I am a big fan of marketing guru, Joe Polish. He has a podcast called I Love Marketing and the early stuff is gold. I highly recommend you listen to some of it. The following is a direct quote from one of these episodes:
The difference between selling and marketing, selling is when you’re on the phone or face-to-face with somebody, marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face-to-face with you properly positioned. So that by the time you talk to them, they’re pre-interested, pre-motivated, prequalified and predisposed to do business with you. I’ll say that again because this is something that everyone should write down. When you do your marketing right, selling is easy and ideally unnecessary, because if you do your marketing right, it does your selling in advance. Really good marketing is the quickest path to the sale, really good marketing does all of your selling in advance. And the people end up becoming pre-interested, pre-motivated, prequalified and predisposed to do business with you.
How does this relate to Direct Primary Care? Well, as much as we don’t want to believe it, the public still doesn’t know or understand DPC that well. This is why I recommend newsletters for the public where you educate them. Posts on social media (IG, FB, Twitter, Tik Tok, etc) also do the same trick. Joe’s point is that you want them to be “pre-interested, pre-motivated, prequalified and predisposed to do business with you” before they sign up. This makes closing the sale so effortless. Instead of wasting your breath on pitching on someone who then asks if you take their insurance, you now have a prospective patient in front of you ready to sign up and start getting great care.
Educate, educate, educate. That’s marketing. The selling part is an afterthought.