In my last article, I defined “good marketing” as effective at delivering a far greater return than the investment. 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 themselves in the shoes of the type of new client or patient they are trying to attract.
Let’s say one type of public [target market] is a woman aged 40 to 60 with middle- to upper-income status who has dental issues and needs implants and other work. Do this exercise: imagine you are her and you decide to look for a dentist. You go to Google and type in “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 websites you clicked on would make you want to visit them 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 many of the original, time-tested practices for creating a marketing piece that would elicit a 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 create a website that interests and elicits a response, and step two is to get as many of the correct target audiences as possible to see that website through 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 effective marketing by taking time-tested actions that not only get your website, mailer, or other marketing item in front of the right public in volume, but also make the person interested and want to call the practice. This includes individual market research to identify the hot buttons for your area and practice type. We use these hot buttons to craft messages and images that will resonate most with the person. It also includes a long history of success for our dental clients, which we have translated into proprietary protocols to ensure they are as successful as possible.
