You don't have to market your practice alone. Outsourcing your eye care practice marketing can ultimately save you time, money and a whole lot of stress.
It’s not uncommon for eye care professionals to feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. From handling insurance paperwork and dealing with staff issues to conducting exams and selling lenses or frames, it’s tough to get everything done. How do you find time for
promoting your eye care practice? How can you even think about things like marketing when there is so much else to do?
You basically have four options: ignore marketing altogether, assign certain marketing tasks to staff members, work extra hours or outsource marketing responsibilities. You obviously can’t ignore it, but many ECPs are hesitant about outsourcing. It’s difficult to give up what you perceive as control. (You don’t want to make it impersonal, either.) As this post will explore, there are several reasons for outsourcing marketing and several ways you can benefit from it.
Reasons to Outsource Marketing
It’s not uncommon for eye care practices to outsource things like their optical, but outsourcing marketing isn’t as common. Still, there’s often a glaring need for it and the top eye care professionals are using it. To reinforce this, here are three reasons for outsourcing marketing:
- Lack of time: As mentioned above, you likely don’t have enough time to properly devote to your marketing efforts. If someone on your staff is handling your marketing, they’re obviously not contributing to other important responsibilities. Outsourcing, however, frees up time.
- Lack of expertise: Unless you have some sort of marketing background or education, you’re likely not a marketing expert. Do you know best practices for scheduling social media posts, optimizing websites for SEO and writing engaging blog posts? If not, you or your staff will have to go through time-consuming training or risk using ineffective marketing techniques.
- Lack of budget: To truly get the most out of your marketing efforts, you need a team of people dedicated to it. Having an in-house marketing team isn’t feasible for most eye care practices, however, and having even one employee devoted to marketing can be costly. Outsourcing often makes the most financial sense.
These are just a few reasons why outsourcing marketing is beneficial for eye care practices. There are several benefits to outsourcing marketing as well.
Benefits of Outsourcing Marketing
By outsourcing your marketing efforts, all of those lacks will turn into successes, especially if you use a marketing program that specializes in optical marketing. With no marketing efforts to worry about, you’ll have an extra set of hands and more time and resources to devote to important areas of your practice.
The right marketing program will also have the optical marketing expertise and know what best practices work for the optical industry and how to position your practice with timely and informative content posted regularly on your social media pages. Finally, most marketing programs are more affordable than in-house marketing and some don’t even have a cost if you meet certain incentives.
You can’t afford to not make marketing a priority, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it yourself. Outsourcing your eye care practice marketing can ultimately save you time, money and a whole lot of stress.
