The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
— Peter Drucker
INTRODUCTION
Marketing encompasses all the work involved from promoting to selling products and services to consumers. In the eye care profession, this definition is no different with our patients. By taking a holistic view of this subject, it reveals that marketing efforts are extensive. The application of it occurs throughout the entire patient care experience. It starts when the customer first becomes aware of the company by finding it through a search online. This continues past the moment the patient gets home from his or her appointment and receives an email to provide feedback about the experience.
Eye care providers take part in marketing all day without even knowing it. Their actions and behaviors exemplify the company, which is a form of marketing. Patients witness this firsthand when coming through the office. Consumers’ thoughts and perceptions are strongly influenced by what they observe around them.1 This patient care experience creates the brand, or identity, of the company. It is this brand creation that smart practitioners view as an opportunity to improve the practice by differentiating it from the competition. It takes time to develop but can be of incredible value.
The correct use of marketing can separate a thriving practice from a struggling one even if the quality and level of eye care is the same. An unclear and undisciplined approach can waste a lot of money and not provide the expected return on investment. This chapter explains the method of how to incorporate marketing to produce an advantage for a business. The first section focuses on understanding the practice and its environment. Attention transitions to discussions about how to plan and execute the marketing initiatives. This topic progresses to developing the practice’s identity and promoting it to the desired audience. The targeted goal is to develop an efficient marketing philosophy that creates value to the practice for the present as well as the future.
WHAT IS MARKETING?
The first part of operating a successful business is possessing a useful good or service to sell to consumers. The other part is to effectively promote this product to the right target audience. The completion of these steps leads to the generation of revenue. Marketing fulfills the latter requirement. The ability to do it well can have a significant impact on the company’s overall success.
There are a few common misconceptions about marketing. The first is that the amount of money spent on it is directly proportional to the level of return on its investment. The second is that everyone represents the targeted consumer. The reality is quite different. Successful marketing revolves around the ability to efficiently research, strategically plan, and mindfully execute an action strategy. It is through these activities that a valuable marketing blueprint can be created and followed to achieve optimal results.
Effective marketing strategies are built on a foundation of knowledge centered on the needs of the marketplace and the status of the competitive landscape. This information is then combined with the company’s vision and mission to design the best possible product promotion. The resultant marketing plan will position the business to efficiently progress toward its goals, both financially and philosophically.
This expansive process funnels down to the very important exercise of specifically identifying the real target audience. An accurate understanding of this issue helps to direct the marketing strategy to create the correct brand identity.1 The result is an effective game plan that is supported by judicious and intelligent use of company resources.
MARKETING IN EYE CARE
The influential powers of marketing are witnessed in eye care by the various types of patient cliental that are drawn toward a practice for its products and services. The best businesses understand how to effectively promote their products. This process forces the organization to identify what they do best—known as their core competencies—and which customers represent their desired target audience. The result is avoiding a common pitfall of wasted resources where the consumer base is too large or undefined.1 This knowledge directs valuable company resources to be allocated for maximized return on the invested cost and time. The important fundamentals in marketing for the eye care practitioner to execute are the following: understanding marketing basics, developing marketing plans, appreciating the 5 Ps, growing brands, utilizing the Internet, and using the physical office.
Understanding Marketing Basics
Importance
Excelling in marketing is dependent on understanding the fundamental terms and ideas used for it. Their meanings shape the discussions within an organization and among its competitors. They also guide companies with their marketing strategies that provide direction for the business as a whole along with its individual products and services.2 Effectively using these keywords enables businesses to separate themselves from others. This skill set is magnified in crowded landscapes that have companies with similar products wrestling for market share.
