subject: Marketing And Advertising For Doctors: Mistakes You Can Avoid [print this page] Some of the biggest mistakes of advertising for doctors are promoting at the wrong moment, selecting the wrong office location, not knowing how to handle objections, not answering price queries the right way, and not drafting a marketing plan.
Apart from these, there are a few other marketing errors that you need to keep an eye on.
Promoting in school yearbooks or church bulletins
The expenditures here should come out of your charitable contributions account, and not from your promotional budget.
Placing your name in your ads headline
Dont put your name in your ads headline as a practitioner does not have enough recognition to have his/her name to entice to a browser to read. In its place: Head the ad with strong benefits for coming to you, and keep your name and logo at the bottom.
Writing direct mail yourself
Direct mail is the toughest type of promotion to create. Heres why: It requires that specific techniques be built into a piece to stimulate immediate response. Practitioners hardly have the knowledge or for that matter talent.
Sadly, most copywriters are not familiar with them. In its place: In direct mail, it almost always pays to hire direct mail specialists. Your response rates can go up by 20 times.
Cutting prices first
Prices should be the last thing in your marketing formula to fiddle with. Prior to cutting prices, promote other aspects of your practice experience, new service, selection, hours, convenience, and the like. Play the price game if all else is ineffective.
Not being aware of your bottom line
If it is to attract new patients or clients to retain the old ones, that is the goal. If it is to please your colleagues (or competitors), that is a different goal. And each one procedures a different kind of promotion. If a promotion is done well, your competitors will feel threatened as they should. If they dont, it is most likely not well-conceived. Being aware of which goal is your true bottom line from the start saves you money and anguish.
Not tracking and coding your advertising
Minus effective tracking of which ads are producing how much in what media, you cannot stop the losers and pump up the winners. As such, in order to improve ad results, insert keys into your ads false phone extensions or individual telephone lines for each specific medium. That way, you will be aware of the source as soon as they call. Asking them where they came to know about you yields 30 to 50 percent wrong responses.
Practice brochures that do not sell you
Most practice brochures dont sell as they contain extraneous or even negative selling points like what to do in an emergency, a warning not to miss appointments, a requirement that you pay at once, and the like. Instead: Place all the rules in an inexpensive brochure to be given to existing clients or patients. Place only convincing copy in your practice brochure.
