Healthcare and Dental Marketing: Un-Advertising – A Brand New Marketing Concept

Successful healthcare and dental practice management has to include marketing methods that can get lots of good patients into the door without expensive advertisement. Traditional healthcare and dental marketing tends to be restricted by only internal marketing or external advertising.

Yet, it is more and more true that most medical and dental practices that do advertising exclusively are throwing their hard-earned money out the window. They might increase the total collection but almost never the bottom line.

The reason is obvious : advertising is hardly noticed and definitely not believed. The amount of advertising in this country is way up, but for most practice owners it means an ever decreasing profits.

Here are the common problems in advertising:

1) If your advertising message only talks about the benefits of your services and your experience and your diplomas, you will sound alike with your competitors’ messages. Patients cannot choose easily among services which ‘look alike’.

2) You are promoting yourself. People are skeptical about the claims in your ads. Your prospects already expect you to say, “We have the latest technology”, “We are service-orientated”, etc.

3) Ads have little staying power in creating deep impressions. The moment you stop advertising, no one will remember you. Out-of-sight means out-of-mind almost immediately.

4) Your prospects are bombarded by 5000 advertising appeals a day. You are trying to get your message heard in an overcrowded marketing environment. Thus advertising cost goes up and returns decrease.

How about traditional word-of-mouth and networking activities?

1) Many offices depend on word-of-mouth as their primary source of new patients, but depending only on internal word-of-mouth alone could not help you to break through income ceilings. Particularly in a depressed economy, most offices find their new patient referrals going down or at best staying below a ceiling. Patients are leaving their doctors at the drop of a pin due to loss of jobs and insurances.

2) Networking meetings and luncheons to stimulate patient referrals from other doctors and related businesses are too time-consuming. You can send your staff to bring small gifts to another doctor’s office to thank them for referrals but how many ‘let’s-bring-em-bagel’ trips can you make to ALL the possible referral sources? This time-consuming and costly ‘gift-giving’ will eventually dead-end for most – due to not enough time for the doctor and for the staff to continue the action. 

What is the solution? ‘Un-Advertising’ is the answer.

Un-Advertising is about getting other organizations, media, business owners and health care professionals etc in your community to say how good you are, instead of you having to promote yourself.

Put your messages onto other organizations’ existing communication channels. It is like hooking onto a high speed train to travel to your destination versus trying to build your own railroad and train!

This strategy builds trust and reputation very quickly in the community without advertising and the best of all, it does not require the budget as in traditional advertising. 

To get prospects to notice you, you need a ‘spark’ – something that turns their heads. Without this first spark, there is no fire that could start – thus no wind can spread this non-existing fire! Advertising is the wind and doing advertising without first establishing a position or perception which was put in people’s minds by other sources than you will be a squandering of money.

Your message must be believed, it must build trust, increase customer loyalty and make your practice stand out from your competition, especially in depressed economic times.

Remember: Healthcare and dental advertising can help get new patients and grow your business but if you do not wish to waste money in your healthcare and dental marketing efforts, you must include establishing trust and reputation in a broader and cheaper way. And that method is called ‘Un-advertising’. There are numerous articles on this subject.

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