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

In previous articles, Silkin Management Group has provided information on the use of surveys in marketing including the basics of how to put a survey together.

As previously discussed, surveys are the key to marketing success. It is not uncommon to see money wasted on marketing when surveys are not done prior to any marketing activity. This would include, but not be limited to designing office brochures, sending out a neighborhood mailing, putting together an effective yellow page ad or something as simple as asking for a referral.  You certainly don’t want to waste money on ineffective marketing and, as a result, feel that marketing “just doesn’t work”.  Unfortunately many doctors end up feeling that way because they don’t know some simple basics of marketing technology.  In fact most of the new clients of Silkin Management Group come to us with that attitude.  But once they learn a few of the essential points that make marketing successful (surveying is at the top of the list), that attitude normally changes because they can now get predictable results with their marketing activities.

Assuming you have gotten a survey written and completed by a good number of your patients/clients (we suggest getting at least 50 done in order to get a good trend on the answers), what do you now do with the surveys to hand?  The first step is to tabulate them.

TABULATING THE SURVEYS

1. As mentioned above, you need to get an adequate number of responses to see some sort of trend in a majority of the answers.  It usually takes about 50 surveys or so to start seeing a clear majority trend.  If you do not have enough surveys back to get such a trend, the first step is to get more surveys done either by increasing your sampling or extending any deadline you put on the time for completion.

1. Collect all survey results and tabulate each question by tallying responses.  People’s answers can vary on open-ended questions, in which case you should group similar responses together.  For example, let’s say your survey question was “Describe the perfect ________ (put your doctor type here i.e. “dentist, veterinarian, optometrist)”.  If in response to this question 5 of the people surveyed said “a happy person”, 7 said “a cheerful, engaging doctor” and 10 said “he/she is nice and helpful”, these answers could all be grouped together in one category as they are all a similar response. This category answer might be “22 – cheerful, helpful and engaging”.

1. Once you have the raw number tallies of people’s responses, change these raw numbers into percentages based upon the total number of surveys done. You should now have percentages that show you a clear majority, percentage-wise, of the key answers.

1. Note down any individual who wanted feedback on the survey and make sure you send them any data requested.

1. Use the high percentage answers to create your marketing activity in whatever area you are working on. For example, let’s say the answer given in point #2 above is the majority answer to a survey question,  the Silkin Management Group consultant would help the doctor work out ways to insure he/she was always cheerful, helpful and engaging with patients/clients, no matter what else was going on or how he/she felt during the day.  As a result, the doctor would undoubtedly get more referrals.

There are a variety of ways to do surveys.  You can have them filled out at the office while a patient/client is waiting, you can send them through the mail or email and you can even look through patient/client files for valuable information.

In fact you might not know it, but you have immediate access to survey information from data that you have been collecting for quite some time – right in your patient files. You will find data in there that will tell you who your current patient/client types are (i.e. age, location and other demographic information).  Gathering this type of information is often one of the first activities that Silkin Management Group clients do when embarking on a marketing program.

If you have a computer data base of patient/client information, gathering this type of demographic data is fairly easy.  If you have only physical files it might take longer, but is still worth it.

To save time you should start with pulling information from your new patient files for the past few months as this should give you a good idea of your overall patient and client base.  Though many doctors are aware to some degree what kind of patients and clients they deliver to, getting the exact data can be eye opening and extremely valuable.

Silkin Management Group suggests to its clients to have their office manager use these files to collect age, occupation and location of their patients/clients. (In the case of a Veterinary office, also collect the species, sex and age of the animals who are patients.)  Then tabulate the information into their appropriate categories and percentages as covered above. From this you will have extremely useful demographic information.

For example you might see that your majority patient/client age is 35-45 years old, that the majority of people live in a certain area of town and work in a certain industry.  This data would then be used in your marketing efforts relative to who you would concentrate on promoting to.

Below is an example survey Silkin Management Group designed and used with many of our clients as a simple, in office survey.

ACME MEDICAL CLINIC

Only through listening to you can we determine what you like and what you don’t like about our practice.  We would therefore appreciate it if you would take a couple of minutes to fill out this survey and return it to the receptionist.

1. How did you first hear about our practice?

1. What prompted you to come see us rather than another practice?

1. Why have you continued to use our services?

1. What do you look for in a good (put doctor type here such as Dentist, Veterinarian, etc.)

1. What do you look for in a good (doctor type) office?

Thank-you very much for your input.

Name (optional): ____________________________________  Date: _____________

Would you like any feedback or personal reply to this survey? _____ Yes _____ No

Silkin Management Group has been delivering management consulting and training to its clients for nearly three decades. During this time Silkin Management Group has educated its clients in marketing basics -  techniques that are easy to use and get results. The above information about surveying is only one of the many tools Silkin clients learn to use.

For additional information about Silkin Management Group, please contact us at:  info@SilkinManagementGroup.com

Having consulted and trained doctors and their staff in over 4000 practices over the last quarter of a century, Silkin Management Group has found that doctors often make the mistake of making the following assumption:

“A patient/client came in for their initial visit, therefore they will continue to come back regularly.”

While this may be true for some patients/clients, it can also be a costly and unfortunate assumption. At Silkin Management Group we teach our clients that, from the time the new patient/client walks through their front door, it is completely up to the doctor and staff whether or not they continue to frequent the practice.  A great deal of this depends on the quality of the communication with the person.  In fact, whether a person even decides to come to your practice in the first place can be a matter of preliminary communication received by them in the form of a promotional piece or letter.

The manner in which a person is treated, communicated with and serviced on that first visit will most certainly establish their initial impression.  Your task, then, is to continue to create a lasting relationship with that person.

Along those lines, Silkin Management Group clients learn that they must assume the position of full responsibility for all communications with their patients/clients. As an example, letters sent out immediately to the people who have come in for their first visit will afford you the opportunity to further educate and instruct your patients/clients. Sending such a letter can instill in them a feeling of importance and value as well as a sense of confidence in the doctor and practice.

Letters in general are an ideal method of cultivating the relationship between you and your patients/clients.  Sending letters should be on ongoing process in any practice.  At Silkin Management Group we recommend a number of types of letters that can be used, including:

• Welcome to the Practice
• Thank-you for a Referral
• Educational Letters
• Newsletters with Current Practice Information
• Financial Information Letters
• Personal Letters of Congratulations (weddings, job promotions, etc.)
• Sympathy Letters
• Re-activation Letters
• Happy Birthday Cards or Letters
• Appointment Reminder Cards or Letters

Silkin Management Group has a variety of example letters that we provide to our clients to help them create these letters. Feel free to contact us if you would like any help in this area.

When you keep a regular flow of communication going with your patients/clients, they will remember you, appreciate you and be much more likely to continue to use you as well as refer new patients to you.  Remember, though, that it is the job of the practice owner to insure that his/her practice initiates and continues to stay in communication with their patients. There is always somewhere else they can go unless you establish and continue to create a relationship with them.  Letters are a very effective means of doing so.

If you would like more information about Silkin Management Group and its consulting and training services, please contact us at: info@Silkinmanagementgroup.com