Marketing 101
Let Your Software Show You the Money
By Elizabeth Mansfield
You’ve spent thousands of dollars on your office management software. Clearly, it’s going to have the ability to file claims and record payments efficiently and effectively.
If you can’t file claims, you’re not going to stay in business very long. But it can be critical to the success of your business in other ways.
Besides filing claims and recording payments, what else can your software do to make money for you?
Marketing.
Your software is more than just a tool for filing claims, scheduling and recording payments—it’s a marketing tool. If it makes money for you now, just think how much more you’ll love it when you maximize its marketing potential.
Like Renée Zellweger in “Jerry Maguire,” you’ll say “I love my O&P office management software! I love it for the marketing tool it wants to be. And I love it for the marketing tool it almost is!”
But tools don’t work unless you actually use them. How can you enable your software to help you with your marketing?
Let’s start with the fun stuff, like birthdays and anniversaries.
With the help of your software, you’ve got access to all kinds of important dates. Do you send birthday cards to your patients?
At its most basic level, the card serves as reminder advertising. When your patients open the card, your name goes right up to the top of their minds.
Do you send thank-you letters on delivery? Everyone likes to hear “Thank you.” Your patients will feel appreciated if they receive a thank you after they receive their orthosis or prosthesis.
How about the day they became your patient? A “happy anniversary” card would be appreciated and remembered.
O&P software’s ability to track referral sources shows another way the software can be a marketing tool.
It gives you an accurate overview of referral activity, enabling you to
follow up with good sources and identify which might benefit from more
intensive marketing.
However, it’s important that your data is up to date.
And think carefully about what information you want from the
reports. Make sure that the person entering the information is properly
trained and that you’ve specified how you want to track your
referral sources.
Do you want to differentiate between VA clinics, or do you want them
all together? What happens if the referral source is not the actual
physician?
The reports to the referring physician, which can be generated by most O&P software, can also market for you.
Never thought of a report as a marketing tool? Visualize the path of the envelopes containing your reports. Try to count how many times either the reports or the envelopes have the opportunity to act as tiny billboards for your company.
Every time someone sorts the mail, opens an envelope, files a report or opens a patient file, he or she sees your letterhead and you create “top of mind” awareness.
“Thank you for the referral” letters or cards are nice, but a report to the referring physician is considered medical documentation and has to be filed. You can’t guarantee that a thank-you letter is even going to be read.
Someday the person who does the filing or opens the mail may need a prosthesis or know someone who does. They’ll be more than familiar with your company’s name if you’re taking advantage of the marketing resources of your software.
It’s almost as if you can hear your office software calling:
“Help me help you!” Like any effective marketing tool, its
purpose is to (as they said in “Jerry Maguire”) “Show
me the money!”
Elizabeth Mansfield is a marketing consultant with Outsource Marketing Solutions LLC in Hartford, Conn. Contact her at elizabeth@askelizabeth.net.
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