Marketing plan for a sleep center

Marketing

Monitoring and Evaluation

There are a number of good performance measures that can be used to test the effectiveness of a marketing plan. Indirect measures include revenues (have they increased?) or profits (did high-margin customers increase?). For the most part, however, measures about the effectiveness of a marketing plan should be based on marketing-specific metrics.

For Dr. Sleep, this likely involves customer surveys, non-customer surveys and analysis of sales data. The surveys can be used to reveal a wide range of information. Brand exposure is a key area of concern, and can be best measured with a survey of people how are in the target market, but are not currently customers. It is valuable to know how much exposure the brand has. Additionally, these same respondents can be questioned about their likeliness to use such a service in general. This is because while the respondent is captured is a good opportunity to learn about the likelihood of non-customers to become customers.

Surveys of customers can focus less on brand exposure (they've heard of us) and more on other metrics. It is valuable to know how well the marketing program sold people and convinced them to become customers. It is worth testing the influence of different elements of the marketing plan. For example, was it simply enough to plant the seed of seeing a sleep therapy service that convinced them to spend their money with Dr. Sleep? Or, were they already considering a similar service and some element of the marketing plan (price, etc.) convinced them to choose Dr. Sleep over other competitors.

In addition, customer satisfaction surveys can test the effectiveness of the product/service offering itself in the marketing mix. In a sense, we do not need repeat customers, since that would imply failure on our part, but we do want referrals. Thus, we can test if our product is successful and then if that success would lead to referrals and recommendations to friends and family in need of sleep therapy.

Part of the marketing program is to broaden the customer base to be more reflective of LA's total demographics. Such basic information can be collected by the intake staff, and can then be compared against data from prior to the marketing effort. If there is a specialized campaign -- say taking out ads in an ethnic newspaper -- we can track to see if there was a bump in the demographics of that group among our customers. Such direct studies can also help understand how best to reach specific target markets, especially the larger ones that can be segmented.

The major evaluative categories are profitability, productivity and efficiency. All three derive from targeting certain customer types that will help improve each of these things. Efforts in these areas can indicate successful execution of the marketing plan. That said, successful conception of the marketing plan will be measured more on whether there is correlation between observed changes in patient trends vs. observed outcomes in the major evaluative categories.