
Content Marketing: This entails creating content, whether eBooks, infographics, video seminars, or other downloadable content. The goal is to create a product (often free) to share information about a product, obtain customer information, and encourage customers to continue with the company beyond the content.
What Are the Benefits of Marketing?
Well-defined marketing strategies can benefit a company in several ways. It may be challenging to develop the right strategy or execute the plan; when done well, marketing can yield the following results:
Audience Generation. Marketing allows a company to target specific people it believes will benefit from its product or service. Sometimes, people know they have the need. Other times, they don’t realize it. Marketing enables a company to connect with a cohort of people that fit the demographic of whom the company aims to serve.
Inward Education. Marketing is useful for collecting information to be processed internally to drive success. For example, consider market research that finds a certain product is primarily purchased by women aged 18 to 34 years old. By collecting this information, a company can better understand how to cater to this demographic, drive sales, and be more efficient with resources.
Outward Education. Marketing can also be used to communicate with the world what your company does, what products you sell, and how your company can enrich the lives of others. Campaigns can be educational, informing those outside of your company why they need your product. In addition, marketing campaigns let a company introduce itself, its history, its owners, and its motivation for being the company it is.
Brand Creation. Marketing allows for a company to take an offensive approach to creating a brand. Instead of a customer shaping their opinion of a company based on their interactions, a company can preemptively engage a customer with specific content or media to drive certain emotions or reactions. This allows a company to shape its image before the customer has ever interacted with its products.
Long-lasting. Marketing campaigns done right can have a long-lasting impact on customers. Consider Poppin’ Fresh, also known as the Pillsbury Doughboy. First appearing in 1965, the mascot has helped create a long-lasting, warm, friendly brand for Pillsbury.
Financial Performance. The ultimate goal and benefit of marketing are to drive sales. When relationships with customers are stronger, well-defined, and positive, customers are more likely to engage in sales. When marketing is done right, customers turn to your company, and you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. Even if both products are exactly the same, marketing can create that competitive advantage for why a client picks you over someone else.
According to MarTech, a digital marketing provider, the world will spend $4.7 trillion on marketing by 2025. This estimate includes an increase of $1.1 trillion from 2021 to 2025.
What Are the Limitations of Marketing?
Though there are many reasons a company embarks on marketing campaigns, there are several limitations to the industry.
Oversaturation. Every company wants customers to buy its product and not its competitors. Therefore, marketing channels can be competitive as companies strive to garner more positive attention and recognition. If too many companies are competing, a customer’s attention may be strongly diluted, resulting in any form of advertising not being effective.
Devaluation. When a company promotes a price discount or sale, the public may psychologically eventually see that product as worth less in the future. If a campaign is so strong, customers may even wait to purchase a good knowing or remembering what the sale price was from before. For example, some may intentionally hold off buying goods if Black Friday is approaching.
No Guaranteed Success. Marketing campaigns may incur upfront expenses that hold no promise of future success. This is also true of market research studies, where time, effort, and resources are poured into a study that may yield no usable or helpful results.
Customer Bias. Loyal, long-time customers need no enticing to buy a company’s brand or product. However, newer, uninitiated customers may. Marketing naturally is biased towards non-loyal patrons as those who already support the company would be better served by further investment in product improvement.
Cost. Marketing campaigns may be expensive. Digital marketing campaigns may be labor-intensive to set up and costly to maintain the scheduling, implementation, and execution of the plan. Don’t forget about the headlines that promote Super Bowl commercial expenses in the millions.
Economy-Dependent. Marketing is most successful when people have capital to spend. Though marketing can create non-financial benefits such as brand loyalty and product recognition, the ultimate goal is to drive sales. During unfavorable macroeconomic conditions when unemployment is high or recession concerns are elevated, consumers may be less likely to spend no matter how great a marketing campaign may be.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing is a division of a company, product line, individual, or entity that promotes its service. Marketing attempts to encourage market participants to buy their product and commit loyalty to a specific company.
Why Is Marketing So Important?
Marketing is important for a few reasons. First, marketing campaigns may be the first time a customer interacts or is exposed to a company’s product. A company has the opportunity to educate, promote, and encourage potential buyers.
Marketing also helps shape the brand image a company wants to convey. For example, an outdoor camping gear company that wants to be known for its rugged, tough goods can embark on specific campaigns that embody these traits and make these emotions memorable to prospective customers.
What Is the Purpose of Marketing?
An important goal of marketing is propelling a company’s growth. This can be seen through attracting and retaining new customers.
Companies may apply many different marketing strategies to achieve these goals. For instance, matching products with customers’ needs could involve personalization, prediction, and essentially knowing the right problem to solve.
Another strategy is creating value through the customer experience. This is demonstrated through efforts to elevate customer satisfaction and remove any difficulties with the product or service.
What Are the 4 Ps of Marketing?
A commonly used concept in the marketing field, the Four Ps of marketing looks at four key elements of a marketing strategy. The Four Ps consist of product, price, place, and promotion.
What Are the Types of Marketing?
There are dozens of types of marketing, and the types have proliferated with the introduction and rise of social media, mobile platforms, and technological advancements. Before technology, marketing might have been geared towards mail campaigns, word-of-mouth campaigns, billboards, delivery of sample products, TV commercials, or telemarketing. Now, marketing encompasses social media, targeted ads, e-mail marketing, inbound marketing to attract web traffic, and more.
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