By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

Our patients become much more valuable when… Try and finish the sentence. It’s a neat trick to shift your thinking away from the customer as a value extraction target. Deep down you know they are much more than that. They have the potential to be value creation assets, worth exponentially more to your business over its lifetime.

Try: our patients are much more valuable when they become brand ambassadors and evangelise for us on social media. Our patients become much more valuable when they try our new treatments. Our patients become much more valuable when they introduce their families and acquaintances. Our patients are much more valuable when they give us good ideas.

How do you normally measure patient value? By how much they pay you in fees per year, right? Try to notice the other things they do that add value to your business. This might not be an intuitive exercise at first. Recently I was in a marketing session with a dental team, doing this exercise. The principal called everyone’s attention to an interesting fact. Some of the answers, he observed, had a “we”, as in, “Our patients become much more valuable when we give them follow up calls to check how they are after major treatments.” The others, however, had a “they”, as in, “Our customers become much more valuable when they post good things about us on Twitter.”

Was there a difference between the potential patient lifetime value when we do something versus when they do it?, the principal wondered. It seemed clear that there was. After a few moments of silence, the conversation among the team rose to a new level I hadn’t seen before. Each team member realised quite suddenly that it made perfect sense for the business to actually invest in its customers if it meant they might accrue a special value.

This was a new way of conceiving marketing for them. Normally they saw it as an expense. Now it was about nurturing a long term relationship with each customer rather than acquiring targets for value extraction. So what does it mean to invest in your customers’ lifetime value? How do you do it? At the beginning, try to get rid of some old thinking. Try to stop thinking about how you can acquire a new patient as cheaply as possible.

A patient is not just worth what they pay for, they are a means to value creation. Look at the difference between your typical patients and your best patients. What makes the best ones so good? Now, take a look at your typical patients. What makes them not so good? Do they sometimes do annoying things like no-shows or paying late? Great, they’re human. Now, ask yourself what you can do to turn them into your best patients at each of the critical waypoints that your business struggles with.

A client complained to me recently that they were getting too many tyre-kicking self-referrals. These people came in and just wanted to talk, they said, and the business didn’t have time for it. What they wanted instead was people who were willing to buy. This was an implant centre where people spent £30k for treatment. If I were going to spend that kind of money I would want to talk for a long time too, and so I asked what these customers’ expectations were. Were they getting what they wanted?

No, it turned out. The problem — the reason why these people were not buying — was that they wanted to see the specialist first, whereas the practice wasn’t set up to do this. There is nothing wrong with assessing patients before using a specialist’s valuable time, but there was something wrong with the way this was being explained to patients. There was some work to do here on improving communication.

The biggest hurdle I have in my work is convincing people that marketing is an investment rather than an expense. Marketing isn’t really an expense. What it really is is a way of changing how you talk to your customers so their lifetime value increases all the time. It’s a way to stop thinking of them as difficult, and a way of thinking of yourself as a business that provides high quality experiences.

People who are setting out tend to overlook all the value they will add to their business from treating their customers well. These are invisible gains at first, but they pay enormous dividends because they mean the business is developing relationships over and above short term transactional gains. Businesses that learn to do this communicate authentically and so things just start coming naturally. No need for cleverness. Let me help you try it.

Call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.