So you might be wondering what the first step is to get started with your marketing. Well, we recommend starting with what we call a Marketing Execution Plan (MEP).

1. It helps you understand your patient avatar

Unlike a typical bulky marketing plan that gathers dust on your bookshelf, an MEP is a concise guide that tells you exactly what you need to know…

• It identifies who you’re trying to attract
• What their emotional drivers are
• What they’re experiencing before they see you
• And, what they might experience after you help them

2. It helps you understand your competition

It helps you get a clear picture of your competition so you can understand who else is attempting to attract that ideal customer that you’re after.

3. It helps you evaluate your website

You must know how your website and marketing materials stack up visually. A marketing executive plan enables you to identify what you should be doing at every stage of the funnel. By using a customer value journey, we can see every step that a prospect must go through. From the awareness stage to the engagement and conversion stage, until, eventually, they’re out in the world saying nice things about you and recommending you to all of their friends and family.

So what we need to do is we need to document those steps for every single customer avatar that you’re trying to attract. That is the essence of the marketing execution plan. It should provide you with the foundational tools and tactics that you can employ to the best effect to realise your goals.

Most eye surgery marketing doesn’t work

After working with healthcare clinics for the last 20 years, we’ve noticed that many people are doing marketing wrong. They have websites, email campaigns, videos, a social media presence, but a lot of it doesn’t work. In fact, in most healthcare marketing and many other industries, there’s a long-standing joke:

“50% of my marketing budget is working, but I’m just not sure which 50%.”

This is one of the biggest reasons there’s a real lack of strategy in marketing in general, particularly in the healthcare industry.

Why we ALWAYS start with a plan

Ten years ago, to address this problem, we started insisting that every one of our clients go through what we call a marketing boot camp as part of the marketing execution process. What this does is it gets you ready to compete in the market. Essentially, it helps the people that most want to find you if you are what they’re looking for.

By establishing the essence of what you offer, we can identify the people who want you and those who don’t. Remember, there’s plenty of patients that, upon seeing you in the market, will not like you. We don’t want to spend money reaching them because that’s a waste. So instead, we want to laser focus on who you should be speaking to so that your marketing budget is best spent and so you can be the top competitor in the market for the people you most want to reach.