| A Direct Approach:
A direct approach to marketing and advertising is scientifically
based and means that you will use some method to track and
evaluate the response to your advertising. In this way you
will know whether or not the advertising that you did was cost
effective. The answer to that question will guide you in
further media advertising efforts.
The Importance of Your Offer:
You must "Give 'till it Hurts!" Think about the
kinds of offers you respond to. Would you drive 50 miles
to save 50 cents on a six pack of garden flowers? I
wouldn't. Would you drive 50 miles to save 50% on a set of
4 new tires for your car? Now you are getting my
attention---If I need tires! Will potential patients take
you offer of a Free Consultation seriously? Maybe not!
Many chiropractors have made that offer for too long a period of
time. You are going to have to do better. How about
a FREE Pain Assessment? "What's the difference,"
you ask, "between a Free Pain Assessment and a Free
Consultation?" A, clever one, the difference is
nothing but the wording. People may be tired of FREE
Consultation but they are not tired of FREE Pain Assessments
because Pain Assessments are a new way of saying things.
Consider some of these
offers:
Free Fitness Evaluation
Free Job or Work Fitness Evaluation
Free Nutritional Assessment.
If you are one who does not like giving FREE STUFF to people,
consider offering a discount on the above offers---Fitness
Evaluation for only $10.00 or $25.000 Gift Certificate good
towards Nutritional Assessment. Notice that the Website
that is yours when you join the Marketing Library for
Chiropractors gives you the opportunity to include exciting,
interactive offers. When it comes to marketing and
advertising...Offers Work!
How to Plan Your Ad
Start with the message you want
to get across to potential patients. Write down what you
want them to know, the offer you are making and what you want
them to do as a result of seeing your ad or visiting your
Website. Identify all the benefits you touch upon in your
message. You may not have actually stated any benefits in
the message you wrote---most people don't unless they are
trained to write that way. So, start by identifying the
features you wrote about. Features are items such as: Open
7 days a week; 15 years experience; Free Nutritional Assessment.
Once you identify features, finish the thought by stating the
benefit to the potential patient. Your office hours are
definitely a convenience to people. Your experience means
they can have peace of mind that their problems will be handled
well. A Free Nutritional Assessment allows them to meet you at
no financial risk and it gives them valuable information about
their own diet.
Select One Benefit
Select the one benefit you think
is most appealing to your audience and turn that into a
Headline. "Open 7 Days Because Back Pain Strikes at
Any Time" or "Don't Guess? Call XYZ Chiropractic
for a Free Nutritional Assessment and know for sure how your
diet stacks up." You cannot be all things to all
people in life and especially not in small media ads. Ads
that try to focus on too many benefits are confusing and fail to
give a strong message to any one target. A good Website,
however, does allow you to focus on more than one benefit at a
time. Each link on your Website should focus on a specific
benefit to a specific target audience.
Support Your Headline with
related or additional benefits.
Support for the Nutritional
Heading might be: Learn How Your Diet Affects Your: Energy
Levels, Your Weight, Your Health, Your Happiness.
Sometimes simple changes in what you eat can make tremendous
changes in How You Feel.
Tell your Reader what you
want them to do
You have identified the target
audience you are after (people with nutritional concerns).
You have made a generous offer and supported your headline.
Now it is time for action. Even though your Heading asks
people to call, you must reinforce this. "Call today
for a no risk Nutritional Assessment." Give them you phone
number, Web address and some reason to act now. Maybe
people who call within 7 days also receive a FREE Consultation
with the doctor or maybe the Free offer is only valid for one
week.
Decide on a potential layout
for your ad
Does any type of graphic come to
mind? If you are thinking of placing your ad in a
newspaper, the width of your ad will be determined by their
column widths. Your ad can be as many inches long as you
want but you must take at least one column width and add to that
in terms of column widths. Column width may vary: The LA
Times' columns are about 2 inches wide. Your ad's
dimensions will be something like this---3 column widths by 5
inches. If you tell your media representative you want
your ad to be 3 by 5, be aware that the rep is hearing 3
columns...not three inches.
HOW TO BUILD IN EVALUATION
METHODS
One: Use a limited offer
in your advertising. Your offer may be a Free Body
Composition Analysis with one Free Think Your Way to Weight Loss
Session. People must call now to be eligible. If no
one calls, either your offer had no interest to your audience or
the media you chose did not reach your target audience. A
very effective way to use a Website is to include a section
about your special offer in connection with a feedback form.
This makes evaluation easy and really lowers the cost of your
newspaper advertising.
Two: If you are using two or
more media sources, direct readers of your newspaper ad to call
and ask for Sam while you direct your radio audience to call and
ask for Mary. Then you know which ad pulls. Should you
rely on people to tell you how they heard of you? Yes and
no. Always ask but remember that people lie, don't
remember, haven't a clue...so use scientific testing methods
because advertising isn't cheap.
Do Your Homework
In order to know whether or not
your advertising is cost effective, you need to know aht a new
patient is worth to you. You can obtain this figure by
dividing your yearly revenue by the number of patients you saw.
This will give you average yearly revenue per patient data.
Because personal injury patients generate much higher revenue
than family practice patients, it is a good idea to determine
average yearly revenue separately.
How to Evaluate the
Effectiveness of Your Ad
You have built tracking methods
into your advertisement so you know what kind of response you
got. But what you you expect? Advertising is
supposed to be cost effective. That means that if you
spend $600.00 to run an ad in a newspaper or magazine, you need
to generate $3,000.00 to $6,000.00 in revenue from it, but this
revenue is based on yearly revenue. Ads have short lives.
The response to your ad will occur the day it runs or the day or
maybe two days after the ad appears. Don't expect people
to clip out your ad and call you weeks later. And just
because you heard of something like that happening one time does
not mean that it is the rule. It isn't. So, figure
it out! You know the revenue a new patient will generate.
You know how many new patients you got from the ad and you know
what the ad cost to run. If it was cost effective, keep
going. If the ad did not pull its weight...it is
time to go back to the drawing board.
Sample Ad Designs
The purpose of the
Marketing Library for Chiropractors is to provide members with
real marketing assistance. When you join, you will have
the advantage of visiting and using professionally designed
media ads, door hangers, flyers and much more. Try it out Risk
Free for 30 Days.
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