What is “Good” Marketing?

In my last article I qualified “good marketing” as effective in getting far more return than the investment made. There’s a lot of technical advice I could give to achieve this, but I think the most useful piece of advice for a layperson is to put himself in the shoes of the type of new client or patient he is trying to attract.

Let’s say one of the types of public [target market] is a woman aged 40 to 60 of middle plus income who has issues with her teeth and needs implants and other work. Do this exercise: imagine you are she and you decide to look for a dentist. You go to the Internet and type in Google dental implants and your town (e.g. dental implants New York). Now, look over the results and, still imagining you are this woman, see which results attract you. Click on some of those. On each one you click on, again being the woman, see if you find on that website something that would get you motivated to call the practice.

Such as:

• Is there an offer of a consultation or other call to action that would make it easy for the patient to come in?
• What is the practice like?
• Are there any convincing third-party endorsements?
• Are they saying things that would make the person feel confident about going to that practice?

See which of the websites you clicked on would make you want to go to it, if you were that 40- to 60-year-old woman. A website that can do that is accomplishing good marketing. Not how high it is on the Google results page, although that’s important too, or how many links it has, etc.

You might also find that not too many of the websites you clicked on are eliciting much interest in your imagined role as the 40- to 60-year-old woman. That’s because much of the original, time-proven practices of making a marketing piece that would itself elicit viable response have been lost or ignored in favor of search marketing strategies. While these are important, they are only half of the equation. Step one is to make a website that will interest and elicit response and step two is to get as many as possible of the correct target public to see that website through the search marketing strategies.

The same exercise can be done for direct mailers. What mailers have you gotten, of any type, that got your attention and got you to act? These mailers had the basic ingredients of successful marketing.

In our company we ensure good marketing by doing the time-proven actions of marketing that will not only get your website, mailer or other marketing item in front of the correct public in volume, but that will also cause the person to be interested and want to call the practice. This includes individual market research to isolate the hot buttons for your area and type of practice. We use these hot buttons to craft the messages and images that will best resonate with the person. It also includes a long history of success for our dental clients that we have translated into proprietary protocols we use to ensure our clients are as successful as possible.