Archive for the ‘Email Marketing Solutions’ Category
Most dental marketers have this answer to the what-should-you-do questionââwhat “we” specialize in. There is quite a bit of conflict of interest in this response, but often they are correct by default. Doing “something” — even their thing — can work. However, the results these one-legged solutions create are often short-lived.
The market changes, consumers evolve, and competitors compete. Therefore, the second stage Top FAQ becomes: What do I do now? A question I hear a lot more frequently.
When I started, some dentists were marketing outside of the Yellow Pages, but few were doing anything else consistently. In the intervening 10 years, more and more dentists have been proactively getting their message out. While the level of “direct dentist competitor marketing” is still not overwhelming, if one or two dentists in the general area have been getting their message out in some way, your local market gets squeezed.
Your “new” entry into the market is then going to compete with that pressure. Added to this is the price pressure your competitors have created by presenting the concepts of FREE and discounted dental services. With the value of dentistry already greatly influenced by insurance reliance and general oral health ignorance, price marketing makes anything beyond the basic dental services seem outlandish.
Consumers do not want to pay a lot for anything. Once your competitor says they can pay less (which suggests they were paying too much before), you seem to be put in a position only to compete on lower price. The other extreme that was the dream 10 years ago, which has been largely dismissed, is the high-end cosmetic practice. In a tough economy, this concept is severely pinched and probably not viable in more than a dozen markets. Department stores have dropped significantly in their popularity and the “dental-mart” concept is also hitting its height of effectiveness.
These consumer and market pressures and realities restrict the value of any one dental marketing strategy. Everything that once worked great now has limitations. Here are a few trends I have noticed from “inside” the dental marketing industryâ¦
New Marketing Concepts Often Have a Great but Short Half-life
1. Email was going to make marketing free and almost effortless. Now the effects of spam and email overload greatly limit its original value. About eight years ago when my former employer did their first email campaign we received 20 calls from dentists within the first few days and that was sent to about 900 dentist emails. Within about a year, it took 30,000 emails to create a few phone calls over many weeks. Back then just having a website meant we were going to get one client a week. Now only having a website means you⦠have a website.
2. Three years ago when I started PPC advertising on two services (Google and Yahoo) I received 25 emails a month from prospective dentists. Now I am also on a third PPC service run by MSN (they were linked with Yahoo originally) and get less than half the responses while spending 5 times what I did that first year. While it is still viable for me to do PPC, it will never give me the type of advantage it did that first year.
3. You might remember that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was all the rage before PPC. Search engine gurus were all over the Internet. They could provide you will top ten results - guaranteed!!! My site is search engine optimized and I now get top ten results for “almost” everything dental marketing. However, this is not easy to accomplish (and hold on to) and there are various “trapdoors”.
First, it takes constant effort and some SEO companies are more into “tricks and scams” than building real value. Second, my web guy always used to comment that these same SEO gurus were often NOT in the top search engine position themselves. The competition squeeze is a force of marketing nature–even they cannot escape.
Finally, without a niche–within a niche–you will not be successful long-term. From my perspective, I cannot compete directly against website companies in PPC or SEO rankings. This is because everybody and his brother thinks they can create a dentist website so there are 5,000 “dental website” companies battling in that keyword arena. Therefore, dental websites is NOT a niche, which is a big trapdoor for me to avoid.
Going directly against competitors can be very wrong even though others have been very successful. Just because Wal-mart is making billions does not mean Target wants to go there. Microsoft makes billions but selling iPods seems to do well for Apple.
If dental websites are all my competition does and they have a big corporate advertising budget, they can out buy me on the PPC stage. These crank tons of generic website corporations also can greatly improve THEIR search engine visibility because they are able to “link” back to them. If I try to compete with them head on–a trapdoor opens for me.
