Six Common Medical Advertising Mistakes
1. Low quality.
If you’re purporting to be an amazing, world class cosmetic surgeon you probably shouldn’t 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 don’t advertise in People magazine. You would be paying too much for that broad reach. It’s why many markets are too big for tadio and TV advertising. Medicine is geographically driven. You won’t 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 you’re 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 doesn’t matter if you made the most smoking hot website in the world. If it gets lousy traffic, you’re still not converting anybody because you don’t have enough frequency. You’re 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 shouldn’t be all about you. Statistically, marketing that focuses on the doctor just doesn’t pull as hard as marketing that focuses on the patient.
5. Lists of procedures.
A list of procedures isn’t an effective ad campaign. Not memorable, no headline, no testimonial – it’s a laundry list. You’d be better off going with a list of benefits.
6. No tracking systems.
You can’t rely on anecdotes from your staff to track your advertising success. You can’t base thousands of dollars in marketing on how someone feels, at that moment, that it’s working. It doesn’t 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.
