Old fashioned person-to-person contact can help dentists gain new patients. It’s called ground marketing, and there are people who specialize in this type of dental practice promotion, and train some of your team members to do the same. Combine it with your digital campaign and watch your numbers grow.
However, it seems many dentists have dived into digital marketing head first without stopping to take a look at their other options that have always produced good results. What is also needed is something I call ground marketing, often more likely referred to as "guerrilla marketing."
I specialize in ground marketing and have been using it for a long time. Applying it to dental practices produces results in real time. The goal is to attract new patients to your dental practice immediately. Dental ground marketing is attracting new patients in real time.
The power of a dental ground marketer
This dental marketing technique uses tactics that build pipelines from businesses, companies, and communities to your dental practice. It produces results on paper with the new potential patient’s name, number, types of insurance, and when you can contact them, and whatever other information the ground marketer considers important.
Let’s say you (the dentist) look at your schedule for next week and see that you have no new patients. The ground marketer notices this and immediately brings in new patients for next week in real time. That’s the power of a great ground marketer.
Not everyone can do ground marketing. It takes a well-trained, outgoing, and self-managed type of person to do this. The responsibilities include going out business to business, business to company, building rapport with VPs and human resources departments, conducting lunch and learns, creating various of events, tactics to accomplish the overall strategy, and more.
Ground marketing, just like digital marketing, has a lot of components. They are both full-time work. Ground marketing on the other hand has more people-to-people” and emotion involved. For example, I’m always on the ground, at meetings and events talking to people about why they don’t like their dentist, why they haven’t visited their dentist, and why they feel they don’t have to return for recalls or pending treatment.
I get to know these people and I understand them from their perspective. With their information I create strategies, tactics, techniques, scripts, and ideas to start attracting these patients. You see, that’s what makes a ground marketer different; we understand the consumer’s point of view because we’re always on the ground talking to the consumer.
Many times dentist, dental staff, and digital marketers don’t see the emotional side of what people see, hear, and feel about dentistry and their dentist. Understanding the emotional side is crucial. Why? According to Psychology Today “emotions greatly influence and, in many cases, even determine our decisions.”
The article also says, “While emotion can be communicated effectively in a print or television ad, there are other important components of a brand that have emotional dimensions. For example, rich and powerful mental representations of a brand include its personality. Research reveals that consumers perceive the same type of personality characteristics in brands as they do in other people. And just like with people, they are attracted more to some personality types than others – attractions which are emotion based, not rational. Brand personality is communicated by marketers through packaging, visual imagery, and the types of words used to describe the brand.”
Summary
Ground marketers represent your dental practice. They are your brand’s personality. They shout your brand to everyone and everywhere in the community.
Ground marketers comprehend and have the consumer mindset that makes it much easier for them to attract new patients to your dental practice. When talking to people about your dental practice, ground marketers give out the brand’s personality, which brings emotions into play and inclines people to sign up or agree for a consultation.
Ground marketers push. They are their physically in businesses, in companies, and in the community signing up new patients. Don’t exclude ground marketing from your marketing and advertising strategies. Find a ground marketer to create marketing and advertising strategies for you. Now imagine having both digital and ground marketing in play. There is no way your schedule can be empty.
