Are Your Orthodontic Marketing Programs Performing Worse?
Orthodontic Marketing programs are slowly but surely becoming less effective. High patient producing campaigns that worked brilliantly for years are suddenly performing much worse than they did previously. And if you don’t have a new orthodontic marketing program in place to reach those prospects and an orthodontic website to convert them into patients, you’re going to continue to continue to struggle to bring new patients into your practice.
Where have all the Orthodontic Patients Gone?
Media is becoming more fragmented and sources that people used to use to find an orthodontist just aren’t being used anymore. Yellow Pages is a great example. Whenever anyone needed to find a local business, they opened up their Yellow Pages and found someone by growing right to that section and picking the business that met their needs. But people aren’t using Yellow Pages like the used to. More and more people are using Internet to find everything that need.
Direct mail used to be a good option as well. But with the continual rise in postage prices and the abundance of junk mail, using direct mail for your orthodontic marketing is like tearing up $100 dollar bills, just like you tear up all the mail you get for credit cards and lower interest mortgages.
The new patients are still out there - they’ve just gone to a new source to get all the information that they need - the Internet.
How are you going to reach these Prospective Patients?
The answer is the Internet search revolution that’s called local search. Local Internet marketing is fastest growing form of advertisement with growth rates estimated up to 50% per year for the next few years. By 2010, $25 billion will be spent on local Internet advertising.
Your competitors might have already discovered this new source of clients. Just type in your city name and "orthodontist" in Google and look at all the all the ads that come up on the right side of the screen under the heading "sponsored links". Those are your fellow orthodontists - and they are taking your future patients.
The local search revolution is taking over advertising as we know it. Think of it as a hyper-targeted direct mailing, that’s going out to only the people who are looking for your services, and allowing you to give them the information that they’re looking for professionally and effectively.
How Do you Get these Orthodontic Patients Back?
You need to beat your competitors at the local Internet marketing game. You need ads that draw new patients to your orthodontic website and a website that compels them to pick up the phone and call you.
If you want more information on how you can re-energize your orthodontic marketing programs, click on the link for the test drive below to watch the 10-minute video on local Internet marketing.
