Some marketing firms are consultants pure and simple. They come in, look around, make recommendations, then take your money and leave.
You're the one expected to do the hard part -- the actual work of putting those recommendations into effect.
The Galen Group is different. We do the work. Not you. We're there with you throughout the entire marketing process. In person. Learning your needs. Addressing your concerns. Executing your individually designed marketing strategy.
We do the marketing. So you can do your job.
And what exactly is it that we do?
First, we start by sitting down with you and finding out precisely what goals you have for your business or practice.
We don't try to impose our own plans or ideas on you. Nor do we just hear you out, then leave you with stale advice and an exorbitant fee. We work with you hand in hand to develop a strategic marketing plan suited to and approved by you.
Then we put together a detailed, step-by-step plan of action for your approval.
We work out the costs, the values, and the projected results. And when you're completely satisfied, we proceed to provide, completely or in part, the following services:
SERVICE EVALUATION
We study and analyze the daily workings of your practice. Which services are rewarding and which not? Which services give you the best return on your time and effort? Which offer least?
Which services attract the most client interest? Which don't? Which might, if they were presented to your clients in a better manner? If better implemented by your staff?
How many such services can you comfortably offer? Which services have other firms found to be popular with clients? Can those services be added to your own?
We get the answers.
GOAL PLANNING
What are your financial and personal goals? Do you want five new clients a month, or ten? Do you want to maintain your income, or triple it? Do you want to expand your office, or narrow it? Do you want to be more active and well-known in your community, or do you value your privacy?
We help you assess and define your goals and hopes -- and so help you take the first step towards achieving them
CLIENT STUDY
We use a variety of effective information gathering techniques -- extensive mail surveys, statistical analysis, studies of patient files, short in-office questionnaires, focus groups, database sorting, studies of clients who've gone elsewhere, personal observation, and more -- to find out exactly what your clients really think of your office, your staff, your practices, and you.
We not only get their opinions -- we get their suggestions. We find out which aspect of your services they like. And which they'd like to see modified -- or dropped.
Often we find that just asking their opinion and letting them know that you're actively working to provide even better services can end up improving your relations with your current clients. And bring in new referrals as well.
POTENTIAL CLIENT STUDY
We study and profile not only your current clients, but also the demographics and movement of the general public, to seek out and pinpoint the most likely candidates to be your new clients.
We not only show you what sort of person you're reaching now, but what segments you could easily be reaching, and how.
The Galen Group has access to extensive nation-wide and city-specific informational databases that describe clients and firms in the city where you work and throughout the nation as a whole.
That means we can not only see where you stand, but where you stand in relation to your peers and competitors locally and throughout the nation as a whole.
Our extensive compilation of shifting demographic factors and population moves, our attention to upcoming governmental regulatory moves, our awareness of changing patterns in public attitudes, lets us do more than simply project your firm's future -- it lets us help you shape it into the successful firm you want it to be.
PLANNING A WINNING STRATEGY
Using our precise analyses of your goals, your clients and potential clients, your operations, and the overall social, economic, and legal context, The Galen Group works with you to formulate a specific set of tactics to make your practice into the practice you envision.
INTERNAL MARKETING
Referrals and repeat business stem from the quality of the service you give -- if your clients perceive that quality. The Galen Group's surveys, discussions, letters, new patient education materials, brochures, and other marketing techniques, show your clients that your desire and ability to provide the best possible service for them is genuine and serious. And it's that kind of concern that turns new clients into steady clients, and steady clients into ones that send family and friends.
STAFF TRAINING
One of the most important factors in a business-client relationship is neither the businessman nor the client -- but the go-betweens in that relationship: the staff. Poor staff work can keep client numbers down even when every other aspect of a business is state-of-the-art.
Is your staff helping to get and keep clients, or are they driving them away?
Don't wonder. Find out.
Your staff are your salesmen. And we can show and train your staff into being one of the most lucrative sources of clients you have.
BROCHURES, NEWSLETTERS, WRITTEN COMMUNICATIONS
Clients should be informed. What's more, they like to be informed. And the best and easiest way of doing that is simply getting directly in touch with them by means of the written word.
Of course, writing, designing, printing, and producing print materials can be time-consuming. But we can save you the time and trouble by producing the all the written materials you'll need to keep your name, your business, and your services, in the mind of the clients you have now. And before the potential clients coming your way.
And if the written word is helpful in talking to your current clients, it's all-important in talking to your potential clients among the general public.
Direct mail has provided a revolution in effective and cost-effective marketing. We know its effectiveness. We use it. We can produce welcoming letters and to introduce your firm to what may be hundreds of thousands of new city residents each year -- residents looking for services like yours.
We can attract their interest. We can produce the follow-up literature for each likely candidate or interested party. And we can use or develop mailing lists that will make sure those new residents (and any other potential clients) will know who you are, what you offer, and where to reach you.
MEDIA. PUBLIC RELATIONS, COMMUNITY RELATIONS
Our marketing research has shown us that what a lot of legal and medical professionals already know: media 'hard-sell' rarely works and often backfires.
All too often professionals who realize they need marketing services go to advertising agencies or marketing groups who don't specialize, as we do, in the professional and median-range business field. And the result is a garish and financially wasteful 'campaign' that causes the practitioner to lose not just his money, but the respect both of his clients and his peers.
We've learned better. Any plan to market a professional practice must stress the honesty and substance of that profession, and of the person practicing it.
Any plan to market a quality product must stress the honesty and substance of the firm that provides it.
Having said that, however, it's also true that there are appropriate and beneficial ways of placing your name before the community.
Public speaking engagements, appearances at professional associations and gatherings, interviews with journalists, articles in professional publications, the giving of seminars, statements on public matters relating to your business or profession to radio, television, and newspapers -- in short, public relations -- can all be tactfully presented and profitably pursued.
We can see to it that they are.
And while the Galen Group knows the value of conservative images and traditional approaches, we also know that any business or practice that wants to grow and survive has to be aware of the social and technological changes taking place today. And not just to be aware of them: to take advantage of them.
One of the most important of those changes involve the revolution in communications heralded by the computer, and made available by the World Wide Web and the Internet.
Access to the net provides not merely the most cost-effective way imaginable to make yourself known to your public and your peers and to the world, but also offers today's business or practice access to vistas of information, services, networks, and contacts that by themselves can turn a business around.
We can get you online. We can get your name and your message onto the Web and out to the world. And we can do it in ways that can literally cost you less than a dollar a day.
MONITORING AND FOLLOW-UP
We've defined your goals, evaluated your practice, evolved a strategy approved by you, and implemented it to the best of our abilities.
What's left? One important item. We make sure everything is working the way it's supposed to.
Some marketing organizations don't check the results of their plans. They don't wait to see the returns.
The Galen Group does. We're there throughout the process, fine-tuning our contributions, shaping and re-shaping our interventions, checking and re-checking until the result you see is the one you wanted to see.
We stand by our work -- literally! And we're there with you till the job is done the way you want it -- done right.
Jonathan Tasker Rich
