Building a Physician Relations Marketing Program
You’re ready for a marketing plan that expands your physician network and explodes your patient referrals without expensive lunches and time wasters.
Physician relations marketing is the best way to continually grow doctor referral relationships, but it needs to be implemented correctly to produce results.
So, in this blog, I’m going to tell you how to build a killer physician liaison marketing program!
Hiring A Physician Liaison
Choosing the right person to be your physician liaison is vital to the health of the physician relations marketing program.
You need an individual ready to devote themselves to building and maintaining strong doctor referral relationships.
This individual can be someone that may already be part of your team, an eager new graduate, or an experienced professional. There is not a strict physician liaison ideal profile.
It is important that you hire for full-time to ensure the new physician liaison hire is committed to the position and will have the needed time to grow the marketing.
Full-time physician liaisons produce greater results and help you avoid costly employee turnovers.
Provide a physician liaison training program for your physician liaisons. This will guarantee your physician liaisons are professionals and posses the highest level of training and skill set to produce results.
5 Qualities to look for when hiring a physician liaison:
- Well educated
- Prompt
- Organized
- Charismatic
- Driven
Provide A Physician Liaison Training Program
This is a BIG one and can be the difference between BIG results!
Provide a professional physician liaison training program. Physician liaison training will provide your physician liaisons with the skills and resources to confidently market to physicians to convert patients.
Physician liaisons training equips your physician liaisons with the necessary skills to tackle challenges and gain that competitive advantage.
It also provides physicians with a level of confidence that their physician liaisons are the most professional and successful practice ambassadors.
Advantages of a Physician Liaison Training Program
- Greater results
- Consistency
- Professionalism
- Confidence when marketing to doctors
- Structure and organization
- Strategic marketing plans
- Proper tracking
- ROI reports
- Easy management tools
A Strategic Physician Relations Marketing Plan
Make it real, create structure in your physician relations marketing by building a strategic marketing plan.
Go past base level theories or off the top of your mind planning and create a strategic marketing roadmap based on analytics.
In order to know if it’s working you need to know where you are. It’s time to pull the numbers and run an EMR / EHR report.
Use the numbers in your EMR reports to develop your referral marketing report. Collect averages, identify patterns and trends, target weak areas, and develop your benchmarks and goals.
This report is the blueprint for building a strategic and effective marketing plan. You practice audit provides you with invaluable insight, direction, and benchmarks to measure your success.
Developing a physician relations marketing plan based on analytics creates the efficiency and effectiveness you need for profitable results. It also allows for ease of communication between physician liaison and management, as well as, clear and easy management.
The marketing plan will be your complete detailed plan and steps to take to reach your revenue and patient referral goals. This includes territories, targets, frequency and follow-up meetings and so much more!
Marketing that Converts Patient Referrals
Physician relations marketing is a fairly competitive field. This means it’s not enough to just send out a physician liaison that is friendly and can schedule pricey lunches.
It’s crucial that your physician liaison is trained to tackle challenges, face hurdles, and equipped with the skills to confidently market to physicians without lengthy closes and expensive treats.
Physician liaisons should be trained and instructed to professionally represent the practice and effectively communicate while marketing to develop lucrative relationships.
It is also important to understand the needed and appropriate ratio to quality v. quantity when it comes to marketing to referring doctors.
The Key: The key to marketing to physicians that converts patients is to truly understand, recognize, and address their NEEDS & WANTS. By marketing to their needs and wants you can create VALUE in the relationship and create actions and processes to enhance the relationship.
Keys to a lucrative Physician Referral Relationship:
- Staying persistent after “no”
- Ability to directly communicate with the physician
- Create value to the referring doctor
- Personalize the relationship
- Consistency and useful follow-up
- Enhance referral experience
Physician Liaison Tracking & Reporting
Believe it or not, this is one of the most ignored processes and the lack of proper tracking has lead to mismanaged and subpar physician relations marketing.
Just like any marketing campaign, physician liaison marketing requires organized and consistent tracking processes.
It’s important to track efforts, conversations, marketing visits, etc. Not only will this improve management of the physician liaison marketing but help you develop tangible reports of the success of the program.
An organized tracking system can be the make or break of your marketing, especially in team environments.
Meeting With Your Physician Liaison
Create an environment with regular meetings with your physician liaisons with prepared agendas and have your physicians partake.
The closer in a relationship your physician liaisons are to the physicians and involved in regular meetings to discuss the marketing the more successful they will be.
At the end of the day, physician liaisons that aren’t with their physicians will lack value, It’s all about providing the highest quality of patient care and it takes the doctors to do so.
If you don’t create the structure of regular marketing meetings that involve the team you’ll have miscommunication, inconsistency and stagnate marketing.
Most importantly, building a killer physician liaison marketing program means making the investment of time, resources, and money.
Invest in your physician liaisons by providing physician liaison training and the security of full-time.
Invest in your physician liaison training to provide your referring physicians with professional representatives there to create value and streamline referrals.
Invest in the resources that create structure and organization to develop efficient workflows.
And always invest the time it takes to meet and grow your physician liaison marketing program.
Now go build lucrative physician referral relationships!
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