When you are responsible to make a promotional campaign for your company, what will you do? Don’t worry because all you need to do is to organise your thoughts then you can make the correct decisions which leads to successful campaign.
There are many methods you can follow for your campaign, but not all of them will succeed. You can put ads in TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, boards, or in the internet. Those would cost you a lot of money and they are not guaranteed. The best guaranteed way is to use cheap promotional gifts. Those gifts you can distribute for people as an advertisement for your product. Before you choose this gift you need to decide many things. You need to determine which type of people you want to be your customers. They should make a small study about what they would prefer. You want the people to need your gifts and use them, not throw them away. The gift must be something personal or useful to your customers. It should be used more than once a day to have more visibility for your brand.
Companies prefer cheap promotional items in their advertisements especially the new established ones. Because with the price of one expensive gift you can make ten or twenty cheap gifts and can be distributed to twenty people instead of one which is better and can cover a wide range of people.
There are many options to choose from, you can make pens, mugs, key chains, wallets, fridge magnets, accessories, umbrellas, t-shirts, business card holders, calendars, folders, organisers, calculators, coasters, and many others. You can choose the gift to be related to the product you manufacture, if you are manufacturing plastics or metal you can choose your gift to have plastic parts like pens or key chains. Or metal parts like business card holders or coasters.
Even if you choose the cheap promotional type of presents, you need to make sure that they have good quality because they represent your company in the customer’s eye.
After you make all those decisions, it won’t be hard for you to choose the most suitable gift for you or your company. It would be a great responsibility because if you choose the wrong way or the wrong gift, you would cost your company lost time and lost money. Be careful and you would make the correct decision.
Cheap promotional way is the best way for your company because you can make your promotional campaign with less money and can cover larger groups of people from all ages and in all occupations. You don’t know where is your potential customer can be, there maybe customers other that the audience you thought of. You need to have a wide range in distributing the gifts because you may have other customers than you thought of. Always try to keep your customers happy in order to gain them and more. Don’t neglect them and it would be your loss. Always keep them and their needs, likes, and dislikes first.
Is this the most reliable way to get new patients? I am talking about the community meet and greet. How does this chiropractor marketing method work? Here is the strategy. First of all, you need a practice newsletter. All professionals should find a way to maintain communication with their patient base. Mailing a periodic newsletter is my favorite strategy. No, don’t bother sending the full color ones that can be self-mailed. It’s obvious to everyone you didn’t write it. I’m referring to a relationship-building newsletter. You will make about 30 copies of your most recent newsletter.
You then select a geographic area within 3 miles of your practice from which to farm for patients. Select a day of the week when most residents will be home. In most parts of the country this is on Sunday. You will take your newsletters along with a stack of Gift Certificates offering a free appointment / exam / some type of enticing introductory offer, making it easy to come in and see you. You will go out door to door to introduce yourself to the people in this targeted community. This is your only objective Your goal is to hand out one newsletter per household. You will ask them one simple question: “My name is Dr. Blank and I own the XYZ chiropractic clinic around the corner. I am trying to increase my exposure in this neighborhood.
I am wondering what you think would be a good way for me to get my name out there?” You ask this question to get the recipient involved. In answering your question, you are engaging them and they often sell themselves on becoming your patient. If there is one thing we know, it is that involvement inches them closer to doing business with you. That’s it! Every person reading this can do this without fear. Yes, you have to actually knock on the door. Yes, you have to speak to someone. Whoever answers the door is who you will speak with. Not everyone will be home. As a doctor you’ll find that about 1/3rd of the people you meet will talk your ear off. “Oh, you’re a doctor?
You know my (fill in complaint) has been bothering me lately!” After discussing their problem with you, many will ask you “How hard is it to get in and see you?” At which point you can hand them the Gift Certificate or schedule them on the spot. It’s literally as simple as handing them a newsletter, introducing yourself, and asking them this involvement question. What kind of results you can expect? Our clients tell us they average 3 scheduled appointments for every hour they do this. This proves very profitable since their cost to acquire each patient is virtually zero.
If you’re a motivated doctor who’s looking for a big increase, there’s no reason why you couldn’t be generating 30 or more patient appointments per month if you were to go out and do this on Sunday for a few hours. A couple from California generated 400 patient appointments in 90 days using this strategy. And I know another doctor that generated over 100 patients in a 60 day period. The results can be terrific! Break out of your comfort zone, drag your spouse with you, and go out into an affluent neighborhood sometime this month and hand out practice newsletters face to face.
One of the most successful people I’ve ever met once said to me, “Try to break out of your comfort zone at least once a month; you’ll find all your breakthroughs in life will come as a result of breaking through preconceived ideas that have been boxing you in.” That’s pretty good advice.
What’s the best way to generate 30 new patients per month?
Tap into the law of averages.
I have developed quite a few ways to generate significant patient flow using high probability methods. In this article, I’m going to discuss one highly successful and proven ways to generate serious patient flow that has stood the test of time but could be considered by some to be outside the box in approach.
