I am a big fan of Joe Polish and the I Love Marketing Podcast. Some of the tips I give here will obviously be influenced by what I hear there as well as other books I have read. Oh, and from experience as well. Let me tell about Push, Pull and Dangle. That’s the easier way to say it it but the true order is:
- Pull – your marketing campaign has to pull them in. What are you using? Ads on a billboard (expensive and rarely work for DPC)? Ads on TV or paper (expensive). Direct marketing postcards? FB ads? This is the strategy of getting to your website. Now if your website sucks or is confusing then you wasted your money.
- Dangle – This is the technique of giving them something to get their information (name and email). I created the free Consumer Guide to Primary Care to offer patients. I talked that more in my updated The Official Guide to Starting Your Own Direct Primary Care Practice. That was another thing I learned from Joe Polish. The guide is a large PDF that goes into detail about all the problems in the system and why DPC fixes it. You can offer whatever you want but dangle something. Keep is PG-13, though. 🙂
- Push – this is where you take those emails and names and constantly educate these people on the benefit of DPC. NOT SELL but educate. You can use the list to send out when you do a free lecture or an open house. At Forest DPC, I would use that information to send an email with the attached Consumer Guide PDF. I would then send another email a week later with links to videos I made about my practice. I did stop after that but there is nothing to say you couldn’t grow this list and continue to educate these people.
There is your DPC marketing tip of the day. I would love to hear what you are doing. Put it in the comments.