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Healthcare Marketing against Strong Competition Watch Your backdoor and hold on to your successful marketers. Remember, it’s a dog eat dog world in the head to head arena of healthcare marketing. You must study your competitor or opponents in your territory, find out what they are doing, analyze how well it is working, how it is impacting your marketing strategy, discover what your competitor thinks you are doing and how this belief or perception is causing your competitor to react. All these components are critical. In today’s marketing world, there is a lot of effort made to find out the trade secrets of a competitor. So, every good marketer is always trying to discover what they are up against. The competitor’s weaknesses or problems as well as what they do that is working well. After having said this however, there is a lot of misinformation disseminated into the marketing arena to direct or misdirect the competition and shape their activities and decisions by causing them to react without full detailed information. Managers should look out when they are up against a strong and deep strategy competitor. If you are having sustained success at even a modest level, they will turn their eyes on your marketers, at least the ones that are successful for you. They will recruit your marketers to change jobs, pump them for information, invite them to a recruitment functions and ply them with food and drink and statements about how good their organization is to work with and how many benefits they offer. Remember, if you have valuable marketers whom you depend on, don’t forget to recognize the producers and reward them. Let them know how you feel. Send them an email thanking them for their performance and work ethics. Send them a personal letter to their home where they can receive praise that their familys can share. Recognize them in front of their co-workers by thanking them for their work and let them know that their efforts are making a significant difference in the company. Don’t hold back because you believe that recognizing the producers in front of their marketing group will hurt the feelings of the non producers. It may, but it will also inspire the weaker producers to dare to excel and challenge them to achieve greater success and win your praise. Give them rewards; a steak dinner for your successful producer and their spouse or friend. A dedication plaque naming them Top Marketer for the Year or Most Promising New Marketing Talent. Praise and thank your producers and make sure that they are rewarded financially. Because, if they are producing for you against the competition, the competition is going to learn who they are and make an effort to recruit them and if that happens, you will lose ground in your market arena. It is better to keep moving forward and progressing than spend valuable time trying to regain lost ground. Ask your marketers to notch up their marketing program. To find new ways to reach and open the mind of the market target. Day in and Day out, most of the marketers just buy lunches and feed the client for a few minutes of time while they make their presentations. If you can develop a plan that gives you reason to return sooner and keep the customer thinking about you or calling you, then you have made progress. Say, an ongoing prize giveaway in which the client’s employees get to register several times. You can stretch this out for a month or two and build up the client’s interest and expectations. It doesn’t have to be a big prize. Maybe a Starbucks Basket of Goodies! Keep your marketers thinking about new and different marketing approaches that notch up their interest level. Ray Vaughn HealthCare Marketing Specialist Developing Successful Marketing Strategies for HealthCare
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