Conversely, Niche Dental does not have links on our client sites because we are about building your value first not ours. We want to build YOUR search engine ranking and bluntly if SEO is not viable for you — or even a website - we are not going to try and sell you those concepts. Something else might work better first! Like in-practice marketing or a direct mailing campaign.
You Can Do It Yourself: Dental Marketing
One of the first dentists I worked with as a dental consultant back in 1998 called us because of his marketing effort that died a quick death. He sent out three letters. The first one got two patients. The second one attracted 10 patients and the third one was a “failure”. His small direct mailing campaign–about 2-3,000 prospective households–had basically the same message each time.
Ironically, his dental marketing was very successful. But this dentist was very frustrated — his marketing did not KEEP working well. He wanted to know what he was doing wrong. If you refer to my examples above, you will see that he did nothing wrong except he stopped–in two ways. He not only just stopped sending letters; he did not realize that he had never sent letters before.
The keys to dental marketing success are to “keep doing” what you did before with a variation on the theme (different presentation/message/etc.) and then add something “new” to the mix. New does not necessarily mean the latest technology - but to find arenas where the public has not seen your message.
I also recommend sticking with high value presentations. This is not about “boutique esthetic” dental practices or extreme makeover concepts — it is about presenting the dental consumer with “more” than they thought was possible. Offering promotional incentives and dental service discounts can be beneficial, but if a dentist in your area already has that niche or no one does - the high value strategy could provide you with more options. Going the price route is very difficult to pull out from once you get into it.
My Best Marketing Recommendation
My recommendation has always been to utilize at least three proactive dental marketing strategies. One will work well, one will be a work in progress, and the third will be changed within the first six to nine months of the year. Either start all at once or develop your three-pronged campaign in stages, but do not end any of them until all three have worked together simultaneously for at least four-six months. They will often work off of each other.
For example, one might build your credibility. The other might inform and one might encourage consumers to act. As you see what they are doing, you can decide if one needs to be dropped and/or if another one should be activated to keep the momentum going. While saturation is possible, completely closing a valve to patients that had worked before is not always the best decision.
The three-pronged (or more) approach gives you a matrix of potential and improves the power of any one element. Conversely, spending your entire budget on one concept and then waiting for results is very risky. The SEO guru, the PPC concept, the emailing company, and the mass mailer group are often too inflexible to provide the comprehensive strategy you will need to have a long-term successful business.
Dental Marketing: Go it Alone, Maybe Not
Developing and implementing this strategy is something you can do on your own. Many dentists do fine without a dental marketing company. That is not all: I knew one dentist that did his own veneers (prep and all) looking in a mirror I guess.
However, even though I could get all the design software to create websites and marketing materials for my clients, I decided to run my business by having a person with this deep skill set do my dental designs. That is why Matt, a national dental design award winner, and owner of The Peripheral Vision, fills that role.
Because your local market and marketing is always evolving you might need someone on your side now (or in the future) to explain, develop, and/or implement your strategy. To have someone on your team that is flexible and not stuck in past or “caught up” in promoting the next best thing - call Niche Dental and you can talk directly to me (Dick Chwalek) about what is possible (and legitimate) for your dental practice.
Dick Chwalek
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/top-dentist-dental-marketing-faq-what-should-i-do-181931.html
If you elect to do business while on the internet, it is absolutely vital that you learn internet marketing. There are a number of internet marketing services that can easily help you with this endeavor. Knowledge has often been said to equal power. If you are moving your company, or the services that you offer online, it is time to acquire the knowledge that you need in order to gain the momentum in your industry to become powerful. Remember, there is a lot of competition out there. The more that you know about online advertising and marketing strategies that are used, the better off you will be in terms of your success.
There are some online marketing services that offer you the detailed instruction on very popular internet marketing terms in the internet marketing directories. This is the very first recourse that every internet marketer has to look into .The resources which you will find in these directories will help you to recognize all lingoes which are found in these industries.
But before implementing it is very necessary to lean and apply the terms in your own web marketing program. Once you have implemented the resource into your web, then you may consider yourself as an expert in the internet marketing strategies.
