Mass advertising broadcasts your brand to as many people as possible. Its strength is in creating brand awareness over time and positioning your practice in that coveted top-of-mind space when a consumer becomes interested in dental services.
Benefits of Mass Advertising Your Practice?
Brand Awareness for Your Practice
If you consistently and distinctly impress your brand on your market, they WILL be aware of you. Your practice will become a household name that everyone recognizes. Sustaining a mass advertising campaign will pay off. If Invisalign didn’t mass advertise to the public would consumers be asking for Invisalign by name in your practice? Probably not, or at least not as much. You benefited from Invisalign’s mass advertising with relatively little or no Invisalign advertising on your part. You probably can’t afford the budget to get international, national, state or even county brand awareness, but you can in your community.
Easy on Your Dental Marketing Budget
Some mass advertising campaigns are shockingly inexpensive on a cost per impression basis. For example, a vinyl car wrap costs about $2,000 for design, print, and installation. It will usually last three to five years. How many people are in your town? How many will see that car AT LEAST once over that three to five years? If it is a clever and memorable design, people will definitely see it, and most will likely remember it. Over the lifetime of the investment, you will probably be paying way less than a penny per impression — especially when you factor in tax deductions.
Everyone Needs A Dentist
For many modern businesses, mass advertising doesn’t make much sense. A company that makes beagle-specific chew toys probably won’t benefit from mass mailers to average households. The niche is too narrow, and advertising dollars could be better spent on more targeted tactics. Dentists enjoy a great advantage here. Everyone needs dentistry! Mass advertising makes sense for a dentist because everyone needs what you sell.
Brand Awareness
Mass advertising enables you to shorten Can get your market familiar with you quickly.. Mass advertising leans heavily on a “push strategy,” meaning you are pushing your brand into the consciousness of others. For example, content marketing is like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, hoping someone will discover the trail and follow it back to your practice. Mass advertising is like a neon blimp in the air with a sign flashing in your direction. They both have their place.
Example Mass Advertising Tactics
Direct Mail
Many dental practices thrive without employing direct mail at all. This is often because they have lower-hanging “marketing fruit” they can harvest before throwing resources into mailers. But mailers do have their place! [Just like all the other dental marketing tactics and streams.] A new practice sending a mailer to introduce themselves and their services can help jumpstart the patient acquisition process. Letting everyone in your zip code know that you now offer dental implants could impress your market. Often, mailers are simply conversation starters and planters of “idea seeds.”
Video Ads
What better way to break the ice with potential patients than giving them a chance to check you out, commitment-free? In 15–30 seconds, you can make an unforgettable impression, and those potential patients will make a mental note to call you when they need a dentist. The objective of the mass advertising stream is to make people aware of your brand and interested enough in your practice to call you now or call you later.
Fortunately, it won’t be that hard. Dentists are great, but it’s no secret that the monumental majority of them don’t invest in great video ads. This means there’s a whole lot of fish in this stream that your competition isn’t going after. Also, video is exceptional at communicating your brand in a sticky way. Viewers retain about 95% of a message when they watch it in a video. When reading it in text, they only retain about 10%.
Billboard / Signage
With all the big data, predictive algorithms, and targeted advertising options out there, billboards and signage have been relegated to secondary, or lower, thoughts. Many have forgotten about the strengths of a good ol’ fashioned sign. But get this – A full ⅔ of people claimed to have seen a billboard in the last month. [This number might be low, but behavioral statistics are at the mercy of the participants]. Of those who have seen a billboard, over 80% look at the actual advertising message. Finally, digital billboards are even more conspicuous, with 77% of people saying digital billboards often catch their attention.
Often a dentist will not even consider including Mass advertising in their marketing because of the expense involved and the lack of perceived value it creates. Yes, mass advertising is an investment that is usually not immediately effective in generating revenue. However, DON’T pass up on great opportunities to get your name out there in a big way. If you own your building, why on earth wouldn’t you make a fantastic analog or digital billboard? Buy once, cry once, and then you have a salesperson that never sleeps whose sole purpose is to paint your name in the sky.
If you have an excellent video promoting your practice, boost it on social media and YouTube so people in your community can’t hide from your brand.
If you want your practice to be the first dental practice a new move into your community becomes familiar with, set up a mailer program for new move-ins.