Written by You’ve learned to market your solo practice with ease and you’ve had some success. Congratulations! Now it’s time to set your sites on bigger things. You’ve decided to grow your efforts into a group practice.
Is the way you market a group practice the same as the work you did in your solo practice?
The answer is that many of the marketing principles that you use will be the same, but the strategies will be different.
You’ll also want to make some pretty important decisions as to the type of group practice you want to have. This will make a difference in how and if you conduct some of these marketing principles.
Once such example is the type of people you want working with you in this group practice. Will they be Independent Contractors or Employees?
There are pros and cons to be said for both approaches. An Independent Contractor status will give you and the other group practice members a significant amount of freedom. While an Employee status will give you more control and the other group practice members more security.
Examples of the employee status may be your ability to provide incentives, supervision and significant structure to the practice.
With either approach, you’ll want to ensure that each of the members of your practice have their own brand, niche and target market defined. This will strengthen the marketing efforts. And don’t be afraid to bring several professionals into your group practice. This will strengthen your ability to market the practice and give you a great reputation in the community.
To be most effective in marketing your practice, you’ll need to ensure that both network marketing and online marketing are taking place. You will focus much of your efforts in online marketing while the other professionals in the practice focus on networking.
Market Through Networking
Simply speaking at a local event, attending a chamber event or a network marketing event is all that is needed for your professionals to get these referrals. Your practice gets a great reputation in the market place, more referrals, and the practice has just marketed another specialty. Win win!
What I love most about requiring them to do this, is that you are strengthening their marketing skills and helping them to be recognized as the industry expert in their specialty. The busier your people are, the stronger your practice becomes.
When you do network for your practice, make sure you are focusing on the practice as a whole and not a specific specialty. For example, your practice has multiple locations, only serves a certain demographic, or utilizes a specific approach.
Online Marketing
As the owner, online marketing will fall more on your shoulders and will include things like, SEO, website development, advertising, blogging and social media.
This can sound pretty overwhelming, when you’re looking at doing all of these things yourself.
If you can outsource things like your web development, Google Adwords, Advertising and SEO, that will save you loads of time and headache. If you can’t however, break it down into smaller chunks and do one of them at a time.
Trying to do it all yourself and all at one time is a recipe for stress and disaster.
That said, there are some tasks that the others in your practice can support you with. Blogging is one example.
Having each of the practitioners in your practice take turns writing a blog will keep the marketing content flowing and take some of the pressure off of you.
If you have employees, rather than independent contractors, you can offer an incentive. An example might be for those who blog more than twice in a one month period. If each employee is writing about their specialty, you have a variety of content that is consistently being pushed out online. Everyone wins!
Market Metrics
One thing this experience will teach you, is that not every marketing effort will yield the best results for your practice.
It’s important to measure everything you do so you can make the most educated decisions possible.
There are a number of tools at your disposal to help with this. Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Facebook Insights, Ads Manager and a number of other sites and apps will let you know what’s working and what isn’t.
You’ll want to try a number of different approaches and test each one to make the best decision possible.
What are the keys to success in managing your group practice? Share your victories in the comments below!