Keywords
Marketing: The management process of promoting and selling products and services
Internal marketing: Marketing to those within an organization
External marketing: Marketing to those outside of an organization
Pull power: The ability of a marketing activity to draw consumers toward a company for its products and services
Public relations (PR) firms: Companies that manage the outward image of a company and its associated products and services
Word of mouth: A method of advertisement that spreads recommendations about a company and its associated products and services directly from one past consumer to a prospective one
Print advertising: The use of hardcopy materials to promote a company’s products and services
Radio advertising: The use of radio to promote a company’s products and services
Television advertising: The use of television to promote a company’s products and services
Online advertising: The use of the Internet to promote a company’s products and services
Cause-related event marketing: Company advertisement done at an event that promotes a cause
Community event marketing: Company advertisement done at an event held for the community, which is usually near the physical location of business
Applications
Marketing in an eye care practice can provide a strategic advantage if done correctly. First, identification of the specific audience target is required. This then leads to creating a thoughtful approach to promote the company’s services and goods to that audience. Marketing efforts can be directed to both individuals inside and outside of the practice, which is known as internal and external marketing, respectively. The goals for these different classes vary on the needs of the organization. Internal marketing focuses on the staff and is applied as a method for employee retention. The more common meaning is related to external marketing by attempting to draw patients to the practice. The success of these initiatives is determined by its pull power. Public relations firms are outside vendors that aid businesses that are unfamiliar in this space with marketing strategies.
The traditional route of marketing in eye care was achieved by word-of-mouth advertisement. If patients were pleased with their experience, they would recommend the practice to their friends and family. Examples include patients advising their colleagues at work to visit a practice because they had great results from cataract surgery or because they love their new glasses. The cycle would then repeat itself until the services were no longer valued by the customers. This method is still an effective approach to acquiring more patients.
As technology has changed over time, the medium used for advertising also transformed. The evolution has included print, radio, television, and now online marketing. These approaches are each unique and offer a specific connection to different audiences. The demographics of the targeted audience dictates which medium would be best used for a given practice. The utilization of print with a newspaper and radio is effective in smaller towns. By contrast, larger cities tend to perform better with television and online methods.
Another advertising method involves marketing at heavily attended events. Cause-related event marketing include donating money on behalf of the practice for the local Glaucoma Awareness Dinner. In exchange, the company is publicly thanked at the beginning of the meal. An example of community event marketing incorporates the use of hats with the practice’s logo on them that are distributed at the annual Laguna Hills Fair. The takeaway is that the selection of marketing events depends on the audience likely to attend these activities.
Immediate Action Items
In the past, you have probably invested in marketing for the practice, but do you know which have worked best? An organization’s marketing budget can quickly add up when all of the options seem so enticing. However, some will do better than others. Of the marketing decisions made, have you ever performed an analysis to see which ones led to increased revenue? Part of this process is to see which ones perform well so you will know the ones to continue. This requires strategy to track which advertisements are working. One method is to assign each form of marketing a unique phone number or promotional code. When a prospective customer contacts the practice through any medium, such as phone call or online, it will allow tracking to evaluate the advertisement that led to the referral. Analytics can then be applied to assess the relative value of each marketing approach. This will be discussed later in the chapter. Start marketing effectively by checking to see if your system can monitor the source of referrals. If not, take the opportunity to install a system that does.
Importance
A functional business requires consumers that are willing to pay money in exchange for its goods and services. The challenge is how to connect the people to the products. This is very similar to having an aspiration in life. Without a specific goal in mind, the steps taken to achieve them have no target in place. The result is usually wasted effort and ending somewhere that was not intended.
Efficient businesses take time to thoughtfully understand the specific set of customers they are targeting to attract. Although this seems like a common-sense approach to marketing at first, the reality is that most organizations are so eager to start marketing that they do not critically assess their intended audience at the beginning. The excitement to have their product or service available for sale makes them take action before knowing where they are going. The end result is a wide and vague target of potential buyers instead of having a clear and purposeful segment of customers they are trying to attract. The repercussions of such random actions include the development of unclear messaging, inability to differentiate, and blown resources.
Once the specific audience is delineated, the next step is to understand the competitive space where the company will work and develop a strategic plan on how to achieve the goals. The due diligence needed for this assessment is incredibly valuable to the endeavor’s success. This information identifies both opportunities and threats that need to be acknowledged. All of these activities eventually lead to an efficient marketing plan that remains dynamic enough to weather through storms but still arrive at the target destination. The lack of planning likely leads to poor and frustrating results.
