Cost Effective LASIK Marketing In A Nutshell
First of all let’s clear something up:Your advertising dollars are collectively the most important investment you can make in your practice.
“But I have the most expensive, and up-to-date equipment money can buy. I have a very expensive education and years of experience to back it up. How can my ad expense possibly be more important?”
Well sir (or madam), the hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, and those hard earned certificates are totally worthless…unless you have enough LASIK patients to generate respectable profit.
How do you bring those patients in? That’s what you spend your advertising dollars doing. If you do it wastefully you end up hating the sound of the word (Marketing?! Grrr!). If you can do it cost-effectively, you think your Marketing Director is a genius and you’re achieving your dream.
Strategic Messaging and Tactical Implementation
These may sound like buzzwords but they’re not. These two words sometimes cause readers to go blank because their specific definitions as they apply to marketing are not grasped.
- A strategic or overview marketing plan means a carefully crafted overall message that presents your skill and your practice so as to differentiate it from your competitors and make prospects eager to schedule with you. In other words it’s WHAT you say.
- A tactical marketing plan is the implementation and delivery of that strategic message using the correct media – or HOW you communicate that message.
The strategic message can usually be worked out by studying and analyzing what your past patients have had to say about their experience. Once you have that established it probably won't change. The ‘shifting sands’ in this equation are found in the tactical implementation of that message.
Here are some Tactical Basics:
Advertising media fall into four major groups:
- Print
- Broadcast
- Signage
- Web-based
The considerations when making tactical media selections are:
- Finding vehicles that will hit your targeted demographic (have you established that?)
- The amount of reach you desire
- The frequency you desire (and can afford)
- Production costs (print ads, radio ads, TV ads)
- Placement costs (where do you place those ads most effectively and economically?)
- Timing, and those three magic words
- Return on Investment
- “Reach” - creates awareness – this refers to the size of audience for that media or your message
- “Frequency” – generates responses – people generally have to see or hear an ad 5 or 6 times before they will act.
How to combine reach and frequency depends on your planning and your budget. Should you use a “blitz” campaign to achieve immediate and massive awareness, or a “blinker” campaign to re-kindle interest on an intermittent basis? Or a lower impact continually running schedule for consistent messaging?
Cost effective advertising can usually be attained by concentrating your ad placements within a few specific media. Your reach will be smaller, but you can increase frequency which will produce responses. How do you identify those media in your area?
- Ad schedules and timing – these should consider seasonal, community events, and cultural issues. You have to be up on these, or have someone whose job it is to track these so your messaging is falling on receptive ears.
- Tracking your results – this alone allows you to fine tune R.O.I.
- Testing, Testing, Testing – That overall message can probably be phrased in a number of ways – some may miss the target by a mile, and others might miss it by a millimeter. You have to have the latitude to try variations in your message and develop new angles with your media placement.
Contact us now to learn about or schedule an in-depth and confidential Marketing Analysis.
