CALLS TO ACTION - OR CALLS TO INERTIA?
Think about the last time you bought a TV (or a home, car, or sofa). Did you instantaneously get the idea and make the purchase? Of course not. You thought about it, looked around, asked friends, searched the internet, read magazines and checked your budget.In other words, you spent time gathering information and considering your choices. The actual transaction, especially for major purchases, normally comes after an investigation period.
This is the major problem with a typical LASIK ad: the LARGEST percentage of people who see it are NOT ready to buy right now.
There’s your expensive ad, being seen by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people who are interested in LASIK but who won’t be ready to actually make the purchase for several months or even years.
Your “Buy LASIK before March 31 and I’ll give you $500 off!” special is meaningless to those ‘future buyers’—so they won’t contact you.
Your ‘Call to action’ becomes a ‘Call to move on…’ or a ‘Call to inertia…’ for the majority of viewers.
“Let Me Make You An Offer You Can’t Refuse…”
The problem with almost any offers you might make in your LASIK ads is that they not only CAN be refused – but they may contain the seeds of that refusal in the very offer.
For example, Just about every LASIK ad includes the words ‘Schedule your Free Consultation!”
Of course, WE know why that’s such an important step – how else can a prospective patient learn if they’re a candidate? And if they don’t know that, their research and investigation is potentially a total waste of time. It’s so logical that you’d expect that call to action to produce a stampede of prospects into your waiting room.
But the average prospective patient doesn’t think like that. He or she is still mulling over whether they need or want eye surgery, and instead of that call to action communicating a sensible precaution against mulling in vain – it communicates… SALES PRESSURE!
And, yes, they stay away in their droves.
Tell Them Something They WANT To Know
How do you get the viewers of your ads to go into action? By telling them something they WANT to know.
What do they want to know? They want concise, clearly communicated answers to questions like:
- Does LASIK hurt?
- Is it safe?
- What are the risks?
- Can I throw away my glasses?
- Can anything go wrong?
- Can I really get 20/20?
- How do I choose the right doctor?
Take a look at your current or recent ads: do they come even close to answering those questions? Of course not. Any print ad or a radio or TV ad that did answer those questions would wipe out several months of your marketing budget.
This is where your real call to action comes in.
Give viewers of your ads an option to contact you to receive a Free Report or DVD that promises to educate them about how to make the best purchasing decision, and that compares your practice against other choices in the marketplace.
This is a low risk offer, easy to request, and contains good information that genuinely facilitates the decision making process.
And it will result in those ‘future buyers’ coming to you when they are ready to buy.
How you prepare and design those reports and script and produce those DVDs is a skill in itself. There are right ways and wrong ways – and we know them all.
We’ll describe some of them to you when we give you the results of your Marketing Analysis.
Contact us now to schedule an in-depth and confidential Marketing Analysis.
