Promoting your business can be challenging.
Success requires an understanding of your target market’s behaviour, human psychology and buying responses, and the ability to design an effective campaign to suit your chosen method of promotion. The digital media space has added to this complexity.
Finding additional ways to generate results from your promotions will ensure your are getting the most out of your advertising efforts.
In my previous blog I wrote about an interesting way to promote your practice to your local community. It is the Coffee On Us! campaign and you can read about it here.
Using this campaign as an example, let’s look at furthering the opportunity for success.
The promotion on its own has the potential to generate the following result:
Your cost of supplying 50 coffee vouchers is:
Coffee cost @ $3.50 each = $175
plus printing of 50 vouchers through Vistaprint = $8
Total promotion investment is $183
Assuming the practice fee for examination and scale & cleaning is $230
Less 20% for voucher = patient paying $184 for their first visit
Your practice only requires a 2% strike rate to cover promotion costs. That means every patient over and above 1 is generating income. If you achieved a reasonable 10% strike rate with 5 people booking in, your ROI will be 400%, with an investment gain of $737. A great outcome that can be generated monthly or quarterly.
Slight adjustments can be made in the design and delivery of your campaign in an endeavour to generate more success. For example:
- Get the business card or email address of each voucher recipient so you can continue to communicate and offer future promotions. Often people need numerous exposures to your business before you are ‘sticky’ in their mind.
- Change the voucher offering. Try different discounts, services and offers. For example tooth whitening in preparation for Valentines Day.
- Try different cafe locations. For example using one close to a train station will have more business people in the early morning, and cafes close to schools will have a later busy time after school drop-off.
- Have the cafe focus on different times of the day.
- As stated in the first bullet point, people often need numerous exposures, so adjust the regularity and frequency of this promotion.
Track your results by identifying which version of the campaign your new patients responded to. You will see a pattern unfold for the most successful process of implementing this campaign, and get the most out of each coffee!