You have to know what your target is and where it is.

Picture yourself with a bow and a quiver of arrows. You only have a limited amount of arrows, so every one of them is important and you can not afford to make mistakes. So you start shooting up in the air, hoping to hit some thing. . .which turns in desperation into anything. The arrows are scattered in a ridiculously large area and shots go out to anything that moves or looks alive. You may be shooting at moles with that approach rather than something that can feed your family.

I’m going to use arrows as an analogy to a good marketing effort. After you shoot random arrows for a while, you are going to start to wonder if there is something wrong with the arrows that you are shooting. I can hear it now, “I’ve tried everything and marketing doesn’t work.” That’s when the blame game starts and it becomes canonized that arrows just don’t work. But the problem from the beginning wasn’t the arrows, it was the lack of direction and the ability to hit the target.

Know your target – it will dictate your approach and message. Your target will determine where you place your advertising. Good marketing goes for the numbers. It looks for the people who are most likely to respond and not the ones on the fringe that might just respond if the wind is blowing in the right direction.

1. Target marketing focuses on the buyer’s needs and preferences.

2. Target marketing also takes into account that perception is reality, and you have to know what those perceptions of your target market are.

The target for chiropractic care is overwhelmingly, women. The health care decision-makers are, by a large margin, women. Even if you have a sports chiropractic practice, who is it that encourages the guys to come in for care? It is still, by a large margin, women. Trying to be everything to everyone will ensure you an overwhelming failure every time. So focus on marketing specifically to women will give you a greater degree of success.

Positioning is another important aspect of target marketing. There are a few ways to position yourself effectively to have a good appeal. You can appeal to women who want a sage natural healer, or a doctor who leverages technology. To best determine the positioning message, however, you need to take a good look at not only what you want to do with your practice, but what your target market wants and needs. You can spend a whole lot of wasted time and effort trying to educate and inform on the issues that are important to you, while never really speaking to them.

Marketing, good marketing, is like shooting arrows. You are definitely hunting for new business. It is the life blood of any practice and if you know your market, you will stop blaming arrows and start having
success.

Article Copyright 2007 Educate for Health, LLC and its licensors. All rights reserved.

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