Making your optometrist marketing dollar achieve the best possible return on investment is always attractive, especially in the midst of tough economic times. Traditional advertising methods - like print media advertising, for instance- can be costly and difficult to evaluate. In contrast, online advertising is generally low-cost, with a greater (or at least more easily trackable) return on investment. Here are five ways that you can advertise your practice without breaking the bank:
Email Marketing
One of the main advantages of optometrist marketing via email is that it costs so little yet is still an effective way to keep you in your patients' minds on a regular basis. Email marketing allows you to remind both active and inactive patients about your practice, while providing them with useful eye health information, electronic coupons, and other desirable content. A monthly or quarterly e-newsletter is the perfect way to keep in touch, prompting your patients to schedule appointments rather than putting them off.
Website Marketing
A website is a necessity these days, and it's also capable of yielding an extremely high return on your investment. Since more and more patients are seeking care providers via Google and Yahoo, making sure that your website is visible in search results and attractive to site visitors is crucial. Make sure that your website targets local searches; register with Google Maps and Yahoo Local for the best results, and be sure to include terms related to your physical location on your website. For instance, if you are located in the lower west side of Manhattan, you may want to focus on specific neighborhoods that you're close to: the West Village, Chelsea, Soho, and Tribeca. People tend to search by neighborhood (in a large city) or by town, county, or region.
Pay-Per Click Advertising
Advertising via pay-per-click can also yield excellent results, particularly if you have stiff competition in the organic search results (the ten results that appear on a typical search page.) Pay-per-click ads can appear above organic search results, so people may see your site before they even get to the regular results. The beauty of a pay-per-click campaign is that you can easily track which ads bring visitors to your site. For best results, be specific in your choice of ad terms; saying "Tribeca optometrist-15% off designer frames" will bring you more qualified leads than "New York Optometrist" (which could get you visitors from Buffalo who are unlikely to actually use your services).
Local Connections
Be sure to consider your presence in local online venues, like your area newspaper or chamber of commerce. Many patients may also seek out information from review sites, like Citysearch or Yelp. Good reviews on these sites are like magnets that attract patients to your practice. (Conversely, bad reviews can send patients in the other direction, so it's good to monitor these sites to respond to criticism appropriately).
Word-of-Mouth
Your patients are your most powerful marketing tool of all. If they're enthusiastic about you, you'll see their friends, family, and neighbors too. Go the extra mile to make them feel special. Send them birthday discounts, give stickers to the kids, have evening hours at least once a week, and treat everyone as if they were your most important patient- because they are.
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