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At Silkin Management Group, we try to teach our clients the most cost effective means of marketing for new patients.  A great deal of money can be spent on marketing efforts with little or no return which can leave a bad taste in ones mouth about marketing.  When this happens, doctors often give up on doing any type of marketing and hope that new patients/clients just walk in the door.  Wasting money on ineffective marketing and/or giving up on doing any type of marketing are not solutions that will result in an expanding practice.  A missing ingredient here is often the use of a simple but vital marketing tool called “surveying”.

Per the World Book Dictionary, survey means “to take a broad, general or comprehensive view of, to view, examine or consider.” In other words, it means to carefully examine something as a whole and/or in detail.

Surveying is vital to any successful marketing campaign, as most Silkin Management Group clients will tell you.  Surveying takes the mystery out of anything because it enables you to get a very specific idea of what the needs and wants are of both existing and potential patients, and can help find out what works and what doesn’t work when selling a product or service.

Surveys can save you time and wasted effort.  By properly utilizing surveys you will not be shooting in the dark when you implement a new idea. You will not be left in the dark wondering why new patients aren’t coming through your front door in the numbers you expected from your internal marketing activities or mailers and yellow pages ad, or why some patients/clients don’t come back.

Have you ever wondered, as many brand new Silkin Management Group clients have, why new patients/clients have dropped off even though you are doing the same things you have done for many years?  It may well be that the things you’ve been doing for years are no longer appropriate to the present environment, especially given the change in the economic climate these days.  Such a scenario is likely caused by failure to survey in a timely manner and making adjustments accordingly.

There are simply answers to marketing problems that just cannot be answered from any source but your patients/clients themselves.  Thus a key marketing motto is “know before you go”, which is done by surveying.

How To Construct A Survey

Following are some basic guidelines that Silkin Management Group teaches its clients on how to put a survey together.  Although surveys will vary practice to practice, there are some basic points to follow when writing your survey.

1. Tell your patient/client, either verbally or as a written introduction to the survey itself, why you are doing the survey and thank them for participating.

1. Ask only relevant questions in the survey.  Restrict your questions to important factors that will actually tell you important information that you can put to use. For example, when surveying existing patients about why or how they ended up in your practice, one good question would be:  “What prompted you to come see us rather than going to another practice?”

1. Keep the survey brief.  It should take no more than 3 to 5 minutes to complete.  If the survey is too long the participants may feel annoyed, overburdened, bored, or will not respond.

1. Construct a survey that asks for specific answers.  Answers such as a simple “yes” or “no” are helpful, but it is even more useful if the question sets it up to provide you with even more information (i.e. see the example question above).

1. Allow the participant to remain anonymous if they so choose.

1. Provide a way for them to receive feedback on the survey if they so desire.

1. If appropriate, set a deadline for the receipt of the surveys. If you do this, make sure you tell them why you have a deadline and when it is.

1. At the end of the survey make sure you thank the patient/client for their help.

1. If you are mailing out the survey (as opposed to doing it in office), include a self-addressed stamped envelope so it is easy for them to send it back in.

Surveys can be done in person, handed out to patients/clients to fill out while in the office, done over the phone or done via mail or email. At Silkin, we recommend for starters handing them out to patients/clients who are in the office as you can exert more control on getting them done that way.  Once you have a workable basic number of surveys done through the in-office method and have preliminary trends revealed, you can refine your survey and get more numbers done through the other methods mentioned above.

In the future Silkin Management Group will publish more articles on surveying including how to tabulate them and provide some sample surveys that can be used. Keep your eye out for them.

Through over 25 years of delivering management consulting and training, Silkin Management Group has taught its clients a wide variety of marketing techniques that are easy to use and get results. Surveying is just one of the tools taught to Silkin clients. If you would like more information about Silkin Management Group you can contact us at:  info@SilkinManagementGroup.com