Loyalty Killers For Maximum Profit.

For many years, marketing and advertising game plans have been backwards in their approach to gain market-share.  Traditionally, ads have been written to focus on the wants and needs of brand new patient. 

As stated at the onset of this report, this segment of marketplace that consists of “new” patients only makes up about five percent of the available market.  The secret of market share domination is the reversal of your marketing philosophy from the “new” patient, to the “switched” patient --- patients that will be switching to you! 

Once you embrace the fact that the real money is in the 95% of the market that have been ignored – your competitors’ patient-base and prospect lists. Your primary task comes down to having strategies and incentives in place to change the location of where, and with whom, they choose to do business.

After positioning yourself as an expert in an area of specialty, you will use this information to attractive greater numbers of your competitor’s past patients.  Your advertising will now speak to specific concerns that you now know exist, rather than presenting a generic ad that doesn’t speak to a prospective patient’s needs, but rattles off canned verbiage about medical services.
 
You will now present yourself as the person trusted by the national, local and/or regional media as an authority in your field.  Your advertising will present a brief and direct message utilizing the data gathered in creating your articles.

You will further be sending copies of your reprints to your past and future prospects or patients. 

INCENTIVE MARKETING

Here are three ideas you can use right now in your display or Internet advertisements:

· “If you have received a written estimate from any of our competitors, show us proof and you’ll receive a special discount.” 
· “Show proof that you received our competitors’ sales letter or brochure and instantly receive “X” amount towards a procedure with us.”
·  “Have you already spent good money on pills, creams, or other remedies with little or no results?  If you’ve been to any health care professional within the last year show us proof via receipt and you’ll instantly qualify for our new patient discount worth “X” amount.”

You’re targeting only those prospects that already purchased or are in the process of purchasing a product or service similar to yours.  You’re rewarding your competitors’ best prospects for taking immediate action while showing you proof of his or her purchasing intent.   Please remember that you’re initial rebate or special incentive you’re offering is only a one-time acquisition cost to your business.  The lifetime value of acquiring this new patient could easily be worth thousands of dollars or more to your business. 

How can your display advertisements get direct exposure to your competitors’ most profitable prospects?   Research the places your competitors advertise: i.e. Internet, newspapers, magazines, yellow pages.  When creating your next advertising campaign, ask yourself would my incentive or ethical bribe be irresistible enough to take business away from my competitors?  With enough incentive and reward for taking immediate action, you’ll have created an advertisement irresistible enough to accomplish your goal. 

This form of advertising was particularly successful in the early days of personal computer market-share wars.  At that time there many provocative special offers, competitive upgrades and rebates offered to capture as many of their competitors’ patients as possible, as quickly as possible!  However, even in those early days, software companies were very particular about what was expected from their competitors’ customer. 

Software Company “A” would ask you to take the front cover, or a particular page, and fax it back to them.  This action would earn you a competitive upgrade, discount, rebate, trade-in, whatever. 

The key was that this action instantly identified the pool of 95% --- the money flowing out, the prime targets!  The computer companies were asking their prospects to make a commitment.

An important key to remember is, when you put together an incentive plan, remember that you are making these prospects give you something back in order to ultimately turn them into long-term patients.  Just understand that in this case, the trade-in is nothing more than an emotionally tangible and marketable concept. In fact, the prospect doesn’t really have to trade-in anything. All you are asking them to do is provide you some sort of proof of ownership. Otherwise, it’s not a trade-in. This is reserved only for people that own these particular products.

At this point, it is very important to restate that the largest pools of existing patients are those who have become your largest competitors’ patients! These people are already proven buyers. You are looking for prospective patients who have already made the emotional decision to purchase!

The main goal is to break the loyalty factor of these existing patients who currently belong to our competitors. What we’re really looking for is the 20% of our competitors’ patients who give them 80% of their profits.

By concentrating your efforts on our competitors’ biggest patients, we will be acquiring the very best, most lucrative buyer of all – the repeat buyer.