There are many different strategies that can be used when it comes to marketing in the virtual world. Listed below are some examples that you may consider:
Article Marketing - Article Marketing stands out as the quickest, cheapest and easiest means of achieving enhanced traffic to your website. Article marketing is the process of distributing keyword-focused articles to various submission sites to popularize websites and promote products and services .As this is considered one of the most effective content base Marketing Solutions, it is now being used by millions.
Email Marketing: Email marketing is another type of advertising strategy that can be used in order to advertise products and services that are offered online. Marketers that focus on this type of marketing will create an email that may talk about a particular subject or one that advertises certain things. When concluding the email, a call to action is included in order to inform the reader of the next step. This is a very popular marketing strategy.
Blog Marketing - Blog marketing is quite easy to get started in. If you all ready have been blogging, you will more than likely pick it up very easily and naturally just as if you have been doing it all along. Also, if you all ready blog, you might find out that you have been marketing the whole time anyways, and just not realizing it.
If you want to know how to learn internet marketing, there are many internet marketing services available online that can teach you what to do, how to go about doing it, and where to go. Internet marketing is a constant revolving door, get in the know now so that you do not go in circles in your own internet marketing campaign.
Jasneen
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/effective-internet-marketing-services-681291.html
As a smaller brand within the clothing design industry, how can you compete against the bigger brand names without email marketing?
You don’t have the kind of money to buy print media or TV ads to expand your client base. On top of that, you don’t have the expensive, fancy tools big companies use to keep their clients coming back. Email marketing helps you retain your clients by helping you promote your brand and make your customers feel appreciated. Email Marketing Solutions only require a few minutes of your time, and what you get are professionally designed email advertising campaigns sent directly to your customers.
So here’s how you start: The first thing you have to do is collect a list of emails. There are a number of ways to do this, but one effective method is to get your customers to sign up by offering them a discount, like ‘5% off every order this month if you sign up for our email database.’ Anyone who is satisfied with your service will want to receive the same merchandise at a lower cost, especially if it means that they will receive a ‘preferred customer promotion’ for doing so.
Congratulations! You now have your first contacts. The next step is to sign up for an email marketing account. Signing up is easy, because most Email Marketing Solutions are so simple that anyone can take advantage them. Now, cycle through the professionally-designed templates and create your first campaign. Building your campaign is also an easy process. Email marketing provides you with user-friendly templates so that all you have to do is input your text (or you can copy and paste it, if you want), and add your images. Here are a few tricks to think about when using your email marketing to create a campaign: Do not use excessive bolding, italics, and capital lettering in the main section or the subject line of your email. Also, try not to put too many pictures of your products without also adding content to support the images. Symbols like dollar signs in your subject line or exclamation points should be avoided as well. All these techniques commonly used to attract attention also end up attracting spam filters. If you overuse them, your email will not go into your subscribers’ inbox, but rather into their spam or junk mail box.
When you are ready, just click a button to schedule your email marketing campaign and it will automatically go out to the people on your list at the date and time you selected.
Now that your email marketing campaign is finished and has arrived in your buyers’ inbox, you will be able to track which of your customers are interested in your promotions. One of the great things about email marketing is that it can track ‘clicks’, and ‘opens.’ This gives you a percentage breakdown and analysis of which of your customers are opening and clicking on the promotions you have included in your email. Also, by adding a ‘forward to friend’ button, you will be able enhance your mailing list, and have a greater chance to gain more customers.
As a clothing-designer, using email marketing will have a large impact on how many return customers you have, which will positively affect sales. Email marketing can provide you with added business and potentially grow your client base over time. This is a cost effective way to keep on par with larger brand competitors and maximize your brand’s potential. You might be small, but now you can plan for bigger things.
Rudy Barell
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/email-marketing-and-brand-awareness-for-clothing-designers-670467.html