by Juan Nodarse

I hope you're enjoying the initial issue of Nutritional Wellness. I am excited about this new publication and looking forward to doing everything I can to contribute to a dynamic, practical and educational publication.

This Column

The purpose of this column is to increase your understanding and application of marketing in order to grow your practice. In the next four issues, I will present some traditional, basic marketing principles, introduce some new ways to look at marketing, and provide some practical ideas you can use immediately.

This first column will introduce marketing. We'll take a look at what marketing is not, and explore how marketing affects the buying process. Then we'll look at what marketing is, so that we can all begin with the same point of reference. You'll see a simple four-step marketing process, and then I'll get you started with the development of a "value-added" marketing plan.

What Marketing Is Not

Before we define marketing, let's talk about what it is not. Marketing is not advertising. It is not yesterday's promotion. It's not creating a calendar and placing on it a bunch of events and programs. And it is not following, in a rote manner, what someone else tells you to do.

Advertising agencies create and place advertising they generally do not do marketing. Media sales people sell advertising - they definitely do not do marketing. Even some health care marketing "experts" don't really practice marketing; they are simply selling tools that could fit into a marketing plan. So, what is marketing?

Marketing Defined

There are thousands of marketing definitions, but if you look carefully at most major ones, you'll see that they address two major points. Marketing is (1) everything you do to bring your product or service to the market, and (2) it is effective to the extent that the activity is done with your patient (or prospective patient) in mind.

For the purpose of this column, then, we'll define marketing as "The process of managing activities designed to promote your practice - based on meeting your target audience's needs and focused on generating a desired outcome."

Marketing boils down to everything you do in your office that affects your patients or prospective patients: the location of your practice, your clinic name, how clean the entryway is, your hours, how the phone is answered, how you dress, and what techniques you emphasize. They're all part of marketing. And obviously advertising and direct mail can fit under the marketing umbrella.

While none of those activities would be considered marketing, put them together - based on meeting your target's needs and focused on desired outcomes - and those individual, sometimes seemingly insignificant tactics can turn into a powerful, strategic marketing plan. How to pull all those different activities together and turn them into a cohesive marketing effort can be a confusing thing. But there is a process that can help you do just that.

The Marketing Process

The marketing process, if followed properly, helps you pull everything together. But remember, it is a living, constantly changing process; it is evolutionary.

In its simplest terms, marketing is a four-step process: (1) the situation analysis - who are we and where are we? (2) goals and objectives - where are we going? (3) strategies and tactics - how do we get there? and (4) measurement - are we getting there?

This process is cyclical; it never stops. It is a process you can follow if you're going to develop a comprehensive marketing plan, or even if you are dealing with a short-term tactical decision.

If you do nothing else, following the marketing process can help you improve your decision-making in building your business. But most importantly, go through the marketing process and you'll end up with a marketing plan. With a marketing plan, you'll find yourself less stressed out, and more confident about all of those advertising and promotional opportunities that cross your desk.

Desired Outcome

The process of marketing has always been very definable, as shown above. However, the desired outcome portion of our definition sometimes creates more questions than answers. The fact is, there is only one desired outcome for marketing, and that is to persuade people to do something.

To understand how marketing can persuade, we must first understand how people make buying decisions. Those who study the field of consumer behavior understand that people buy for their reasons, not ours. Marketing people know that. They understand what psychologists have known for a long time, that there is a specific process that everyone goes through before making a buying decision: The 5 Steps of Persuasion.

There are five steps in the persuasion process:

(1) unawareness, (2) awareness, (3) comprehension, (4) conviction, and (5) action.

Experts know that everyone goes through this process as part of their buying decision. Great marketers understand that the desired outcome of marketing is to move people along this process.

Advertising generally uses a mass approach. In other words, an ad has limits on what it can or can't do. For example, if your target is in the stage of "awareness," an ad that educates is perfect to move them to the stage of "comprehension." But that ad likely will not move to "conviction." This is why advertising, or any other single tactic, has limited success: The majority of the people seeing your message may be in different stages of persuasion.

You can see why advertising by itself is inefficient for a doctor in marketing his or her practice. It would require many, many messages trying to hold people's hands while they moved along the steps of persuasion - at their own pace - before the advertising would work. No wonder by itself advertising is such a hit-or-miss proposition.

On the other hand, a marketing approach would identify where your target audience stands on the steps of persuasion, and would target specific messages, each with a specific purpose. This increases efficiency and maximizes results. The question is, how do we put that effort together?

The First Step

As a first step in creating an effective marketing plan, we must create the situation analysis, or as we said earlier, "who are we and where are we?" One way to accomplish this is to place the steps of persuasion in five columns across a piece of paper (see above). On the first row, write the number of your current patients that fit under each category. On the second row, write the number of inactive patients you estimate fit under each row. And on the third row, write how non-patients within your target marketing areas fit in each area.

This third row is obviously the most difficult one. It could take an incredible amount of time and effort. Or you can take a short cut, and simply make some educated estimates about where the people in your community stand on the persuasion chart.

Use the persuasion chart process, create your own, or follow a completely traditional marketing research process; but the bottom line is, you must have a better understanding of where your target audiences stand in the process of choosing whether or not to come to a doctor and which doctor to visit.

In future columns, I'll take you through the other steps in the marketing process, including setting realistic marketing goals, and creating and implementing successful marketing strategies and tactics. But in this column, I want to leave you with maybe the most powerful concept in marketing - the advantage of listening.

The Advantage of Listening

Listening can be extremely comprehensive. It could include primary marketing research or secondary research that has already been done. It could include what your statistics or records tell you, or what your patient tell you or your staff.

Listening, in my opinion, is the most powerful concept in marketing. I recommend that a must strategy in every doctor's marketing plan is to listen. Think about it:

• Do you think patients are more satisfied with doctors who listen, or those who don't?
• Look at the most successful small businesses in your community. Do you think they have a handle on what their customers think, do and say? Absolutely.
• Do you think you would benefit if you started listening to your patients in order to better understand where they stand on the steps of persuasion