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MARKETING SECRET WEAPONS
Consistency • Frequency • Volume
People forget. People postpone. People deny. Dental Marketing brings reality, encouragement, and prompting.
There are other incentives you can offer to get people to act, but the basic marketing package of consistency, frequency, and volume are a very powerful arsenal. They are "secret weapons" because they are buried beneath the hype of more specific marketing tactics like discounts and freebies.
However, just using these three general concepts can create the type of activity you need and want. Without this type of effort, your patients and consumers will do less, gravitate to competitors, and generally avoid taking care of things. This is not a phenomenon only associated with dental consumers. It is our make up as human beings.
Yet, dentists often want to avoid this reality. "Marketing is a bad word and I will not speak it." Therefore communication of any human day-to-day value is eliminated from the dental consumer experience. Like an ADA produced brochure placed in a holder on the wall is somehow the only ethical way to approach dental communication!
There is more to dental health than dental or health: somewhere people have to be involved. Marketing fills a people need. Using marketing's "secret weapons" might be the most ethical thing you could do for the public and your patients.
Consistency
No one changes their mind or moves off the dime without a consistent value argument. We have too many decisions to make each and every day. We have too little time to make all of them. We have a bunch of bad habits, mounds of bogus information, and a significant ballast of anxieties.
Communicating with consistency is the only way to make a noticeable dent in this reality. If you are doing nothing on a regular basis to break through and state your case, the value of your services will sink further into the pool of consumer needs.
Think of a technology, technique, or material you might not have tried (or as soon) without some type of "influence" campaign. You got a flyer, a colleague discussed the concept with you, you went to a website, and the magazine you regularly read had a write up with an advertisement or two. Now think of how many times your community has HEARD about what you were doing in the last year. Is your tree falling in an empty forest?
What exactly is consistency? It is an impression on a regular basis. It is a real life conversation. It is where people are! A Yellow Pages ad is always there - but effective consistency is not about marketing availability, it's about proactive interactions. Your website is always there, but it will never approach anyone in their normal daily activities.
Imagine advertising the latest technology only in the Yellow Pages, which is published 6 months after you get it. Imagine using your website alone for recall. Each marketing source has its power. Consistency without a proactive element does little to foster upgrades in care. Consistently grabbing the consumer by the lapel and saying, "Did you know this?" can dramatically change their appreciation index.
Your image and message also needs consistency. Promote the latest trends in dentistry but have an "umbrella brand" that people can follow over a number of months and years.
Maybe your consistency is a folksy newsletter. Possibly you run a column in a local newspaper. Perhaps you send out an email to encourage upgrades or more referrals. Rather than try to come up with the perfect plan - start doing something now. Of course, the better you do it, the better reception you will get. Yet, even marketing missteps are better now than later when the competition and marketing environment make it even more complicated and risky.
Frequency
How many times did your mom tell you to take out the trash or do the dishes before you did it? Marketing prods us to make us think, move faster and/or inspire us to take care of things. While mom was not always successful (I resemble that result) things usually progressed much farther than it would have if she had not turned off the TV and made her "presence known".
Frequency and consistency are often symbiotic but are different. Consistency is clarification and reinforcement, while frequency is the inspiration element (getting people to wake up and act).
The best way to think about it is by looking at your internal efforts to encourage compliance and acceptance. Think about the patients who come in without much impetus to proceed beyond the basic needs they perceived as they walked in. Over a few visits - maybe years - you get them onboard to proceed on more extensive needs.
Various internal elements went into this inspiration process. The hygienist made some inroads; your initial consultation stays in their head; and various general media and consumer external influences put a positive spin on your internal interactions. This consistent "communication" provides enough evidence of value and they proceed. But waiting three years or even until the "next visit" can put their health and your business in jeopardy.
Frequency (or inspiration) is a constant peppering of value (often indirect displays) not based on "dental health" or generic dental-visit occurrences. This could be the dentist or hygienist that seems to be able to talk almost every patient into going ahead with all their recommendations. It could be the enhanced smile of a team member or a patient. The dental environment itself (team/décor/comfort level) can encourage a quicker decision.
Yet this frequency is mostly limited to the dental visit. Even if your patients love their new smiles and frequently display them, the numbers of patients with new smiles limits the impact (referrals). If you do fewer than 3 or 4 cases per month of more than 3 anterior teeth restorations, the growth effect of this "inspiration" will not generate noticeable new patient numbers.
