The world of a Physician is full of scientific experiments relating to health, but experimentation also flows over to the business side of a practice. Marketing experimentation can help with a multitude of decisions when launching ad campaigns, finding the right mix of ancillary services to provide, and designing your customer experience journey – which plays a huge part in retaining long term patients. The notion that modern marketing is a balance between art and science is wide-spread, and with new technology constantly emerging, it couldn’t be more accurate. The age of digital marketing has arrived, and by combining it with traditional concepts, opportunities to reach potential patients are created at several touchpoints across an array of platforms. The goal is to provide your target audience with a seamless journey across these platforms through integrated marketing communications. The key to effective campaigns is using marketing experiments when possible to find the best performing concepts, artwork, copy, and SEO optimization.
Types of Experiments
There are two main types of experiments that can be conducted with marketing research, lab experiments and field experiments. When performing a lab experiment, artificial settings are created to control extraneous variables like music, temperature, or digital ads that sample populations see. The opposite can be said with field experiments; these types of studies observe their sample population in real-time and in natural settings. However, independent variables are manipulated in this type of research; an example of this is understanding how patients interact in the reception area while changing one variable at a time.
Types of Applications
The most relevant applications of these experiment types for private medical practices are A/B testing, SEO optimization, copy testing, and concept testing. All are useful and should be looked at more in-depth, but for the purpose of this article, we will focus on concept testing and copy testing.Concept testing is conducted before any real ad designing or copywriting happens. The goal of this test is to reduce costly errors when developing ad campaign concepts. The research participants are given written explanations of a few campaign concepts. The ideas are then rated on things like believability, uniqueness, and desirability. Ideally, the winning concept is designed out. Copy testing comes in with fully designed ads that follow the same idea of the overall campaign yet have completely different elements. The ads have differing colors, models, copy, and product variations. This is meant to determine which advertisement as a whole is received better.Next StepsWhile it’s more likely for a professional agency or consultant to run these experiments for you, having background knowledge will help you understand their recommendations better. Knowing about these concepts beforehand will also allow you to recognize money-saving concepts that your hired agency is using, or you could suggest that they use the more cost-effective tactics. If you’re interested in a quick explanation into types of marketing research, read my blog Listening to your Patients with Quantitative and Qualitative and Research Tools.