Tuesday, June 3, 2014
I’ve worked with a shade under 4,000 dental professionals since opening the doors of my marketing company in 1998, and so I’ve learned a little insider info about you guys.
Here it is: You’re a tough sell on marketing! Kinda…
It’s not that you don’t believe in marketing—the dental marketing industry is huge—it’s that you don’t really trust marketing. You’re skeptical, and rightly so. The dental industry is not one of the easier industries to get responses in, so time after time you are left confused and more than a little disappointed in your marketing results. You wish there were a way to get “better bang for your marketing buck,” as it were.
Well, there is. And the reason it has eluded you for this long is that it requires a time commitment that you certainly can’t keep (after all, you’re busy fixing teeth), and a level of marketing skill most marketing managers simply don’t have.
I’m talking about well-planned, perfectly executed marketing integration—multiple media working together to create a system that generates more leads than the individual strategies alone are capable of producing. Here’s an example:
One of my clients—a smart, committed marketer in his own right—began mailing 6,000 postcards a month in 2009. In 2011, he doubled that number. And in 2013, he added what was at that time our newest product, DirectMail2.0 – a blanket campaign that seamlessly integrated his postcard campaign with a Google campaign to follow-up with his online leads.
The results speak for themselves:
Adding more postcards to his original campaign clearly increased the results, but integrating with an online marketing platform took his results into an entirely different range, without significantly increasing his marketing expense.
Since then, we have introduced a new version of that product—DirectMail2.0: New Patient Edition—that caters specifically to those in medical fields, including dentists, by focusing on enhanced targeting for greater impressions and repetition—the key to getting people to finally notice and call you. The product includes some other extras that are super useful, but the engine that drives your marketing to new heights (like my client above) is the integration of postcard marketing and Google pay per click (PPC) advertising. That’s what you need to take away from this article, and here’s why:
1. Direct Mail Postcards Flat out Work for Dentists
Postcards have been a staple in the dental marketing toolbox for decades, and with good reason: They get the job done. Because the value of getting even one new patient for your practice is so high, you don’t need a ton of responses to justify the cost of a postcard campaign. Depending on your practice, sometimes even one new client pays for the campaign. This is why postcards are a must for dentists. They will rarely knock your socks off in terms of the number of responses, but they are incredibly consistent at generating a significant (if not mind-blowing) return on investment. They just chug along, adding patients and revenue to your practice month after month. And over time, it really adds up.
All that is great, but it doesn’t exempt you from that, “Can’t I do better?” feeling. And indeed, that’s where step 2 steps in.
2. Pay Per Click Supercharges Your Overall Results
Marketing is mostly about timing. If you put your ad in the hands of the right prospect at the right time, you're likely to get a positive result. So the trick is finding the right prospects and hitting them at the right time. Thanks to targeted mailing lists, postcards are excellent at finding the right prospects, but the timing is more difficult. If a prospect doesn’t get your postcard within a couple days of when they are ready to make a decision, you probably won’t be the one they call. Pay per click changes that.
With pay per click, you can target a specific geographical area with your ads, which helps with “finding the right prospects,” too. But you can also keep your campaign running 24/7 if you’re so inclined, so whenever the timing in right for the prospect, your ad is ready for them. And you don’t pay a cent until someone actually clicks on your ad!
By strategically designing your postcards and your pay per click ads to match each other in both branding and messaging, you are creating a seamless campaign that reaches from the mailbox to the laptop. Thanks to your mailing list and pay per click settings, you are reaching the right prospects. Thanks to your online and offline integration, you know your marketing is ready to get the job done when the moment arrives. So if you are ready to stop being disappointed with your marketing results, it’s time to say goodbye to single-platform campaigns and say hello to integration!