Positioning is the process of differentiating your practice’s services, treatments, procedures, and other offerings from those of your rivals in the eyes of your patients and clients. It is an essential component of your marketing strategy since it enables you to convey your unique value propositions and cultivate a foundation of loyal patients. But how can you put your positioning plan to the test with your patient base? Here are some actions you can take to make sure your positioning is strong and in line with the demands and expectations of your target patient market.
Express Your Position
A positioning statement encapsulates the takeaway message you want your patients (and referral sources) to understand about your practice’s services. Your target market, your specialty, your points of differentiation, and your basis for belief should all be included. For example, a positioning statement for an interventional pain practice may read: “For patients suffering from chronic back pain, ‘Spine & Pain Associates’ is the interventional pain management practice that offers innovative, individually-calibrated pain relief via custom-tailored treatment plans that follow best practice protocols and are covered by nearly all major insurances, because we care about treating you, getting you back to pain-free living, and empowering you to enjoy the things you love most with independence.”
A positioning statement should explain your practice’s unique value propositions to your target patient audiences. In order to be effective, a positioning statement must address the requirements and goals of an archetypal patient persona, pinpoint the issue or challenge they are facing, and offer an answer that appeals to them. It seeks to effectively convey the essence of healthcare service to the broader community in a way that sticks in their minds and seems to speak to them directly. In addition, a positioning statement should clearly differentiate the practice from its rivals by identifying any special features or benefits it provides.
Perform Patient Interviews
A fantastic technique to test and validate your practice’s positioning statement with your target patient market is through patient interviews. Patient interviews are a useful tool for learning about your target audience’s wants, dislikes, pain spots, and motivations as well as for getting feedback on your practice’s value proposition and point of differentiation. Depending on your schedule and resources, you can do patient interviews in-person, over the phone, or online. A list of open-ended questions should be developed that probe how your patients view your services, what advantages they anticipate from receiving care from you, and how they compare your practice’s offerings to competing offerings.
Of course, as a practice owner and practicing physician, it can be difficult to navigate your own hectic schedule, and duly challenging to convince a patient to take time out of their busy lives to talk to you about your positioning. A less direct but still useful approach may be to use platforms like Google Reviews, Yelp, Healthgrades, Vitals.com, RateMD, etc. to compile a brief audit of your reviews. From there, you can gather specific terms that patients have used to describe your practice and its provided services. Harnessing the language of your patient audience, rather than devising your positioning statement solely from your own mind, is the key to effectively positioning your practice to resonate with your surrounding community.
Consider The Competition
To test and evaluate your positioning strategy, performing a competitive analysis is a crucial step. You must identify your primary rivals, as well as their positioning statements and market share, their patient and referral source satisfaction, as well as brand recognition performance (which entails “mind share” and “heart share”). When comparing your practice’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to those of your rivals, you can use methods like SWOT analysis, Porter’s five forces, and perceptual mapping to find any market inefficiencies or niches that you can take advantage of.
Diving deeper into a SWOT analysis, we can analogize it to playing competitive chess. Before making a move, your practice can assess the advantages and disadvantages of the location of your pieces and those of your opponent’s pieces (SW), look for threats from your opponent’s actions in their advancement toward market opportunities (OT), and then explore ways to leverage my advantages to capture market opportunities (SO). To assess internal and external elements and make better strategic decisions for your practice, a thorough SWOT analysis in a competitive setting is necessary.
For example, a vascular surgery group called ‘VascuCare’ located in a community that has an older average demographic age may find that all its competitors in the market are focused on treating chronic venous insufficiency and peripheral artery disease, but no other rivals in the immediate area are trained in performing prostate artery embolization (PAE), for which, upon doing research and talking to local urologists, VascuCare notes that there is a large potential market. Herein lies a strength and opportunity: by assessing the market opportunity, one or more of the vascular surgeons of VascuCare may choose to soon get trained in performing PAE, so to leverage first-mover advantage in the community, capture untapped market share, and establish themselves as the niche go-to expert in the region for PAE. Thus, any time referring providers such as urologists think of appropriate patients to refer, VascuCare has initially won “mind share” such that even if other rivals begin to enter the space in performing this procedure, VascuCare is still the group that is thought of first when the topic of PAE arises.
Craft A Positioning Matrix
An effective visual tool for testing and validating your positioning plan with your fellow practice partners/co-owners as well as target patients is a positioning matrix. This can be structured as a standard grid that displays your services along two core dimensions that are significant for your target market. Using availability and surgical outcomes as the two dimensions, for instance, a positioning matrix for an orthopedic practice could demonstrate how your establishment stacks up against other practices in the community. Your positioning matrix can be used to explicitly demonstrate your unique value propositions, highlight your competitive advantages, and emphasize your points of differentiation.
A thorough positioning matrix that maps out the main rivals and illustrates how your practice’s offerings compare in terms of quality, pricing/insurances accepted, outcomes, availability, and other relevant factors is the first step in testing and verifying a sound positioning strategy. You can assess how patients perceive your position through surveys and interviews. By periodically gathering patient feedback and comparing it with market share capture and/or new patient volume growth, you can iteratively continue to align and update your matrix with respect to both market development and consumer expectations.
Validate Your Positioning Message
Upon defining, testing, and validating your positioning strategy with your patient base, you must test your positioning message with them. The positioning message indicates how you relay your practice’s positioning statement to patients via marketing channels, including your practice website, SEO content (and your practice’s content marketing initiatives in general), patient emails and newsletters, advertising, social media, mailers, and other methods of outreach. Your practice must ensure that your positioning message is appealing, consistent, and easy for target patients to understand. You may assess the success of your positioning message and make any necessary revisions using techniques like A/B testing, surveys, focus groups, and analytics.
Observe And Hone Your Positioning Strategy
It takes time and effort to continuously test and validate your positioning strategy with your patients. As healthcare industry requirements, socio-political conditions, patient preferences, and competitive behavior evolve over time, you must continuously assess and adjust your positioning approach. In order to refine your positioning strategy, you must monitor your market performance, consumer feedback, and co-owners/partners’ expectations. Additionally, you must be willing to try new things, test new theories, and learn from your successes and failures.
In the end, your practice’s positioning statement is truly determined by your target patient market. Although healthcare practices may have a vision and an initial notion about what they are offering, over time the positioning statement is shaped and improved based on the input, preferences, and behaviors of the patients. Practices acquire important insights into how their services are viewed and used by actively engaging with the target patient audience, hearing their needs, and seeing their reactions. Practices can adjust and align their positioning statements through this iterative process in order to better fulfill patient expectations, address their underlying conditions and manifested symptoms, and offer treatments, procedures, and other best-case solutions that address their needs.
