Pull, Dangle, and Push: Marketing for DPC
I am a big fan of Joe Polish and the I Love Marketing Podcast. Some of the tips I give here will be influenced by what I hear there as well as other books I have read. Oh, and from experience as well. Let me tell you about Push, Pull, and Dangle. That’s the easier way to say 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 for getting prospective patients 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 about 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 them. 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.
Here is your DPC marketing tip of the day. I would love to hear what you are doing. Put it in the comments.
(This is an encore post from March, 2021)
I can see how in some markets and situations a DPC doc has to get after marketing and in a way that’s financially viable. Luckily, I’ve never really done very much of any of this stuff. I just took really good care of a few people and they told their friends. <2 years later I was full. Now I have 2 clinics in 2 towns 30 miles apart, 5 clinicians, and am approaching 3,000 patients in a rural area–all with a marketing budget of almost zero.
What marketing I have done, is an occasional (maybe 5-6 per year?) FB post that is educational (or laments the system) in some way. Early on before I opened, I did 2 big town hall meetings where I presented DPC to the community- I advertised those 2 town hall meetings in the paper and on FB. And for the first year or two I gave away free t-shirts that advertised my clinic to my members. And I for 5 years I had a little float in the annual County Fair parade, where I shook hundreds of hands and gave out thousands of business cards and candy. Most ended up swept up off the street. That's literally it. I'd say that 99% of our growth has always been word of mouth, from satisfied patients.