What Demographics Should I Mail To?

In the case of Dental Marketing, there always seems to be a strugle over what demographics to choose for a mailing program.

If you are looking for an answer like "you should focus on 25-50 year old women who have an annual income of $40,000, live in a house valued over $200,000, and like to golf and travel," you won't get it here.

In the case of dental care, instead of demographics, you should first consider psychographics, in other words, what makes a patient decide to go to YOUR practice? For a dental practice, it has been proven that a vast majority of dental patients choose their practice mainly because of its convenient location. It's a sad but true reality that comes from a lack of public education about what constitutes great dental care.

Also, when creating a mailing list, you need to ask yourself what your practice needs. Many times that doesn't come down to 25-50 year old women who like to golf; it comes down to patients with money to afford your services.

In both of these cases, the data points to a simple geographic list. There are many things you can get in a simple geographic based list. You can eliminate "unfavorable" neighborhoods, eliminate transient apartment dwellers (not to be confused with condo owners), and not waste money mailing to those who live far out of your area.

If I were to set one demographic parameter, it would be household income. If they make above average income in the area (usually $50K and above), and live within 5-10 miles of my practice depending on population concentration, they would be on my list.

By creating a demographic selection of list by age and personal interest, you not only are limiting your target audience, but also you are going to pay more money per name and receive less targets. In turn, you will also receive fewer responses. In this case too, we are not figuring in design and copywriting costs for a targeted marketing piece. (If you specifically target your market, you need to take the same care to target your message, and your media as well.)

You also mentioned that you are in an insurance heavy market. Do you take their insurance? If not, do you offer programs as viable insurance substitutes? Many practices I deal with are in a location that does not support who the dentist wants to target. Some are fee for service practices in an insurance market like yours, and get beat to death by the "Do you take my insurance?" question.

In a case of demographics, keep it simple. If all you want in your practice is 33-year-old men who own BMW's, you can have all of them and still have a very small practice. But what you really want is patients in your chairs who have the means to afford the best care you can possibly offer for them. My suggestion would be to go with a radius around your office and an income qualifier.

Third Party Endorsements

Many times in marketing, we get caught talking about ourselves. Promoting yourself is a great way to get the message out about what you do, and whom you help. As Donald Trump says, “Brag about yourself and your accomplishments because no one else will.

I disagree with Mr. Trump. Although promoting yourself and your practice is important, there are plenty of people out there who will talk about you, your practice, and how you have helped them. In this case, I follow the Dan Kennedy creed: “What others say about you and your service is at least 1000% more convincing than what you say, even if you are 1000% more eloquent. The following are three of these 3rd parties:

Current Patients: You have hundreds, if not thousands of people you help each year. Every one of them should have something good to say about you and your services. Collect testimonials from every patient at every visit. It’s just as simple as having your front office person give them a form and ask them to fill it out regarding their experience that day. Get their ok, and use these to promote your office.

In an insurance office I recently visited, there were 2, 4” thick binders full of testimonial sheets. With some quick math, I figured there were over 2000 in all. I wouldn’t have to read all of them, but it was a great way to display these testimonials for customers to read. For a sample testimonial sheet to use in your practice, just fax a request to 503-371-1299.

Celebrities: When people think of celebrities, sometimes they get caught up in A-list names like Brad Pitt, or Jennifer Aniston. These people would be great to endorse your services, but they aren’t needed. Think of local people who have some recognition in the community. Find someone like a local news anchor, musician, or maybe the mayor or a state representative. These people are a bit easier to find than Tom Cruise, and sometimes they will be willing to promote your services on the cheap.

News Media: This is the one endorsement you can control. By creating publicity through the local news media, you create an endorsement from them. This is news from your practice produced by you, but rewritten and printed for thousands of people to read. It does not look as if you wrote it yourself, so it appears as a third party endorsement. This is a great deal because this endorsement is delivered to thousands of people daily.

Let these third parties tell your story, and they will have a big impact in your practice.

Have a profitable week!

Online Publicity

Google has become a household name over the last 5 years. If you were to say “Google it” to someone in the early 90’s, they would have looked at you like you were crazy. Now, Google.com has become THE online gateway for online information.

How do you get listed on Google? Well, you can go through their adwords program where you actually bid to have your name at the top, OR, you can take advantage of the little known free ways to be listed on Google.

First, lets see how Google works. Every day and night Google has “bots” or “spiders” that crawl around all of the code on the internet picking up on certain things that rate a website. These things can range from key words to links, to mentions in a blog article. These go into the google computer and out comes a score for a website based on how many links it has from other sites, and how many relevant key words it has on the site itself.

This is the short version of how Google gets its information.

Now that we know how it works, we can look at how to get listed without paying big for a listing.

One of the easiest ways is through Google News. In order to be the top Internet news service in the bunch, the Googlebots crawl through news websites daily in looking for relevant content.

The easy way to get listed on these searches is through your local paper. These newspaper articles, if written correctly, will not only appear on the Google news page, but can also appear as top ranked content on the main Google search page. This is an easy, FREE way to get your practice mentioned and attract new patients through the Internet.

Of course, this is not the only way to promote your practice on the internet, There are still many options out there that are very passive and can lead to great new patient acquisition strategies.

ACTION TO TAKE: Browse the Internet and especially Google. Check local bulletin boards (www.craigslist.org), Local city sites (www.citysearch.com), and especially your local media sites and see what it takes to get listed.

The more you are mentioned on the Internet, the more you are likely to be found.

Have a profitable week!