PracticeBuilders - The nation's leader in healthcare-practice success since 1979

How to Avoid Some Sure Losers of Marketing

One of the surest losers in marketing is the tombstone ad that appears in school game programs and similar publications. Tombstone ads are generally designed to do just one thing: take money out of your pocket and put it into someone else’s. Such ads offer little more than your practice name, address and phone number. Without any kind of benefit to the reader, special offer of services the reader needs or a call to action, these ads are doomed to fail. They are designed to be benign.

What about those ever-popular Yellow Pages ads?

Sadly, most “Yellow Pages” ads fall into the “doomed to fail” and “designed to be benign” categories. Why? Because they are often created by people who have limited design and writing backgrounds and zero healthcare marketing expertise.

Open any Yellow Pages book in any city to any page and you will see for yourself. How many ads start off with someone’s practice name or a logo instead of a thought-provoking, attention-getting, benefit-oriented, marketing-driven headline? Which ad do you think will be more effective at getting your phone to ring? The one that leads with your name, or the one that leads with a message that addresses a real need among your target audience?

The average consumer with a toothache, for example, needs a dentist who can see him quickly and get him out of pain. An effective Yellow Pages ad needs a headline that addresses the consumer’s need to get out of pain quickly. How exactly does a practice name or logo accomplish that? The fact is, neither even comes close. And too many healthcare practitioners are losing time and lots of money on ineffective Yellow Pages ads they cannot change until next year. Twelve months is a long time to be stuck with the expense of a bad ad.

“Spaghetti marketing” is a less-than-satisfying main course.

Perhaps the biggest loser of all in marketing is marketing without a plan. Spaghetti marketing is basically taking a handful of ideas (the spaghetti) and hurling them against the nearest wall (the consumer) to see what sticks (elicits a buying decision).

Without a well-thought-out, cohesive marketing strategy to guide you along the path to practice growth, a better patient mix or increased referrals, your haphazard, scattergun approach to marketing is doomed to fail. So the next time a sales rep calls on you from your local Yellow Pages or a high school program printer or a newspaper, don’t buy into their hype.

Invest in a strategic marketing plan that will get you and your practice where you want to go, and you will avoid the "sure losers" of marketing.