Junk Food Marketing

Junk food marketing works in the short term, but it’s not a sustainable way to grow your practice. Make sure you aren’t a junk food marketer! Hot dogs

Have you ever read ingredient labels while food shopping? Almost everything is filled with sugar, even savory foods like bread and tomato sauce are loaded with the stuff! Why? Because it’s a cheap, lazy way to make food palatable. Is it good for you? Certainly not, but it’s cheap and easy. The same thing holds true for practice marketing.

Cheap and easy and not good for you seems to be the way some practices approach marketing. Good marketing, like good cooking, takes time, and there are no shortcuts. So while you might initially tempt some people with cheap and easy “junk food” marketing, it’s not sustainable.

Have Something to Say

Regular engagement is important, but make sure you have something meaningful to say every time you communicate with your patients. Don’t send out a communication for every little holiday. Your patients won’t mind if you don’t Donut wish them a Happy National Donut Day (yes it’s real, it’s June 3!).

If you’re a veterinarian, though, your patients might get a giggle if you wish them a Happy National Puppy Day (also real, March 23!). But things like that are a special case and just meant to give your patients a little laugh. The other 99% of the time, you should have something informative and engaging to communicate whenever you reach out to your patients.

Make it Professional

All your marketing materials should look professional. It’s easy to take shortcuts like printing out brochures on a regular old office printer or to take your own photos for your website, but those are perfect examples of junk food marketing. Those kinds of things stand out to potential patients; it makes your business look cheap and unprofessional. Have your marketing materials professionally done.

Quality Over Quantity

There’s a fine line between marketing and spam. Even the best quality content will be ignored if it’s too much. You want to engage your audience and keep your practice on their radar, but people are bombarded 24/7 by information. It can be overwhelming. You don’t want your marketing content to be thought of as spam.

You Only Promote Services

It’s understandable that you want to use your marketing to promote your services, but make sure that isn’t the only thing you’re doing. People want to read information that’s helpful, funny, or interesting. Consider your demographics. Do you have a lot of athletes in your practice? Write a post or newsletter about ways athletes can avoid injury. Do you have a lot of families in your practice? Write a post about fun summer activities coming up in your area.

People don’t want to read constant self-promotion, they want to feel like you’re writing for them. You can feel free to add a few lines about your services at the end of a post, but it shouldn’t always be the entire focus of every post.

Set a Schedule and Stick to It

It’s frustrating when you find a blog you like and it’s not regularly updated. It seems unprofessional. If you worry that you can’t keep up a regular writing schedule, batch several articles and schedule them regularly. This not only helps to keep the readers engaged, but it also helps with SEO ranking too. Frequency matters, but it matters less than consistency.

Get in the Kitchen!

Don’t feed your patients and potential patients junk food marketing! Get in the kitchen and cook up something good for them. No one can live on a diet full of sugar forever, and your business can’t survive on a diet of junk food marketing.

For more information on building community connections, I encourage you to read my new book Community Connections! Relationship Marketing for Healthcare Professionals. If you want more valuable information about how to Connect with YOUR Community, you can find FREE healthcare practice marketing content, PowerPoint Presentation Jumpstart Kits, workbooks, blog articles, and my FREE “Practice Marketing Planner” Now!