Proactive, external frequency acknowledges that the consumer needs your services but will stay unaware and inactive if you do not approach them locally. If you are waiting for some other societal force or organization to improve your situation, you are not running a real business.
External frequency communication utilizes varied elements and inspired impressions to effectively engage consumers and patients. Consistency might be a regular newsletter (like the dental visit) but frequency would be the times they see you doing other things like an advertisement, email with a "special link" to your website, and/or a newspaper article (team/practice value displays).
Without frequent impressions of your brand and its value, many consumers and patients will not be inspired to change their habits. They will fall back in their habitual rut. Mom would not like it that you are letting these people stare at the TV and not get their dental work done.
Volume
Ten people need dentistry right now within one mile of your practice and will not do anything about it because no one is talking to them today! But where are they? Who are they? Volume is the quickest way to get to these ten people.
The one-dentist practice only needs 10-50 new patients per month. Unfortunately, these consumers are not walking by your practice each day and looking in.
Some Internet businesses became huge in a matter of months because of the volume effect. While dentistry is almost strictly a brick and mortar event, the Internet proves the concept of volume. Think of your business as focused on a very unique audience - left-handed, cat loving, post-graduate-educated women who collect kitten figurines. There would be little hope for a brick and mortar store like this in a small town in central Wyoming. The Internet provided volume to every business in the world that does require customers to walk in the door.
For dental practices, volume is often reversed online: one among seemingly many local providers and minimal differentiation. For the consumer you are as different and plentiful as the local convenience store, which would be nonsensical to search for online. From an awareness standpoint, most dentists are located in a small town somewhere in central Wyoming.
Volume for a dental practice means approaching enough people to improve the odds you are talking to those who are ready. Yellow Page books and the Internet are a neutral mode of volume marketing. The consumer is left in their habitual rut until THEY "find" reasons to proceed.
Proactive mode dental marketing makes things happen sooner. Increasing volume is necessary to uncover the 10-50 new patients you need each month. Marketing to 10-50 people is not a practical solution. While volume can be expensive, the likelihood of success (finding those 10-50) is greatly increased. If 10,000 mailers are sent out and only 1/2 of one percent are persuaded to get out of their rut or were ready (and you were there first), the results are 50 new patients.
If the cost of one mailing is about 50 cents per piece, your upfront cost is about $5,000. The revenue needed to make this worthwhile would be about $25K. That is about $500 per patient over an 18 month to three-year period. Now imagine getting two $15K-$20K cases and four $5K+ cases and that $500 from the other patients.
Of course, one mailing (or one ad in the local paper that goes to 10,000 households) might not be enough to create the effect you need. But increasing volume to a real life (people are busy/have other needs) level provides significant potential for moving things forward.
Secret Weapon Conclusion
Put only ONE element in your marketing repertoire and NOT the others, and the profit curve continue to fall. A successful business strategy is required otherwise your vocation becomes irrelevant. Proactive, especially external communication is key to insuring that the public gets what they deserve: better dental health.
Going to a CE course, getting another piece of technology, and updating your facility are very important and helpful in many ways. However, those expenses are only worthwhile if your business continues to succeed -- increasing your exposure encourages growth to spread the risk to a larger base.
To build an appropriate marketing budget, think about your budget in more individualized terms rather than as a percentage of total sales. This puts everything you do on the line - rather than me as a marketing person suggesting some arbitrary number that gets shot down by your accountant or business manager.
For example, you are going to a CE course and it costs $5,000. What kind of communication do you need to do to make the course worthwhile for your business? Now add up everything in your facility that requires communication to explain its value to the consumer and your patients.
Here is another way to look at the numbers: To get 50 new patients each month (that you would not have gotten otherwise), you "might" need to spend about $5,000 each month. That is $100 to acquire each new patient. An acquisition fee of $100 is NOT much when you consider that each new patient on average generates $2,500 in fees (national figure). This would put the marketing expense at 6.25% of each new patient's generated fees.
Not only would you get their specific fees, you would be adding 50 more referral agents each month, generating even more revenue.
Add these basic Secret Weapons to your marketing arsenal and see more consistent compliance, more frequent acceptance, and a much larger volume of business success.