What am I talking about?
Running a Chiropractic Infomercial!
This method is rarely used by doctors because it is a new idea for them. It also requires you to break through some comfort zones. But this method has proven very successful and effective.
“You’ve got to be kidding. An infomercial to get patients?”
Now hold on. Before you call me crazy give me the gift of an open mind here. You see for some reason a doctor is more likely to spend a few thousand dollars running a bunch of 30 second TV commercials then they are to run a 30 minute TV-show style practice infomercial that could generate substantially more patients for about the same cost.
Why is that? It is because the TV infomercial has gotten a bad rap. The Practice Infomercial is one of the most reliable and inexpensive forms of mass marketing that exists for you. Inexpensive in terms of bang for the buck.
I know what you’re thinking.
I can’t see myself running a television infomercial. Aren’t those things for selling knives?
Let’s set those misconceptions aside.
The reason the Chiropractic Infomercial works so well is for the same reason that giving community lectures works.
Imagine if you could package your proven lecture and instead of presenting it for 20 people at the rotary club, you could present it for thousands of people at once.
That’s what a chiropractic infomercial really is.
Imagine the impact of 5,000 people hearing all about how you can help them?
We could both agree that the law of averages would insure us a certain percentage of patients.
The power of the Chiropractic Infomercial is you get to give a complete educational lecture to thousands of people for less than it costs for billboard advertising. If you dare to give this a try, I can assure you that your odds of success are high and you will become a mini-celebrity amongst your patients and in your town.
The value of a strong questionnaire design when complemented by the task of high quality sample development is not fully appreciated. Often these two essential building blocks of market research are relegated to the back of the line on research projects.
Research Axiom One: You can never fully recover from a poorly written questionnaire.
• No manipulation of the variables, regardless of how cleverly done
• No amount of analysis, regardless of how brilliant
• No degree of insightful interpretation, regardless of intellectual prowess
Nothing can save you from a poor research foundation. The building will collapse like a house of cards!
If there is one part of the research process that I know, it is questionnaire design. It is a task repeatedly given insufficient time and attention. Clients and research professional alike often underestimate the time it will take to develop a truly well structured and concise instrument.
What amazes me most? Project leaders relegate this task to a status depicted by the attitude of: “Once the questionnaire is done we can get on with the important stuff, like analysis and reporting.” The assumption that analysis work is the essence of the research and the expectation that interpreting the results is where the mastery of research ultimately lies is a mystery to me.
Have we not pounded the concept of garbage-in garbage-out into our heads? Can new internet tools substitute for critical thinking and the hard work of aligning the research instrument to the purpose of the study to answer the business questions that sponsors paid to learn?
If this seems like a bit of a rant, well I guess I am guilty. My own research-on-research including the use of a 25-point questionnaire audit system has shown me that even well healed researchers are less diligent about quality than one would hope. Research is not only science it is a craft [perhaps an art] and if the proper fundamentals are not applied the product is less than artful.
I will end this part of my ranting with an analogy [but don't be surprised to hear more on this topic]. If you have not studied and then practiced writing poetry, would you expect to publish a book of poems simply because your marketing department asked you to? Designing a good quality research instrument probably takes less talent than being a good poet, but it’s close.
Wait, not so fast, we are not done, there is another mistake from which you cannot fully recover. A poor questionnaire design is one possible fatal mistake, but not the only one. Good solid sample development is also necessary. Here is another Research Axiom worth your consideration.
Research Axiom Two: You can never fully recover from a sample that lacks validity; and once again:
• No manipulation of the variables, regardless of how cleverly done
• No amount of analysis, regardless of how brilliant
• No degree of insightful interpretation, regardless of intellectual prowess
Nothing can save you from a poorly developed sample!
The value of sample development is also underappreciated, as are the skills related to creating a valid sample. Project managers, research analysts, and all those who lose sleep over the quality of the sample sources they have available and who work hard to provide the best possible sample for each research project they conduct, are worth their weight in gold.
With numerous challenges to good sample development always hovering over us, if the research team conducting the study does not pay close attention to this critically important task the chances of deriving useful results are likely to diminish rapidly. One of the worst situations to be in, is standing in front of a room full of executives and presenting the research implications when from off in the far corner an executive vice president (EVP) asks you, “Are you sure about that finding? Who were these respondents? They don’t appear to have any knowledge about the market or our products.”
If you can definitively reply, “We believe the respondents in this sample are qualified” and then give a crisp response about the quality control (QC) steps used to verify the validity of the sample, you have saved the day. If on the other hand, you hesitate and cannot defend the validity of the sample, you have lost your audience – there is nothing more they want to hear from you because in their minds the voice of the respondents do not reflect the people they are trying to reach – the day ends badly.
If you do not care about the quality of the research you conduct, well shame on you, but at least recognize that a sample of good quality is a necessity for self-preservation – enough said.
