Hello, and Happy New Year!! Welcome to Online Marketing For Doctors TV and Podcast show, the place to be to grow and scale your practice.
I’m your host, Huyen Truong, author of “Fully Booked” and the “7 Samurai Sword Sales Guide For Medical Clinics”, and I am a strategic marketing consultant to medical clinics, helping them to get more patients and more profits. This episode marks a special milestone of the OMD TV and Podcast show, we reached 100th episode today!!! YEAH!!!
I started this show back in 2018, and I had a vision to make this show the go to place for clinics to learn about the best strategies and tactics to grow their clinics faster.
Fast forward to today, and the OMD TV and Podcast show has been voted as one of the best medical marketing podcasts for healthcare and medical professionals in 2022!
So thank you… my dedicated listeners and followers, as we look forward to more great content in the future… like this one!
With this special episode, I want to cover a very interesting topic that I have been thinking about it literally every single day… “How To Be Everywhere and Dominate the Market?”. Because I don’t think competition is healthy, and as a clinic owner, you don’t want to just compete and survive, you want to dominate and own your market. Think about the major players in the business world such as Google, Apple or Amazon, or the world’s best athletes like Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps who dominated their fields of sports, wouldn’t you just love to be like them?
There is a saying “Champions don’t compete, they dominate.” and in this video, I’m going to talk about “6 Steps to Dominate Your Market”. Let’s get started with the first way.
1. Specify Your Market
When you want to dominate the market, it’s important to think in terms of sub-markets. Here is why: There are huge markets out there for your practice to target, like ALL WOMEN, or ALL MEN… but there are smaller and more specific sub-markets within any particular one. By identifying these smaller sub-markets, you can address a smaller group more effectively and immediately, rather than trying to do everything at once. But by approaching it this way, you just might conquer a few small empires before taking down the big one.
2. Create a Niche
Perhaps the most effective way to dominate a market is to create a niche market of your own. A key element of dominance is understanding how to distinguish yourself as a company, into a market which there is no competition. Integrating this strategy into your marketing plan can help your practice become an industry leader.
While you may be able to offer your business services to the masses, you will achieve greater success if you understand what makes certain niches attractive to your businesses. Crafting your niche requires you to check in on what your business is all about.
What is your mission, vision, and purpose? By understanding your business in-depth, your goals, and what value you intend to offer in the market, you can create a niche that customers can identify. Start by doing your research, knowing your competition, spotting customer concerns, and giving adequate solutions for the problems that your competitors cannot solve.
We think of ourselves as a good example of creating and servicing a niche. There are probably thousands of digital marketing agencies out there, but Online Marketing For Doctors is not just a general digital medical marketing agency, but a medical marketing agency specialising in patient generation for clinics.
3. Create a Value Proposition
You can dominate a market with a good product or service positioning. Finding your niche and setting a competitive advantage can help you earn a better position in the market when you also have a great strategy to support it. You can establish this by focusing on either of these 3 strategies: differentiation or cost leadership or focus strategies.
These strategies were first set out by Michael Porter in 1985 in his book, “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
If you’ve taken marketing strategy classes at university, you have probably heard of Michal Porter before – he is a famous American professor at Harvard University who is the founder of the modern strategy field and one of the world’s most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness.
Let me give you an example so I can make this point a bit more clearly for you: which do you prefer when you fly: a cheap, no-frills airline, or a more expensive operator with fantastic service levels and maximum comfort? And would you ever consider a small company with just a few routes?
The choice is up to you, of course. But the point we’re making here is that when you come to book a flight, there are some very different options available. Why is this so? The answer is that each of these airlines has chosen a different way of achieving competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.
For OMD, as a digital marketing agency, we decided to follow the Focus and Differentiation strategies by focusing on helping medical clinics generate new patients via our 7 step patient generation system for a cost lower than hiring a general marketing specialist instead. So with one statement you can see our clear value proposition and how we are different from other agencies in the market.
So now the question for you is how to create a competitive advantage for your clinic if you decide to differentiate yourself from other clinics not by the lowest cost providers which is not an ideal strategy for medical clinics? Would you go for the Focus strategy, if so, what would be your niche market? If you want to go after Differentiation strategy, what can you do to create competitive advantages and unique selling points that your competitors don’t have? This question leads us to our next step for dominating your market.
4. Create a Market Dominating Position
What exactly is a “market-dominating position”? It’s simply any value-added customer perceived benefit, or a combination of benefits, which differentiates you from your competitors, and does so in a strong enough manner that it makes your business the logical choice in the minds of your prospects and customers.
As an example, a dry cleaner who offers pick-up and delivery would be the only logical choice for any customer who values convenience. This simple distinction represents a market dominating position. The key is to create added value in everything you do. Prospects and customers DON’T buy based on price; they buy based on the value they receive for the price they pay.
Ask yourself what, if anything, makes your service business different from your competitors as perceived by your targeted prospects and customers. For the vast majority of businesses, the answer is price.
Many years ago, Nike offered the top-selling Air Jordan 3 for $150. At the exact same time, Target sold an excellent imitation of the Air Jordan for around $40, but Nike outsold them, ten to one.
