You’ve mastered dentistry, and that’s a major accomplishment. But it takes successful marketing to grow your practice. How can you master the art of dental marketing with postcards?
Remember you have more than one target audience.
No matter what kind of dental practice you have, there are three essential audiences to whom you need to target your dental marketing with postcards:
- New patients – you need a steady supply of new people to grow your business and replace patients you’ve lost over time.
- Existing patients – you need to sell them more services and/or encourage them to visit more often, and you need to strengthen their loyalty to you. Existing patients are also a good source of referrals.
- Former patients – sometimes you lose them because they move out of town or age out of your practice, if you’re a pediatric specialist, but targeting those who’ve lapsed for other reasons can win them back.
Think like your patients.
Hard as it is for many small business owners to accept, you aren’t the focus when it comes to your marketing. What matters is how much your postcard appeals to your patients – or prospective patients. Does it grab their attention? Does it compel them pick up the phone to schedule an appointment, or visit your office for a free tour or pick up the free kid’s mouth guard your postcard offered?
To master the art of dental marketing with postcards, you have to study your existing patients. What are their purchasing habits – which procedures or other services do they buy, how much do they spend, and how often? What are their demographics – age, gender, income, etc.? Where are they located geographically – only within a short radius, or spread around town? Are there seasonal patterns to the flow of patients in your practice?
The more you know about your patients, the better you can target new prospects. And think about this: are you planning to add a new colleague or service line that will mean you need to address a new target audience?
Learn from a pro.
There is no question you can improve your dental marketing with direct mail postcards by employing time-honored trial and error. Just keep creating different postcards and sending them to different groups of people until something clicks. You can be even more effective by doing it scientifically, using A/B testing that changes just a single element each time, so you can pinpoint what’s working or not.
But let’s face it. This is a tremendous expense of both time and money, and in the meantime your dental marketing with postcards isn’t generating the results you want. You’re wasting valuable resources.
You can also go to some do-it-yourself postcard website, plug a few key pieces of information about your business into their template and wait for your postcards to arrive in a box so you can address and sort them and take them to the post office. You may save money, but your recipients will probably have trouble distinguishing your postcard from the one they recently received from another dental group that used the same template. They may even think you are that practice and buy from them instead of you.
You’re still not getting much in the way of results.
It’s easy to avoid both these unproductive scenarios by teaming up with a full-service direct mail company experienced in working with dentists. They know what makes dental marketing with postcards work exceptionally well, whether you’re a generalist or a specialist, practicing in a small town or a big city. They’ve been there and done that, professionally speaking, so you can confidently take their advice to heart.
You’re learning from a master.
Photo Credit: @wwarby via Flickr.