Healthcare and Dental Marketing: Getting Your Prospects to Like You
Note: Whether you’re in the dental marketing field, health care field, or even in the restaurant business sector, speak what your potential new patients or customers would want to hear on topics beyond your profession. This is smarter than wasting money on traditional business or dental advertising.
One of the most crucial functions of marketing and advertising is to attract as many people’s interest as possible.
Most people think of marketing and advertising only in terms of promoting your specific service directly. But getting yourself known and your services and products promoted is done very effectively in MANY other ways than the above. Illustrating this is the fact that there is an awful lot of business done on the golf course, or sitting next to someone on a flight across the country.
For example, on one flight I took recently, I was able to refer a job for a large computer installation at a school to a friend of mine because I happened to sit next to the Director of Computer Studies for that school on that flight. The conversation led to this rather simply after just a casual introduction and some small casual exchange about each other’s professional work.
In other words, one cannot overestimate the power of “finding another person’s point of interest” as an entrance point to your marketing messages!
Regardless of what you promote, whether you make a sales call to someone or whether a patient comes to you, the prospect is putting up his sales guard!
It sometimes takes a while to break down that shield . Yes, the prospect wants to buy, but he is on the defensive. He does not trust you.
The reason so much business is done on the golf course is because his guard, his “wall”, is down. Sales people, business people, and especially doctors are slow learners in this matter. Oh, they have heard of it, they even believe it most of the time, but for some weird reason, they don’t tend to do enough “just getting together” and finding their prospects’ point of interest and talk about those points. They only try to toot their own horn about their services.
It must be that the subject is not well understood. Let me give you some additional insight into this:
You see, the more you talk to a person about “no matter what”, as long as there are some common interests, the safer and more familiar you become to him. People have many, many other interests than the one you are trying to promote to them. What you are providing as a service, from their viewpoint, is a very small part of their life, even if it is healthcare. To make them open to you and what you can do for them, you must find THEIR interests on many subjects unrelated to your profession and talk about those interests. This way they “get to know you”, they start to feel comfortable with you, and thus your new friend will be open to buying from you. It’s about building relationships.
After building this relationship, it becomes safe to talk to you because you did not right off the bat try to sell them.
After this, they will call on you to do business if the need arises! And they will start referring friends to you even though they have never used your service.
Talking about your expertise and diploma etc is useless as people are not necessarily equating all that to a person they can trust
People cannot judge how good or bad you are based on what you advertise, not knowing enough about your profession to tell, so they choose according to their relationship with you, or according to the relationship you have with someone they know. That is a safer choice in their mind.
I do not think that there is anything more powerful than creating a large amount of people to know well and be in communication with you on a great many different subjects. The easiest sales I have personally made are to people I have talked to about “no matter what”.
This is easier than you think!This is simple!And this is quite simple! All you need to do is to establish communication channels on which you can communicate to others about different subjects where you have common interests.
Ideally, those communication channels should be low maintenance and easy to set up so that you would have less time invested in it.
After all, you still have a family and you do not want to spend all your precious time sitting in rotary meetings.
This same communication channel should also be cheap enough to have no limitations on how much or how often you use it.
There is one channel, if you know marketing and public relations basics that meet these requirements, and can be used exactly as above. Perhaps you have guessed it.
It’s the Internet . This does not say that there are no other channels where you can meet people and share their interests – there are many, and they should be used. But the Internet is more and more the medium of the present and the wave of the future. There are programs which help you to automate your communication processes without tedious one-on-one communication.
A word of precaution, nevertheless —one must utilize marketing and public relations principles to properly utilize this channel. Otherwise, the “web” will just sit there doing nothing and another great opportunity will be wasted.
But learning and applying these marketing basics is actually very easy, and combined with the use of the web, is worth all the money and time invested many times over.
Don’t be left out of the loop and standing on the sidelines! Learn business or dental internet marketing and get your share of good customers.
Remember: if you wnat new business , you must be willing to put yourself out there and make new connections with effective business or internet dental marketing. Increase communication channels with others who will assist you to spread the word-of-mouth for you without you paying for them.
