Knowing Your Audience

Three tips you need to know before placing a marketing ad.

When you are in any type of business, it’s important to know everything about your audience and be crystal clear who you’re trying to attract. In your case, your ‘audience’ is your dental patients, but I want to you take it a step further and know your ideal niche patient.

You may think a patient is a patient and they are all one big group, but that’s hardly the case. I bet if you looked at them in detail, they could be placed into a handful of individual groups. And figuring out those categories is the first step you need to take to know your audience.

Once you have your patients grouped in these categories, it acts as a blueprint and allows you to map out a laser-focused marketing sequence to that specific niche patient.

A great example of this is the newspaper and yellow page ads. This has dramatically changed over the last several years. Before all you needed was your name, phone number, and address, but that doesn’t work anymore. Then offices started adding ‘we accept insurance’. And more recently starting listing what credit cards they accept (which you should never do!).

These are things that are just assumed.  So you have to be more specific in your marketing ads and break it down.  Every audience is different in what they are searching for and respond to, so when you’re creating these ads it’s important that you only market for one thing at a time.  Which is why I broke it down into three very important steps you need to cover when creating a marketing piece.
First, you have to be laser focused.  Every marketing piece you do doesn’t have to be all things to all people.  You can have different demographics of patients you are bringing each, but each marketing piece needs to be directed to only one group at a time.  So determine your audience and be laser-focused on them.

Which leads us to step two.  Whether you are creating a marketing piece for your patients or speaking to them in the office you need to let them know you speak their language.  If they are having a dental issue, they aren’t using words like, ‘I need an implant’, they are saying, ‘I’m missing a tooth’.  So, you have to use the words they know and are using to describe their problems.

In this week’s video, I give you three very important tips you need to cover when creating a marketing piece. Is it laser focused to that target patient? Are you speaking their language? And are you making them feel like you care about them? Take a few minutes to watch the video, where I break down each point and give you easy to implement steps to make sure your next marketing piece gets the best results it possibly can.  So, you have to speak their language.

The last part is often overlooked but it is equally as important as the previous steps and that is making a connection with your patients.  They want to feel like you really know them and care about them.  When they see an ad from you or are looking at your website you want them to think to themselves, ‘This dentist gets me and my needs’.  It’s about making a connection with your patients, human to human, and making them feel comfortable in knowing you have their best interest in mind.

If you keep these three steps in mind when planning your marketing you will start to higher patient response to your ads.