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Healthcare & Dental Marketing: How to Attract New Patients without Wasting Money on Advertising

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

Successful health care and dental practice management has to include marketing methods that can get lots of good patients into the door without expensive advertising. Traditional healthcare and dental marketing tends to be restricted by only internal marketing or external advertising.

Yet, it is more and more true that most healthcare and dental practices that do advertising solely are throwing their hard-earned money out the window. They might increase the total collection but almost never the bottom line.

The reason is clear: advertising is hardly noticed and definitely not believed. The amount of advertising in this and other countries is way up, but for most small business owners it means less and less profits.

Here are some of the obstacles you will need to overcome while advertising:

1) If your advertising message only talks about the good parts of your services and your experience and which school you went to, you will sound alike with your competitors’ messages. Patients cannot choose easily among services which are similar.

2) You are tooting your own horn. People do not 100% believe an ad. Your prospects already expect you to say, “We have state-of-the-art technology”, “We are friendly”, etc.

3) Ads have little staying power in creating deep impressions. The next month you cease advertising, nobody will remember you. Out-of-sight means out-of-mind right away.

4) Your prospects are bombarded by 5000 advertising appeals a day. You are trying to get your message heard in an overcrowded marketing environment. Thus advertising cost goes up and returns decrease.

Problems in traditional customer referrals and networking:

5) Many offices depend on patient referrals as their primary source of new prospects, but depending only on internal marketing alone could not help you to break through business income plateaus. Particularly in a depressed economy, most offices find their new patient referrals going down or at best staying below a ceiling. Patients are leaving their doctors immediately due to loss of jobs and insurances.

6) Networking meetings and luncheons to stimulate patient referrals from other doctors and related businesses are too time-consuming. You can send your staff to bring small gifts to another doctor’s office to thank them for referrals but how many ‘let’s-bring-em-bagel’ trips can you make to ALL the possible referral sources? This time-consuming and costly ‘gift-giving’ will eventually dead-end for most – due to not enough time for the doctor and for the staff to continue the action.

What is the solution? ‘Un-Advertising’ is the answer.

Un-Advertising is about getting other organizations, media, business owners and health care professionals etc in your community to endorse you, instead of you having to say good things about yourself.

Piggyback your messages onto other organizations’ existing communication channels. It is like hooking onto a high speed train to travel to your destination rather than trying to build your own railroad and train!

This strategy builds trust and reputation very quickly in the community without advertising and the best of all, it does not require the budget as in traditional advertising.

To attract your prospects’ attention, you need a ‘spark’ – something that turns their heads.

Without this spark, there is no fire that could ignite – thus no wind can spread this non-existing fire! Advertising is the wind and doing advertising without first establishing a position or perception which was put in people’s minds by other sources than you will be a waste of your marketing budget.

Your message must be believed, it must build trust, increase patient loyalty and make your practice stand out from your competition, especially in bad economic times.

Remember: Healthcare and dental advertising can help get new patients and grow your business but if you do not wish to waste money in your healthcare and dental marketing efforts, you must include establishing trust and reputation in a broader and cheaper way. And that method is ‘Un-advertising’. There are numerous articles on this subject.