The process of marketing
Marketing is a process, not an event. It has a beginning and a middle – but not an end. Generally speaking, it involves communicating with the public to influence them to buy your products and services. It’s about effective communication regarding who you are and what you do.
Let’s look at this process a little further. The marketing costs have tripled, but effectiveness has halved, so you must maximise your activities.
There are two elements:
Initial Contact
This is critical to the success of any marketing endeavour. Patients will make a snap decision about your promotion, branding, offer, etc., within seconds. If it is not remarkable or fails to stand out for some reason, you will be lost within the clutter they are bombarded with daily. Indeed, the most significant marketing challenge is the clutter factor.
Ongoing Contact
This is also known as TOMA (top-of-mind awareness). Many patients will need timely reminders of your facial aesthetic services (such as newsletters, emails and texts). Big corporates do this exceedingly well. Here’s an exercise for you; name a soft drink, a fast-food chain, and a luxury car manufacturer.
Most of you probably thought “Coca-Cola” or “Pepsi”, “McDonald’s” or “Burger King”, and “Mercedes” or “BMW”. Their reasoning for their continuous spending is that they will be your first port of call when you are ready to make that purchase.
Without initial and ongoing marketing strategies, you will fail to attract patients to your services. You may be the finest clinician, have outstanding customer care and have the patient’s best interest at heart, but if they don’t know about the services in the first place, you won’t have any clients.
It would help if you also thought long-term, so have a marketing plan for the year. It can tie in with special events such as Valentine’s or Mother’s Day, so you have a systematic approach to what you will market when you’ll deal with it and to whom you’ll sell it.
This way, you won’t have a knee-jerk reaction to, say, one month when your turnover is not as good as you hoped, and so you decide on a whim to spend a couple of hundred pounds to produce an advert. Stick with a plan and commit to it.
To quote Bobby and Shahar Hashemi from their book Anyone Can Do it: Building Coffee Republic from Our Kitchen Table: ‘Don’t expect customers to flock to you. Success is not entitlement. They, like the rest of the world, don’t appreciate new ideas easily. Good things take time to come. You have to see that customers, like every other hurdle you pass – i.e. bankers, suppliers – will not buy into your vision initially. It won’t be easy at the beginning. You’ll need stick-ability. Keep focused and you will succeed.’
Budgeting
Next, you need to look at your budget. In the first year, it is normal for a new enterprise to set the marketing budget as a percentage of gross turnover expected to be generated during this period. This will come from the detailed financials in your business plan.
The budget for the following year could be a percentage of the forecast net profit, the thinking being that, in year one, you have to invest in creating patient awareness of the new venture.
The marketing budget has to cover all the expenditures on launching the business and the ongoing requirements to create and maintain local patient awareness of the available treatments.
Once established, you must review the budget monthly and justify any expenditure. In addition, every patient must be asked how they learned about your facial aesthetics treatments. This will make media selection and planning for the second year much more cost-effective.
By implementing the above system, you should avoid the pitfall of Lord Leverhulme (the British founder of Unilever), who once said: ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I don’t know which half’.
Goals Beyond Finances
You may have different goals regarding what outcome you hope to achieve via marketing efforts. Do you want to build a world-class brand? Or create a unique position in the mind of the customer? You aspire to get the customer through the door and buy repeatedly. What about a desire to motivate a happy customer to refer people that they know?
You also need to consider your goals in functional terms; for example, the number of new patients. Do you have the capacity for new patients? You need to consider the number of conversions, the percentage of referrals, etc.