Issue 1 - January 2005

Are you confusing your customers?
How to avoid sending mixed marketing messages
By Alexis Parian, DC

Take a moment while planning your next ad, promotion, brochure or Web site to consider one of the marketing world’s all-time best admonishments: “Don’t confuse the customer.”

If you keep this adage in mind, you will be well on your way to escaping the consequences of sending mixed marketing messages to prospects and customers. Those consequences? Failed marketing and advertising efforts, lost sales and damaged business reputations.

“Confused customers” (CCs) are created by businesses that unintentionally send out incongruent marketing messages. CCs may be shoppers who never buy or short-term customers. Worse, they may even evolve into bearers of bad publicity — all due to the mental “bait and switch” they experience when businesses communicate one thing but deliver something else.

How you formulate your practice’s marketing messages will help you prevent the confusion that undermines what you are trying to achieve. Keep in mind that marketing messages can be any information you present to the public with the intent of selling your products or services, as with routine marketing and advertising — or they may be present in more subliminal forms.

Every choice you make in active and passive communication “speaks” about your practice and sends a marketing message — your office décor, your style of dress, your Web and print graphics, your office signage and every other “peripheral” detail.

Stop and consider how all of these features can work in agreement to help sell you and your practice — or how they can conflict; creating confusion and mistrust in the minds of your prospective, and current, patients.

Planning is the key to unifying all of these potential messages into a central theme. Otherwise, the various features a practice can present to its audience soon become a stew of confusing and unrelated messages. And it takes carefully chosen specifics to differentiate a practice from its competitors or to identify it as unique or necessary to one or more target markets that it has selected to serve.

Athletic, pediatric and geriatric specialty practices, for example, would all make very different message choices in many areas. How well you refine the list to match your target markets often predicts your success in eliminating CCs and getting the business you want.

If you want to “make music” to your target audiences, here are some tips for making your marketing messages “sing.”

• Know who you are. Don’t expect the public to get a clear grasp on what your practice is about if you haven’t defined it well yourself.

Every practice should have a solid understanding of who it is and how it wants to present itself to the public. Your practice’s identity (branding) must appeal to the target markets you wish to serve. You must then drive these messages consistently.

• Understand your target markets. If you hope to successfully serve certain target markets, knowing their needs and expectations is essential. A prime example of confusing the customer is a downtown weekday practice that advertises an understanding of office workers’ needs but does not offer increased staffing or extended hours either before work or during lunch!

Do your homework so you know what your intended customers want. Go one step farther and find out what you can offer that beats your competition.

• Watch out for subliminal slips. Just as we’ve learned that everything we are and do is “patient education,” the same holds true for our “marketing message.”

Learn to critique every detail — from your intake forms to the stationery, your voice mail message to your practice’s dress code — to be sure they are in agreement with the practice’s identity and the preferences of the target markets. Your chosen markets want to feel at home in your practice, so tailor every detail to seal the deal.

Those office workers and executives the downtown practice would like to attract probably would not be entertained by receiving teddy bear and cartoon appointment reminders or having to look at fluffy country décor in the waiting room.

• Unify your Web, print and advertising artwork. Graphic design is another area where messaging can spiral out of control. If your practice uses different graphics for your Web site, your stationery and your brochure, and then uses different art every time you advertise, your marketing message and logo recognition become confused and diluted.

Get some advice on choosing a single graphic concept to represent your practice consistently.

• Use top-quality text. Whether you are developing Web or brochure content or other important marketing communications, don’t cut corners on your text development. There’s more to presenting and selling your practice than just getting some words in print. Poorly written communications will quickly torpedo your image and confuse your messaging.

• Analyze marketing and advertising opportunities carefully. It’s just as important for you to reach and attract your intended markets as it is to avoid wasting time looking in the wrong places.

The results of misdirected marketing as a form of mixed messaging can range from a poor response to the marketing effort to dissatisfaction from those prospects who do respond — arriving for one thing but finding something else. And, CCs are more likely to do additional damage by now having a negative experience to report to friends and family.

• Summarize your goal. You should be shooting for a continuum of practice identity and theme that pretty much permeates your practice, based on the needs of your target markets. You may serve a single market or even two or three closely related specialty markets if the features that apply/appeal to those markets overlap sufficiently, such as maternal/pediatric, or athletics/sports/rehab.

Marketing communications, advertising, event and promotional planning and all other aspects of the practice’s marketing efforts would then be planned to specifically reach and appeal to the target markets. In this way, mixed messages and failed marketing efforts are kept to a minimum. Through planning, rather than spontaneous choices, marketing becomes much more effective.

• Keep it clear, consistent, concise and compelling. And don’t forget about accurate and honest. If the information you present about your products and services passes this test, you’re doing fine. But think about all the ways your messages can get pulled off-track from inception to delivery. Put a communication plan in place to ensure that everything about your practice reinforces every chosen marketing message for maximum consistency and impact.

• Get help when you need it. Procrastination is costly, but unfortunately, many business owners avoid the planning that solves marketing confusion.

If you’re the type who keeps your operations manual up-to-date, has regular meetings with your staff, and works an annual marketing plan, you’re probably a born organizer and up to the task. (And don’t forget that all of these systems are important to your overall marketing success.)

But if you still haven’t gotten up to get that clipboard, you might want to consider professional marketing consulting to help you get your plans in place. Remember, the key to managing public perceptions about your practice is how well you manage your message.