Six Common Medical Advertising Mistakes
1. Low quality.
If youre purporting to be an amazing, world class cosmetic surgeon you probably shouldnt cheap out on your marketing. What emotions do low quality evoke? Right. Not the ones you want. It is extremely difficult to sell a high end product with sloppy, weird or home cooked marketing. You expect your patients to seek out a qualified professional. You should do the same thing.
2. Too broad.
This is the reason you dont advertise in People magazine. You would be paying too much for that broad reach. Its why many markets are too big for tadio and TV advertising. Medicine is geographically driven. You wont pull from neighborhods and communities that are too far away. Many mediums require you to pay a premium to reach patients that are beyond your pulling area.
3. Frequency too low.
If youre running radio, a month is probably not long enough to evaluate the success of the marketing. people need to hear a radio ad three or four times to even register that they heard it. In websites, we see low frequency in web traffic. It doesnt matter if you made the most smoking hot website in the world. If it gets lousy traffic, youre still not converting anybody because you dont have enough frequency. Youre not getting the volume you need. Good advertising is about creating enough touch points so people get your message enough times to create enough trust to become patients.
4. ego advertising.
It shouldnt be all about you. Statistically, marketing that focuses on the doctor just doesnt pull as hard as marketing that focuses on the patient.
5. lists of procedures.
A list of procedures isnt an effective ad campaign. Not memorable, no headline, no testimonial - its a laundry list. Youd be better off going with a list of benefits.
6. no tracking systems.
You cant rely on ancidotes from your staff to track your advertising success. You cant base thousands of dollars in marketing on how someone feels, at that moment, that its working. It doesnt matter what anyone THINKS. What matters is how many calls were generated and what percent of those became patients. The only way to do this is to put effective tracking systems into place. A call tracking number is a low cost way to evaluate the quantity and quality of your calls.