When you create your own market-dominating position, you will consistently get businesses and individuals to choose your business over your competitors.
Creating added value is a marketing or customer relations strategy that can take the form of a product or service that’s added to your original offering for free or as part of a discounted package. Like all other elements in your marketing toolkit, it’s designed to attract new customers and retain existing ones.
Everyone can add value to their business. And adding value doesn’t have to blow out your costs or take up hours of your time. There are many ways to enhance your business quickly and efficiently.
The key to adding value is determining what your customers and target market perceive as valuable. You must understand their needs, wants, troubles, and inconveniences in order to entice them with solutions through added-value products or services.
5. Define Your Unique Selling Points
As briefly touched on above, a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is your clinic’s competitive advantage compared to your competition. It is a statement that describes how your product or clinic is different (and hopefully better) than the competition.
The best USPs take a unique quality and explain how that quality will benefit your customers, all in a few memorable words. Many companies past and present use USPs as their slogans so that they can put them in front of as many prospective customers as possible. For example, OMD’s slogan is… The Ultimate Sales Machine For Medical Clinics.
A USP is more than just a catchy headline on your website. In the end, it’s all about how the rest of the world perceives your products, services or perhaps your entire organisation.
A USP is more than just a catchy headline on your website. In the end, it’s all about how the rest of the world perceives your products, services or perhaps your entire organisation.
Can your personal brand be the USP? Yes, for sure! A personal brand is an overall impression a person makes to others, and it can be your biggest differentiator in business. Consider Elon Musk and Tesla. Despite the fact that Tesla is not the only electric car on the market, you most likely associate it with Elon Musk’s character traits (or the picture he created of himself and his personal brand). Your brain will immediately come up with words like ‘opportunistic, space-age, modern, and fast.’ This likewise holds true for any other USP built on a personal brand.
If you are running a specialist clinic where you are the principle doctor or surgeon, you can align your personal brand attributes with your clinic as Elon does with Tesla, as your personal brand/image is something unique that no other clinics can offer.
Here is another particularly compelling unique selling proposition example from Avis, a car rental company, for you to check out. “We’re number two. We try harder.” This USP does a remarkable job of turning what seems like a negative quality into a benefit. For many years, Avis was in the unfortunate position of being the second-largest car rental company, while Hertz claimed the #1 spot. In fact, Avis was having trouble just staying solvent. So Avis decided it was time for a total image makeover and they came up with a new ad campaign that would pull the company out of its hole. The ‘We Try Harder’ campaign was so successful, Avis’ market share went from 11% to 35% in just four years.
6. Apply 10X Rule
Grant Cardone is one of my favourite authors of all time, I listen to all of his audiobooks. And one of the books that I listened to recently, he talked about the idea of “Don’t Compete, Dominate Your Market” and applying the 10X method to achieve it.
What is the 10X method? Why does the 10X method think you shouldn’t try to compete, and should dominate instead?
In The 10X method, Grant Cardone says competition is a limiting concept. For extraordinary success, you shouldn’t worry about competing with others and focus instead on domination. A common tenet of capitalism is that competition is good. While that may be true from a consumer standpoint (it can create more choices)… your goal is extraordinary success, and competition will be a limiting concept for that. For 10X success, you need to dominate, not compete.
When you’re competing with others, you’re focused on what they’re doing, which makes it difficult to think outside the box. The most successful people and companies look forward rather than at what others are doing—they create rather than copy or improve. Instead, focus on domination in the 10X method. Here are some ways to dominate rather than compete…
- Do what no one else is doing either because they can’t or won’t. This creates a space in the market and gives you an advantage. For example, Cardone created a new sales process called “information-assisted selling.” Expand into areas where others are pulling out. Adopt “only practice”: things only your clinic does.
- Don’t play by others’ rules. Norms and traditions hinder innovation. Your solution should be the only one that people —including your competitors— think of. For example, Xerox dominated the copier market at one point that the process of copying a document was referred to as Xeroxing. Same thing with Google, people now are using “Google it”. Similarly, OMD’s goal is to make our name synonymous with patient generation.
- Learn from would-be competitors, but don’t emulate them. Walmart founder Sam Walton visited other top-performing chains to see what they did well. Then he dominated over those organisations to such an extent that the others dropped them. He turned others’ specialties into his own unique advantages.
- Out do your competitors in every possible way. Although you may have fewer resources to promote your business, you can do 10 times as much social media posting, show up everywhere on Google (Google maps, Google ads, organic search results, display ads…) actively participating in conversations with target audience community groups on social media, forums such as Mothers Group, Realself…. Telemarketing, mailing, emailing solicitations and visits (for referral marketing and influencers, strategic partnerships…). Act at levels others consider over the top or unreasonable.
Thank you for listening, I hope you enjoyed this show. Our 100th one!
If you want to learn more about me and how our team can help you generate more new patients and referring doctors by using our 7 step patient generation system and Dream 100 referral strategy, please reach out to us and book a 15 minute discovery call with me. I will help show you some current problems you have, and opportunities that you might like to explore to improve your practice marketing.
Thanks so much and hope to talk with you in a discovery call soon.
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