For many specialists, marketing is as simple as placing an ad in the local newspaper, repainting the waiting area, or sending direct mail to residents. However, this is a crucial process in a business that helps in improving sales and promoting business. The key to successfully marketing your products or services is to create a strategic marketing plan that includes activities based on good research and specified goals and promptly implemented and reviewed. The strategy serves as a road map for achieving your marketing objectives.
What is a Go-to-Market Strategy?
A go-to-market strategy is a tactical action plan that lays out the steps that must be taken to succeed in a new market or with a new consumer. It can be used for various things, including the launch of new products and services, the re-launch of your company or brand, or even the expansion of an existing product into a new market.
Why do you need a Go-to-Market Strategy?
Even the best ideas might fail if they aren’t implemented properly
Developing a go-to-market strategy can avoid many mistakes and oversights that might derail new product launches. Even if the product is well-designed and unique, poor product-market fit and oversaturation can derail a launch.
While a go-to-market strategy cannot ensure success, it can assist you in managing expectations and ironing out any hitches before investing in bringing a product to market. We have a free go-to-market strategy template that can help you design a strategy that presents your product before your target audience to help you with this process.
9 Common Marketing Strategy Plans
Determine your marketing objectives
Once you’ve decided to advertise your practice, you’ll need to set attainable and quantifiable goals for the next 18 to 24 months. This time frame allows you to arrange activities aligned with your marketing objectives around community events. For example, you may find a breast cancer walkathon or speak at your community’s annual health fair. It is not advisable to plan specific actions for more than two years due to the frequent changes in the healthcare environment.
Conduct an audit of your marketing efforts
One of the popular marketing strategy plans is the marketing audit, which thoroughly examines all marketing initiatives carried out in your practice over the last three years. Be as thorough as possible, reviewing every announcement, advertisement, phonebook ad, open house, booklet, and seminar to see if it was successful.
Conduct market analysis
Market research is used to create a realistic image of your practise, the community in which you work, and your current standing within that community. Using this research, you may develop somewhat accurate estimates about future growth in the neighbourhood, uncover competitive characteristics, and explore atypical prospects (such as offering patients nutritional counselling, smoking cessation programmes, or massage therapy).
Analyse the findings
After that, you must assess the raw data you’ve gathered and distil it into actionable insights that will serve as the foundation for choosing which marketing strategy plan makes the most sense and yield the best results for your practice.
Determine who your target audience is
You should be able to determine your practice’s “target audience” with the help of your market research analysis, which is the exact group of patients to whom you’d like to direct your marketing efforts. Patients of a certain age, gender, area, payer type, or language/ethnicity, as well as patients with certain clinical needs, could be among your target audience.
Make a financial plan
Before you can decide which exact marketing methods to use to reach your objectives, you must first review your financial data and create a marketing budget. Marketing budgets differ depending on the type of market a practice serves, its age, and whether it has previously marketed.
Create a marketing strategy
You may start defining a particular marketing strategy plan that will meet your goals, reach your target audience, and grow your patient base once you have your budget in place. Keep in mind that your efforts should be focused on the aspects of your practice that can be leveraged to establish a unique value in the minds of patients and referral sources.
Make an implementation plan
An implementation timetable is a timeline that shows when and by whom marketing activities will be carried out. The budget estimations for the 24-month term should also be included in the timetable and the cost of each marketing action.
Establish an evaluation procedure
A marketing plan’s worth is determined by its effectiveness, which necessitates careful and timely implementation, as well as ongoing monitoring and evaluation of results. It’s critical to compare your performance to your established benchmarks while setting your objectives.
Conclusion
The process of developing a marketing strategy plan that describes what your objectives are, what programmes you’ll employ to reach those objectives, who is responsible for those metrics, and when you’ll achieve those goals is known as strategic marketing planning. It’s critical to plan your marketing tactics so that you can assess and grow on successful efforts while changing or discontinuing poor ones.