Category: Blog

Your mar­ket­ing mes­sage should be more than a tag line or a slo­gan. It will iden­ti­fy you and your unique sell­ing propo­si­tion. Your mar­ket­ing mes­sage will com­mu­ni­cate your image, exper­tise and the val­ue you bring to the mar­ket place. Your mar­ket­ing mes­sage begins with your adver­tis­ing then con­tin­ues through your appoint­ment set­ting, prac­tice envi­ron­ment, prod­ucts, com­mu­ni­ty involve­ment, cus­tomer ser­vice and many oth­er ele­ments of your prac­tice. Your mar­ket­ing mes­sage should appeal to the demo­graph­ic mar­ket place iden­ti­fied when you study the demo­graph­ics of your area. See our arti­cle Mas­ter­ing Your Area’s Demo­graph­ics for more detail.

You will prob­a­bly find that you will have mul­ti­ple audi­ences to tar­get. For exam­ple, the mar­ket­ing mes­sage that appeals to cus­tomers age 72 and under is dif­fer­ent from cus­tomers over the age of 72. Mar­ket­ing mes­sages based on income or net worth lev­el is also essen­tial to address. For more infor­ma­tion on how to tar­get more than one audi­ence in a sin­gle mail cam­paign, con­tact us we would be glad to help.

Your mar­ket­ing mes­sage should dif­fer­en­ti­ate you from your com­pe­ti­tion. A com­mon way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate your prac­tice is through the image your mar­ket­ing mes­sage con­veys. The aver­age con­sumer cares more about the pro­fes­sion­al pro­vid­ing the instru­ments than the prod­uct or man­u­fac­ture. Now con­sid­er that con­sumers are bom­bard­ed with adver­tis­ing and you will require a plan to make your mar­ket­ing mes­sage res­onate with your tar­get mar­ket. You will need to com­mu­ni­cate a con­sis­tent mes­sage over time.

If you had a mil­lion dol­lars to spend on a bet­ter Mail­ing List, what would you spend it on?

Here are a few ideas ….

Pay each of your exist­ing cus­tomers to paint a red X on their roofs, then hire a heli­copter to fly around your mar­ket area so you could final­ly see where your cus­tomers are com­ing from. Well not exact­ly, but we actu­al­ly have some­thing even bet­ter! The map­ping tools avail­able today are even bet­ter than fly­ing in a heli­copter. Using your exist­ing cus­tomer data­base with a visu­al inter­ac­tive map­ping tool, you are able to fly around your mar­ket place. You will be amazed at what you can learn from see­ing clus­ters of where your cus­tomers live.

1) Imag­ine being able to see your cus­tomers neigh­bors and all the way down to your cus­tomers house. You will be able to see all the roads, high­ways, rivers, lakes, bridges or lack of roads and oth­er bar­ri­ers that may be stop­ping prospec­tive cus­tomers from com­ing to your office. Also you may dis­cov­er some areas to mail that are fur­ther away but, don’t have any­one else to ser­vice them. Inter­ac­tive map­ping doesn’t cost a mil­lion, maybe one to two hun­dred dol­lars or we might just do it for free.

2) Hire the nations top mar­ket­ing research firms to study the demo­graph­ics of your area and break it into mar­ket seg­ments so you could tar­get your area bet­ter. Again not exact­ly. But … Your local news­pa­pers, cable com­pa­nies and yel­low pages does exact­ly that. They hire the nations top mar­ket­ing research firms to define mar­ket seg­ments. This infor­ma­tion is avail­able to you, since you are a poten­tial adver­tis­er with them. All you have to do is know how to ask them for the mar­ket seg­ment data.

3) Hire a psy­chic to tell you which peo­ple on your mail­ing list will get your mail in time for them to book an appoint­ment for your time sen­si­tive event. If your like me you don’t believe in psy­chics. What you can do here is con­sid­er NOT mail­ing to P.O. Box­es for your time sen­si­tive events. P.O. Box­es for some cus­tomers make up 5%,10% or even 15% of the mail­ing list. Many of these cus­tomers may not check their mail­box­es in time for your time sen­si­tive event. Stop mail­ing them and you could save 5% to 15% on your print and mail­ing costs. Oh shoot we are sav­ing mon­ey and we were try­ing to spend a mil­lion bucks.

4) Buy a super com­put­er to ana­lyze your cus­tomer data­base to iden­ti­fy what age, income and oth­er demo­graph­ics your cus­tomers have in com­mon and the mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion you made into that seg­ment. Well It doesn’t take a super­com­put­er any­more to do this. We have a inex­pen­sive tool that can ana­lyze your cus­tomer data­base. If you have not ana­lyze your cus­tomer data­base you should. Cus­tomers always learn some­thing they didn’t know when they look at our pro­file reports of their cus­tomer data­base.