by Juan Nodarse

If the doctors I talk to are any indication, their frustration with marketing is growing and growing. Why do doctors get so frustrated with their marketing efforts? Why do some marketing efforts work for some, but fail for others?

This article takes a unique perspective in addressing the frustrations and confusion many doctors face when dealing with marketing issues - by considering strategic marketing versus tactical marketing as an opportunity for you to reduce or even eliminate the frustration and confusion associated with marketing your practice.

What is the difference between a strategic and tactical approach to marketing your practice?

To understand the difference between strategic and tactical thinking, you have to understand the essential difference between strategies and tactics. Both are required to make your practice a success - but, all too often, doctors spend too much time on the smaller, tactical issues, rather than on the larger, longer-range, strategic ones. In short, they spend too much time working in their practice and not enough time working on it.

In order to achieve any goal, you have to have a plan in place. That plan usually consists of one or more strategies - general directions or intentions that lead you to the goal. The actions you take to follow these directions or act upon these intentions are tactical by nature.

Imagine you have a very simple goal in mind - you want to travel from your home to New York for a vacation. There are a variety of strategies available to you: You could fly, you could travel by car, you could take a bus or a train. These are obvious strategies. Less-obvious strategies are available as well: You could walk or hitchhike; you could package yourself up in a crate and go parcel post (don't laugh, someone's done this before).

Some strategies are inherently more risky than others (flying coach versus cargo, for example). But identifying the strategy is just half of the battle. Once you've selected your strategy, you actually have to do something. You see, a strategy helps you focus on the tactics that are best suited for that strategy.

This process - referred to as planning - is one of the side benefits of thinking strategically. The clarity that comes from adopting a strategic plan can be tremendously empowering, because you are able to compare available tactics against the strategy and determine very quickly which are appropriate and which are not.

For example, buying an airline ticket may be an appropriate tactic if you're going to fly (or ship yourself) to New York. But building a crate is a tactic that only works for one strategy. No matter the price of nails and boards, you're not likely to buy them if you've already landed on the strategy of traveling with other humans, rather than with the luggage.

Now, while our example was rather silly, I use it to make a point. Doctors are constantly confronted by "tactical" solutions to their problems. Some are right, some aren't. And even more are sort of right and sort of not right. It can be terribly confusing and horribly expensive.

It's human nature to default to those tactics with which we feel most comfortable - and that means we doom ourselves to continue repeating what we know, whether or not it's worked for us in the past, or whether or not what we heard has worked for other doctors. You see, without a clear strategy for their practice, the doctor has no standard for evaluating the relative significance of one tactic against another. The result is slow growth or even worse, stagnation.

Why a practice strategy can make all the difference in your future.

There's a second reason having a clear practice strategy is key to your growth and prosperity: innovation.

Too many times, doctors feel as if they are constantly responding to market forces that are beyond their control. A major reason for this is that doctors are often managing on data collected in the past and spend a great deal of time trying to interpret this historical information, which loses its relevance over time.

Doctors who adopt a strategic approach to their growth and development still track what they've done - but that information is only part of the data they evaluate when making forward-looking decisions. Strategies are based on careful understanding of customer needs, competitive situations and other market-making trends discovered through observation, careful listening, and primary and secondary research.

In the United States, growth of market share is increasingly dependent upon clear, value-driven business strategies. Doctors should be thinking about how to improve their patient relationships. They must consider how to open themselves to new markets or reposition their USP (unique selling proposition) in a relevant and compelling manner.

You see, the total number of consumers in the U.S. is still growing, but at a significantly slower pace than it did over the past 50 years. And given that it is much harder and more expensive to attract new patients, it is imperative that doctors eliminate a tactical, "shoot-from-the-hip" mentality and begin implementing a more strategic, patient-focused approach to marketing their practice.

If you are not strategically addressing your particular marketing situation, guarding your existing patient relationships and aggressively going after new ones, you will eventually be under siege. Revenues will decline. Profits will evaporate.

Having a well-defined marketing strategy will allow you to be more creative in how you approach prospective patients, and maybe even open up entirely new markets you've never explored.

Strategic innovation in positioning, products and service can lead to significant breakthroughs and, more importantly, make you appear unique, different than the others, and the doctor of choice in your market.