What I Learned About Marketing… From Farming.
I grew up on a farm and even farmed for myself for a few years. I didn’t realize it at the time but I learned a lot about marketing when I was farming. Let me explain…
Let’s say you want to grow wheat. When spring comes you head out to the field and prepare the soil for seeding. You likely already applied fertilizer in the fall to get a head start. Once ready you put the seed in the ground and wait for it to come up.
It can take longer if the soil is a bit dry but most times it will be poking out of the ground within a couple of weeks. With the right amount of rain and sun, you will have a crop that is ready to harvest sometime in late summer or fall.
But what if you did this?
The day after seeding you went out to look and to your surprise, no wheat coming up, and the day after that you look again and again no wheat. A week goes by and still no wheat. You think, wow that must have been a bad seed or maybe you think to yourself, ‘wheat isn’t a good crop’, it obviously doesn’t work because after a week there is still nothing to harvest.
You decide that barley will be a better crop. You go out again and till the ground and seed your barley. Again a week goes by and no barley is poking through the ground. ‘Well, barley must not be a good crop to grow either!’ You decide to plow that down and seed canola or corn or whatever the next crop is. You see where I’m going here.
So many people try some form of marketing or advertising for their business and when you don’t get results right away you assume it is because the medium you chose doesn’t work.
Like farming, marketing takes patience and nurturing to get results. You may not get super results the first time you do something, but most forms of marketing (social media, digital ads, SEO, direct mail, print, radio, or TV) take time. Frequency and nurturing are the key. People don’t decide to get a new dentist overnight. They have a bad experience, move, or have something else happen in life that gets them thinking, “I need to look for a new dentist.”
They may not respond to any marketing during this time but will notice your ads and start to think, hmmm, this practice is an option. If you stop marketing at this point, they are not likely to remember you when the time comes that they are ready to book. You want to be there all the way along so you are the obvious choice when they are ready.
You might think you are not getting the results you should from your campaigns but the results will come if you are patient and don’t stop.
Here is an example. One of our clients sent out 5000 postcards per month for 3 months. They got enough new patients during the 3 months to get an ok return on investment but not what they were hoping so they asked us to stop sending them out. We had a unique URL and phone number on these postcards so we could track any calls or website visits directly attributed to them. Here is where we were surprised. They continued to get calls and website visits from these postcards for over a year. This more than tripled the return on investment that we saw in the first 3 months.
What would have happened if we had been more consistent and kept sending for those 12 months? I bet we would have seen 20-30 times more ROI.
Another example is a client who decided radio would be good. We picked a station and started to run spots. After about 3 weeks the client wanted to switch stations because they “weren’t getting very many new patients from the radio and none of our staff listen to that station anyway.”
We tried to talk them out of it but they insisted so we switched to a station that the staff did listen to. After another 4 weeks, they decided they still weren’t getting enough response so they asked to cancel. They said, “we ran ads for 7 weeks and are only getting a few new patients.”
In reality, they only ran ads for 3 weeks and then 4 weeks because they were hitting a totally new batch of listeners with the news station.
Contrast that to another client who has been running radio consistently for 3 years. They didn’t get a ton of new patients when they started but they didn’t give up. They now get 20 new patient calls per day!
Conclusion:
If you are going to do any kind of marketing or advertising, be in it for the long haul. You are wasting your money if you are only planning to do anything for a short time. Sure you may get a few new patients but not the full potential of whatever medium you use.
Have patience and give the marketing a chance to work.
If you have questions about your website or would like a complimentary website audit please visit our website or give us a call (888) 214-0569.
Trent Wehrhahn is the founder and President of Dental Growth Strategies. With his years of multinational sales and marketing experience with dental offices, he has focused his strengths on marketing solutions for local dental offices just like yours.
At DGS we help you assess where you are at and implement a custom marketing plan that gets results.