E-Book Excerpt: Creating a Successful Marketing Plan for Your Integrative Practice

Whether you’re starting a new practice or building up an existing one, two things are scarce—time and resources. Now that you know the basic concepts of marketing for an integrative practice, it’s time to build a plan to ensure you don’t waste time or money.

The Successful Marketing Plan

1. Marketing research. Start by researching both your market and your potential consumers from a broad perspective. Your local library is a great place to start, and many offer free access to online resources and databases. Identify trends in the greater integrative healthcare industry, including market size, consumer habits, market growth and decline, and any other relevant tidbits that help paint a picture of the field in general. This should be a Big Picture review. No need to delve into the nitty gritty—we’ll get to that later.
2. Target market. As we mentioned earlier, a precise target market identifies who will most likely become your patients. Try to identify two or three “segments,” groups of clients based on characteristics such as behavior, demographics, geographic, and psychographics. There are different levels of market segmentation. Mass marketing is more general, while niche marketing is a more closely defined group. Local marketing focuses on local consumers and individual marketing looks at the individual needs and preferences of a consumer. For example, an integrative healthcare practice might target student athletes, or clients at a local fitness center, or attendees at an annual wellness fair.
3. Positioning. How your target market sees you is positioning. Your brand and marketing messages should clearly communicate how you want to be perceived by prospective patients.
4. Competition. You must analyze who your competitors are and how your services are different. Compare price points, target markets, and even their current marketing efforts. The more knowledge you have of your competitors, the better you will be able to position yourself to stand out.
5. Strategy. Ask yourself, “How will I find and attract my most likely patients?” This is the basis of what your market strategy should explain. Look at the entire market and breakdown specific tactics, including events, direct mail, email, social media, content, couponing, webinars, seminars, collaborations, and any other activities that will help you gain access to patients.
6. Budget. Develop a monthly schedule of what you plan to spend on marketing efforts. In addition, for each tactic, determine a metric for success, as well as a metric that tells you to stop that activity if it’s not generating enough ROI.
7. Metrics. You can use a simple Excel spreadsheet to compare your budget against the actual ROI. You’ll want to track tactics over a 30 to 60-day period and evaluate the performance. If a certain tactic is bringing in patients, continue that program, and get rid of anything that is not. Keep in mind, if you’re not bringing in new patients or meeting your goals, you need to improve your marketing.

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the e-book, Marketing Workbook for Integrative Healthcare Professionals. To assess the full text, click here.