Know Your Tribe and Speak Their Language

I like to refer to a practice's patient population as a “tribe,” because like a tribe they’re a group of individuals who are tightly bound together and immediately identifiable by commonalities. So what’s the theme of your tribe? It should be something that defines your practice still further— that’s how narrowed down I want to get.

Six months or a year into your practice, you’re established with space, staff, website, systems and other elements you need to have in place. But if you haven’t settled on a niche market that works for you and can bring in clientele, now is the time to take advantage of that opportunity. You’ve had months to gather data, and this is where your tracking, your analytics, and even your office staff come into play in helping you arrange and analyze information.

This doesn’t just apply to new practices. Established practitioners may not have the flexibility in their business to do what I suggested a new business owner do and try out lots of niches. In this situation, too, the best way to go is to use demographics to hone in on that niche. An established practice will have an even greater body of data with which to work.

When you first start out, you'll probably feel like all you want is patients. You want them to come through your door, and you want them to pay you for what you do. You certainly need that, but probably just as important, or more, is their demographic information, especially at this stage of the game.

A person might come for three visits, feel better, and leave. You may say to yourself “Why didn’t they stay for twelve sessions?” or “Why did that patient never refer anybody?” If a patient referred a lot of people, it’s equally important for you to know that. Of course, the answer to these questions lies only in that client’s brain, but we can get very useful data-based answers to these questions using demographics, and those answers can help you grow your practice.

You want to know what neighborhood people are from, how old they are, whether they are male or female, what they do for a living, their marital status, whether they have a family. All these things are hugely important because they help you know who is coming to you, and therefore whom you can target.

If you use this data correctly, you can make your niche incredibly specific. If you start seeing a lot of female soccer players, you can start to say you specialize in female soccer players. Or high school and college level girls’ soccer. You might be surprised, but when you start getting those girls’ soccer players in, pretty soon you’ll be getting the whole family jumping in. A lot of average people have the mentality that if they’re already at the doctor, they might as well come in for whatever malady they might have. And there’s more business.

Of course, you need a way to gather all this data. I use a very scientific approach that I call... the intake form. That’s part of the beauty of being in the healthcare field. Your patient will write out any information under the sun for you on this intake form, and almost never question why any of it is needed. They’ll give you their emergency contact, full name, health insurance, social security, date of birth—the works.

At my practice, we even ask for e-mails and cell phone numbers so we can keep in contact with them. The fact that we ask for so much information on our intake form and the fact that most doctors have now gone to EMR (electronic medical records) means that if we have to pull this information up for marketing purposes somewhere down the road, it’s a home run. Many doctors don’t even know that they already have all this information right at their disposal. I see people paying marketers tons of money because they feel like they need to have a mailing list. You already have a mailing list! You don’t need to collect new addresses for an e-mail campaign; you already have that! If marketers were smarter, they’d be coming to doctors for our lists. They’d find out it’s against the law for us to sell our lists off to anyone else, but we can definitely use them for ourselves.

We not only have our own giant lists, but we can narrow them down. We can target them by age group, by likes and dislikes—essentially any relevant category. It’s a surprising number of doctors who never even think to capitalize on this for marketing purposes.

You can then use your data to find your tribe. Narrow down your data. Get as specific as you possibly can. There are a lot of other variables to throw in as well that will vary depending on your practice—find them and include them. Don’t stop when you think you have enough. Tabulate what symptoms they come in with, what procedures they usually end up getting, and who refer them. And not just who is doing the referring, but whether they are in-house, through your referral network, or not.

Let’s step off to the side for a minute and take a quick look at the clothing industry. One store you’ve probably seen across the country is American Apparel. Maybe you’ve bought clothes there too; a lot of people have. They have a theme, don’t they? They stand out; they’re different. They don’t have logos on their clothes, and that appeals to a certain frame of mind and a certain demographic. Those people become customers, as they wouldn’t necessarily if American Apparel just said, “We’re a clothing store. We sell all kinds of clothes.”

As another example, let’s take a look at Disney. I love Disney. It's a really intelligently run business. Their theme is “The Happiest Place on Earth.” And it’s not something you can argue. You go in and you’re convinced it’s the happiest place on earth.

Whatever kind of doctor you are, I want you to step into the shoes of a doctor of anthropology for a minute. Remember that your tribe has its own unique culture, customs, and language. I want your practice to be themed so strongly that it becomes a part of their culture. I want your tribe of patients to come to you and say, “I need this service or procedure to be performed only by you. I only want to see you, because you’re the doctor I want to take care of this exact condition.”

In essence, I want you to give people something to talk about. Have a theme that’s catchy like a song on the radio, and people will talk about you like a song on the radio. That’s a very realistic goal that you can make happen. There is someone for everyone, and if you can target those people, they will come to you. As long as you target the correct patient for the correct service at the correct practice, you have the key to success. In addition, sending the right message is vital. Knowing the right ways to get the message out is hugely important, but it works best in conjunction with the right message. Knowing the right message is another challenge we face in our field. As with other challenges I’ve mentioned, there’s no one pre-set formula for success, and because this is real life so much depends on the individual person.