Strategy vs. Tactics
Your marketing strategy is your promotional message. It consists of selecting a target market and determining what to say and how to communicate your message to that audience. Your strategy includes your headlines, sub-headlines, illustrations, and photos, the body of your message, and your offer. For more on strategy, visit the strategy section of this website.
Your marketing tactics include the type of promotion you plan to create, your frequency of messaging, and the means by which you communicate your messages (your media mix). Among the media your tactics include are medical office visits, websites, social media, email, online yellow pages, search engine advertising, print media, radio, television, direct mail, webinars, teleconferences, expos, faxes, and billboards. Tactics also include your sales approach, expo participation, healthcare events, screenings, presentations, and the development of marketing tools, such as videos, CDs, and white papers. Your tactical plan includes three components— an Action Plan, a Media Plan, and a Marketing Analysis.
Tactical marketing also includes determining target markets, conducting primary and secondary marketing research, establishing and monitoring marketing budgets, initiating and managing referral programs and follow-up plans, and creating strategic partnerships. All these factors can be considered when preparing your tactical plan. Of course, plans will encompass all of these, and many include well less than half. We use a checklist when we conduct planning with our clients to ensure we do not overlook anything.
Your Action Plan
Your Action Plan is the portion of your tactical plan that includes every activity you plan to implement with timelines and assignments of responsibility for completing each task. These tasks are called targets. You can download a sample action plan here.
Your plan should address the need to conduct marketing research, the development of promotion (online, print, and/or traditional media), and a list of actions broken down by target market and type of activity directed toward each. For example, a podiatry group's target markets could include referring physicians, insurance providers, independent practice associations (IPAs), senior citizens, school athletic programs, community athletic programs, and local employers.
For the above example, let us take one of their target markets— senior citizens. For this target market, actions
could include developing a newsletter, purchasing a local mailing list of people 60 and over, setting up talks and screenings at the local senior center and retirement homes, advertising in a local senior online publication, creating a Facebook® page especially for seniors, and developing a section of the practice website for seniors. You would then list every specific action that needs to be accomplished to capture the senior market along with the name of who is responsible to complete each target with a deadline for completion.
Marketing Analysis
You need to be keeping monthly statistics on all your promotional actions. We suggest you review the sample Action Plan, which you are welcome to download to provide you an idea of what statistics we recommend you keep.
Periodically (usually quarterly), we analyze and then review the statistics with our client to determine what actions need to be taken to improve marketing results. This involves analyzing statistics, understanding how to interpret trends, and know when and what type of changes should be made, if any. There is an entire science dedicated to how to perform this step, which, unfortunately, is too detailed to include here.
Your Action Plan Is a
Dynamic Document
Situations change... the economy, payor mix, competitors leaving and entering the market, etc. As a result of a changing internal and external environment and your market analysis, we frequently make revisions to Action Plans.
Value of Strategy vs. Tactics
Most medical practices place the majority of their attention on tactics when strategy is usually senior in importance The reason why practices spend less time on strategy is that most marketers have little, if any, understanding how to create content that will allow practices to dominate their markets. This is because this is rarely taught in universities. Yet, since messaging is at least as important as tactics, and because it is sorely neglected, it is essential for a medical practice to concentrate much of their effort on developing their marketing strategy.