Chances are that if you have run an ad campaign in the past, whether print, online, radio or even just in-house fliers, you were not always 100% thrilled with the results. And based on the advertising not meeting expectations, it’s easy to make a blanket statement that advertising just doesn’t work.
However the fact remains that it is working for millions of businesses, so to say that ‘advertising doesn’t work’ may be too broad of a statement to make. The more accurate statement would be that advertising in certain ways does not work or at least that it doesn’t work quite as well we intend it to most of the time.
Before you run your next ad or even put together your next flier to have patients give out to co-workers and friends, follow these ads best practices to help drastically improve your response rate.
CAPTURE ATTENTION
Your first goal is to capture the attention of the people you are targeting and make them curious enough to continue reading. So the question is what will capture your target audience’s eye as they peruse a paper or your latest clinic newsletter or catch their ear as they listen to the radio?
Is it likely to be your name or the name of your clinic? Probably not. Instead try headlining with the number one issue that your target population is dealing with such as Low Back Pain Sufferers Only!
Or you can modify it slightly to show your target a benefit (i.e. ‘What’s in it for ME) they might realize by listening to or looking at your ad – 3 Step System for Eliminating Low Back Pain.
When generating a headline for any advertising, just keep in mind that your goal should be to capture attention and peak curiosity to compel the person to listen or read further.
BUILD CREDIBILITY
So now that you captured your audience’s attention, you have to gain their trust. One of the most effective and fastest ways to accomplish this is by showing how your treatment has impacted another person. And by that I mean through a testimonial.
Considering that your advertising is focused around health and healthcare services, there is a lot of natural hesitation and even fear for most people when they think about going into a new doctor’s office.
The best way to overcome that is by showing that another person, just like them, went to your office, survived, got great results and is once again living life to the fullest.
Essentially, a picture of the patient with a statement about how your treatment has improved their condition and life followed by the person’s full name is a simple formula that will serve that aspect of your advertisement well.
This is called ‘Social Proof’ and nearly every advertising guru will tell you that it is one of the most effective aspects of any advertisement.
EXTEND AN OFFER
Now that you have captured your prospects’ attention and they have read about the results others have gotten, the last key part of your ad is the offer. If you ask 5 different doctors or chiropractic consultants what they recommend as the offer you extend in your advertising, you will likely get 5 different recommendations.
Examples of typical offers include:
Free Consultation
Free Consultation with Examination and Xrays
$37 Full Consultation with Examination and Xrays
A Free Workshop (where an exam at a special price is offered)
$39 One-Hour Massage and Computerized Posture Analysis
So which is the best? Well, it depends on how qualified you want your candidate to be. In other words, a person that has paid money is typically more qualified than one that has not. However, a free service will likely yield more responses to the ad overall, even if those that respond may not always be the best overall prospects.
I actually recommend a free consultation or free workshop to learn more. I say this only because it will often result in a bigger response rate. Regardless, however, the reality is that different offers work better in certain areas of the country and also depending on the services you are extending in your ad. For example offering a free consultation for help with migraine headaches will yield a greater or lesser response than offering, say, a free workshop to learn more on a simple but effective way to improve sciatic pain.
So the question then still remains about ‘what should your offer be?’ The answer is to split test it which simply means try different combinations in your offer and track the response rate you get. I recommend you split test two components of your ad at the very least (when possible of course). The first area is the ‘offer’ as we just discussed. The second area is the ‘headline’ of your ad. But here is the catch. You can’t split them (test a new approach) for both areas at the same time or you won’t know what worked.
Try each headline for a few weeks to see which gets the biggest return and then try altering the offer a couple of different ways to see which gives you the biggest bang for your advertising buck.
As well, always keep in mind that when it comes to the offer you have to provide them a ‘call to action’ so they will pick up the phone. They need to feel compelled to call you because there is a time constraint or supply limit of some type.
TRACK RESULTS
Remember that the only way you will know what is working is to have your front office closely track which ad each person comes from. It’s one thing to just blindly do a low cost internal referral campaign but another altogether to blindly do what are typically higher cost media ads. When you are spending a lot of money, knowing where each lead comes from is paramount to crafting an effective advertising campaign over time.
So in summary: AD SUCCESS = Attention + Curiosity + Credibility + Time Limited Offer
Good luck and as always email me if you have questions.
And please leave a comment below!
Daron