Keywords
Market research: A process to understand the market space based on historical evaluation along with present-day surveys
Market share: The percentage representation of a company’s product or service pen-etrance in a given market
Market expansion: The process in which a company attempts to find new segments of consumers
Marketing plan: The collection of thoughts and processes used by a company to promote and sell its products and services
Creative process: A marketing approach to foster the development and execution of a thought or strategy for a product or service
Marketing strategy: A section of the marketing plan that delineates the process of how a company’s advertising will be performed
Market segmentation strategy: The process of breaking down a market and its consumers into a smaller yet more homogenous group at which advertisement is directed
Target audience: The specific consumer base that a marketing campaign is attempting to convert over to become customers of a company
Demographics: The statistical information of a group, which is usually that of the target audience
Customer profile: The characteristics of a company’s targeted customer
Applications
Successful development of a marketing plan beings with an education about the competitive landscape that the practice will be entering in to work. Market research achieves this goal through a variety of methods. The most common approach is to see who currently serves the customers in the desired space. This reveals information about the competition and their relative market share. Opportunities for market expansion can then be assessed from that knowledge. The subsequent task is to define the customers that utilize the competition, which will indirectly reveal data about the customers. The culmination of these exercises supplies the new practice valuable intelligence when planning out its marketing activities.
Promotion is the next phase of the marketing plan. This involves advertising the practice’s services and products to the ideal patient population. Its development begins with the creative process that produces some strategic options on how to achieve these goals.2 The best ideas are selected and integrated together to build the marketing strategy. This approach is further broken to smaller pieces that focuses even more specifically within that patient pool to establish the market segmentation strategy.
The most important step in this entire process becomes the identification of how the practice brings in customers as defined by its target audience. The group’s selection is vital as it provides the customer profiles and demographics. This information influences the entire marketing efforts and will be used in the metrics to assess its effectiveness. The simple rule of marketing is as follows: a clear understanding of your target produces clear marketing, and a poor understanding creates poor marketing. Within this audience, the practice hopes to discover some champions for the practice. Their intense commitment to the business can be harnessed in specific ways to further help promotional efforts.
Immediate Action Items
Does your practice have a marketing plan that it uses as a guideline for where and how to spend the marketing budget, or do you pick and choose marketing opportunities as they present? Without a strategy of how each advertisement plays a role in the overall picture, you will have results that look cut-and-paste. This will lead to a poor return on investment for your marketing efforts. Now that you know what your practice identity is through its clear culture along with its vision and mission statement, take time to assess who your target audience is. Be as specific as possible and sure it matches what is offered by your practice. The resources you provide (supply) must fulfill the desires (demand) of the targeted customers to be competitive in that marketplace. The next step is investment into understanding the profile of these market segments so you can tailor the advertisements specifically to them.
Importance
Businesses that attempt to create successful marketing plans are required to answer some specific questions along the way. The request for this information will be inevitable in the marketing process and should be anticipated. The best companies prepare for these topics and provide well-developed answers. Underperforming organizations just continue their ineffective habits of generating responses spontaneously without a focused goal.
This information can be obtained through a process involving the 5 Ps: product, price, placement, promotion, and people. Once these are in place and defined, the ease of developing a marketing plan increases. Thinking through the 5 Ps is another example of how preparation is critical to the success of business similar to other areas like negotiations.
Keywords
Awareness gap: The space between what consumers know about a company’s products and services vs what is really offered
5 Ps: The 5 components of a marketing strategy (product, price, placement, promotion, people)
Product line: A group of associated products or services
Product portfolio: The collection of products and services provided by a company
Churn rate: The percentage of customers that stop buying a product or using a service from a company
Cross-promotion: The use of one product or service in a company’s portfolio to introduce and promote another to a customer
First-to-market: The condition of being the first product or service to be offered for a certain category
Trademark: A legally registered word or symbol that represents a company or product
Copyright: The legal right of an owner over literature, artwork, or music
Patent: The legal right of an owner for a design
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