Marketing Agencies

Marketing is essential to the success of a health business, whether it be a clinic or private practice. Many doctors, nurses and aesthetic practitioners think that Marketing means handing over your marketing to a marketing agency, getting them to do all the work and do it all for you. This is completely the wrong way to do marketing and hiring a marketing agency is one of the quickest way to burn through your profits and crash your business.

In my opinion, there are 5 reasons to avoid traditional marketing and I will share what you should consider doing instead.

Marketing Agency Fees as Overhead Expenses

Hiring a marketing agency adds a huge overhead expense to your profit and loss equation. Marketing agencies don’t come cheap and they shouldn’t do if they are any good.  A cheap agency is unlikely to deliver on their promise of driving leads and sales. However, every month, even if you’ve got a good marketing agency, you will have to work extra hard to pay the marketing agency. Have you done the analysis, have you done the maths to show that your business has the cash reserves to commit to this significant overhead? Marketing rarely produces results immediately. How long can your business survive if there is a significant lag between the marketing expenditure and the marketing results?

Return on Investment - the ROI - of a Marketing Agency

A marketing agency will often provide metrics such as click rates and website visitor numbers, but you as a doctor, nurse or aesthetic practitioner, you are only really interested in sales. It can be really difficult to actually know how effective the marketing campaign you are paying for is.  I know many clinic owners who spend thousands each month on an agency and they can’t tell me exactly what the ROI is. It’s very difficult.

Quantifying the return on investment with external agencies can be akin to navigating through murky waters. The metrics provided may not always align with the clinic's objectives, making it really challenging to judge the true impact of the marketing spend.

The Market Niche

The third reason to avoid a marketing agency is that you as a clinic owner know your niche better than anyone else. 

You know your niche - the sorts of people you can help better than anyone in a marketing agency. You know what content resonates with your niche and you know where they hang out on the internet. 

Brand Identity

You have your own style of messaging that has been refined after years in practice. You talk to your patients and clients in a certain way that projects your authority, your values and your personality. Entrusting a marketing agency with your marketing will inevitably derail your style of messaging - your style that authentically reflects the character and your principles. People will easily spot the difference between your messages and those of a marketing agency and - trust me - no one likes to be marketed to.

 Your Marketing Skills

The final reason why you should not employ a marketing agency is that if you do, you will never develop your own marketing skills.

Now don’t get me wrong. Marketing is not easy and it takes time to develop marketing skills. When I say this to my colleagues, they say things like “I haven’t got time, I’m too busy” or “I am not interested in Marketing, I just want someone else to do it for me”.

Well if that's the case, here’s the bad news, if you run your own clinic or practice, you must be interested in marketing for 2 reasons: firstly,  if you have marketing skills, you will never be at the mercy of an external agency who can charge you whatever they like and not be accountable. And secondly, you will never be able to tell the difference between good marketing and bad marketing. This second reason is particularly important because that leads me to what you should do instead.

In-House Marketing

If you are a solo-prenerur, you can do it yourself with your own content and messaging based on your unique knowledge of your niche. In this respect, use the power of Owner-Led Video Marketing - Short and Long Form:

In my experience, owner-led video marketing has proven to be a really potent tool. Both short-form and long-form videos, when made carefully and thoughtfully, have the ability to forge a personal connection with your audience. The sincerity and authenticity conveyed through video can massively boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

You can even ask your own loyal customers for help with video. Yes, and you guessed it, marketing agencies have a name for this - they call this UGC - user generated content. Anyone with a smartphone, can produce and distribute their own UGC and connect directly with their audience and generate leads.

Summary

Look, let’s be clear about this. Marketing agencies are never going to care about your business as much as you do. They don’t know your niche as well as you do and they will never message as well as you do.

They almost certainly have a long list of clients, most with a marketing budget much, much bigger than yours, so you and your business are never going to be at the top of their list of things to do.

That’s why you should develop the marketing skills for yourself. Eventually, as your business grows and your team grows, you may not need or even want to do all the marketing yourself but you will be able to design the marketing for your own clinic and business and incorporate it into your business systems.

Lets Connect

I would love to hear about YOU and your business. Are you a solopreneur health professional? Do you own a clinic? 

Do you do your own marketing? Do you think I am wrong? Do you think it’s best use an agency?