3 Tips On How To Get Your Clients To Think Of You More Often

Today on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will share with you one simple marketing strategy that will keep producing more clients by spending just once on marketing.

This year, more than ever, I had so many birthday wishes. Literally more than 100 that I’ve never had previously. It just got me to thinking about kind of it’s a day of the year, at least for most people, I know not everybody loves their own birthday, but it’s a day of the year for most people where you’re kind of more open, more receptive to context that you normally would be.

As a business, what if we could use that openness to sort of bring your practice to the top of the mind. Now for dental businesses, one of the things that you face is that your clients, for the most part, are thinking about you maybe once or twice a year. You know, it’s not like you’re a supermarket and they’re coming every week. It’s basically once or twice a year for a checkup. So, anything you can do to boost the awareness of your business in that is really going to make a difference.

This is a great opportunity. You’ve got a real need, so what do we do? Wouldn’t it be great if you received something through the post? It could be an email but I reckon through the post is better. Something relating to your birthday.

I need to set the scene here. Firstly, be aware for most people, as my friend David Moffet says, “Dentistry is a grudge buy.” Therefore, coming to them with something dental I don’t think is going to work. But, we’ve come up with some non-dental ideas that you could use in your practice to really take advantage of that birthday.

So, here’s the first one. What about if you were to talk to some of the local businesses near you, particularly in the healthcare space and you put together a little wellness pack? What if you spoke to a physio, a chiro, maybe a doctor, a massage or even a hairdresser. All you would need to do is print it up on a sheet.

Basically the message would be, “Dear Lovely Patient, Congratulations on your birthday. As you’re getting another year older, we’d love to send you this. Here’s our wellness pack for you to pamper yourself on your special day.” And in it, you could negotiate some discounts or vouchers. So, that will be one simple thing you can do. It wouldn’t be too hard to reproduce. It could be pre-printed, the vouchers. Basically, most of those other businesses are like, “Thanks so much. So, you’re going to send details about my business to your clients?” Why wouldn’t they like it?

That’s one possibility. Another possibility is around community events. What if you were to, I don’t know if you know you can do this, you can actually book out a movie theater where you could actually say, “Hey, everyone who’s birthday is in July, come and have the movies on us.” It doesn’t even need to be for birthdays, but birthdays would be pretty cool and you know would do that.

Or if there’s a local event that you’re going to be involved with, maybe like a community event, you could give them tickets to that.

Now the third idea that we came up with was where you could have for your clients, again you send out, you say, “Happy birthday. By the way, you’ve gone into a draw, because we really love our clients, and we appreciate your business. We give away a hamper of stuff every month. By virtue of it being your birthday, you’ve gone in the draw. We’ll let you know at the end of the month whether you win or not.”

So, those are three simple things you could do to really get your practice more top of mind. Get your clients thinking about you more often, but not necessarily in the context of dentistry. Say, “Wow, thanks so much for thinking of me.” Hope that makes sense. That’s some simple things you can do. Take advantage of everybody’s favourite day of the year.

By the way, here’s the maths. If you’ve got around a 1000 active clients on your books, let’s call it 50 weeks a year, that’s 20 envelopes for you to send out a week. Or maybe 20 emails for you to send out a week. This is absolutely doable and a great opportunity.