The document outlines the biggest mistakes practices make in marketing and advertising, including promoting at the wrong times, choosing poor office locations, not properly handling objections from potential clients, failing to create a marketing plan, and not tracking the effectiveness of different advertising methods. Common errors involve sponsoring teams without requirements, writing direct mail materials themselves, and using brochures that do not effectively sell the practice. The key is to target promotions during busy seasons, address objections, evaluate competition, and measure responses to different advertising approaches.
2. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 1. Promoting at the wrong time
– On a limited budget, start your promotion just
prior to your busy season and end it just prior to
a seasonal fall-off
– Don’t spend your money promoting during dead
times unless you’ve spent sufficient money
promoting during the up times
– It’s always less productive and costs more money
3. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 2. Choosing the wrong office location
– The right one is in an area with an advantageous
professional to population (or company) ratio
– The wrong one is selected solely on the basis of
where you want to live
– A freestanding building almost always offers better
outdoor signage opportunities than a professional
building does
– And signage is so crucial in attracting the public that,
if done well, it can produce a third of your new
patients or clients
4. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 3. Not knowing how to handle objections
– If some professionals could hear their staff members
handle an objection from a caller, they might well be
distraught
– Then they’d surely know they’re losing big dollars
because their front desk often shoots answers from
the hip
– Instead: Script out sample answers for each common
objection — no money, no time, no interest, no need
and I’ll think it over
– Results: optimal answers and many more
appointments
5. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 4. Not answering price queries correctly
– When people call to ask how much, don’t just
mention the price
– First, explain the unique benefits of receiving the
service or product from you
– Then quote the price
– Without explanation, your services are just like
everyone else’s, so price can be the only
determinant
– With it, you can charge even more
6. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 5. Not preparing a marketing plan
– Without analyzing your competition, your objection,
your budget and to whom you’re directing your
promotion, you’re susceptible to two potential
disasters
– One — being swayed by salespeople into buying
poorly designed and incorrectly targeted promotions
– Two — failing to consider all important variables
– Both lead you to big losses and dead ends
– Instead: Construct a marketing plan first
7. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 6. Sponsoring clubs or sports teams
– If it’s not mandatory that the players come in (or
are brought in by parents) for a free service so
you can meet them, then recognize your
sponsorship as altruism, not practice building
8. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 7. Promoting in school yearbooks or church
bulletins
– These expenditures should come out of your
charitable contributions account, not your
promotional budget
9. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 8. Putting your name in your ad’s headline
– Rarely does a practitioner have enough public
recognition to have his/her name entice a
browser to read
– Instead: Head the ad with strong benefits for
coming to you, and keep your name and logo at
the bottom
10. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 9. Writing direct mail yourself
– Direct mail is the most difficult type of promotion to
create
– Why?
– Because it requires that specific techniques be built into a
piece to stimulate immediate response
– Practitioners rarely have the knowledge — or the talent
– Unfortunately, most copywriters aren’t familiar with
them
– Instead: In direct mail, it almost always pays to hire direct
mail specialists
– Your response rates can jump 20 times
11. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 10. Cutting prices first
– Prices should be the last element in your
marketing formula to fiddle with
– Before cutting prices, promote other aspects of
your practice — experience, new services,
selection, hours, convenience, etc
– If all else is ineffective, then play the price game
12. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 11. Not knowing your bottom line
– If it’s to attract new patients or clients or to retain old
ones, that’s the goal
– If it’s to please your colleagues (or competitors), that’s a
different goal
– And each one produces a different kind of promotion
– If a promotion is well-done, your competitors will feel
threatened, as they should
– If they don’t, it’s probably not well-conceived
– Knowing which goal is your true bottom line from the
beginning saves you money and anguish
13. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 12. Not coding and tracking your advertising
– Without effective tracking of which ads are
producing how much in what media, you can’t stop
the losers and pump up the winners
– So to greatly improve ad results, insert keys into
your ads — false phone extensions or individual
telephone lines for each specific medium
– That way, you know the source as soon as they call
– Asking them where they heard about you yields 30%
to 50% incorrect responses
14. Biggest Mistakes in Marketing and
Advertising Your Practice
• 13. Practice brochures that don’t sell you
– Most don’t because they contain extraneous or
even negative selling points, like what to do in an
emergency, a warning not to miss appointments,
a requirement that you pay at once, etc.
– Instead: Put all the rules in an inexpensive
brochure to be given to existing clients or
patients
– Put only convincing copy in your practice
brochure
