Marketing is not a game of certainty. You could have a great idea, a wonderful product and the concept is fantastic in your mind, but when you launch it to the world, it tanks. Most ideas, marketing concept and products that you will try will fail.
That’s okay and it’s a NORMAL part of the game. The key to growth in your marketing is to fail forward, learn from your experience and get a little bit closer to your target market each time.
Like any company with much more and with less resources in marketing, we make plenty of mistakes in this field. I have researched and designed a fantastic HIIT program, that is specific and tailored (and works) but is NOT a commercial success. Am I disappointed, ABSOLUTELY!!! I put in a lot of work and effort to make the product technically excellent, but it just doesn’t resonant with the market. That’s reality and it’s important to move on and keep trying.
However, these are the few things that we do at our centres to minimize the risk and increase our chances of success
Understand your target market
The first step is to understand your market as best you can. I have written about this in the past, but it is still extremely relevant, but conducting client persona interview is a great start. Using the framework discussed in David Meermon Scott’s book, The new rules of marketing and PR, allowed us great insight into the journey customers take before they buy from us. This completely change our digital marketing and communication approach with much better results.
(Click on the link below to download the framework)
Firstly, we already knew that we generally have an intelligent, professional target market, but what we didn’t realise is how much research they do on our services before they take the first step to contact us.
The hugely surprising thing was that customers usually start their journey of exploration about health and exercise services 6 months before they actually make contact with us. This starts with deciding they want to do something about their issue or health, talking to a trusted friend or other health professional and then beginning to do their research.
Once they have been recommended to approach our clinic, they will explore our website extensively to work out whether what we offer matches their needs and that we actually know what we are doing to be able to achieve their goals.
Once they actually contact us, they already have a good idea of what we do, what to expect and whether we are the right place for them or not. When the human contact actually occurs, we are basically confirming or disapproving the thought they had about our clinic and allowing them to “step over the line” and purchasing our services.
Understanding this aspect of the client journey has been a game changer for us, with improved client conversion, clients who better suit our service and resources and ultimately, happier clients.
What you do know about your clients that will help you be more targeted in your marketing approach (Click on the link below to download the framework)
Come up with a plan of what you are going to try
Understanding why your clients buy from you and how they prefer to buy from you gives great direction of where to start, but it the first step. Then you need to give it a go.
We decided to try Facebook and Instagram advertising, as our target market is on there media and Meta’s tools do allow us to specifically focus on advertising on our target market.
We tried several different types of advertising, including quotes, informative articles, short videos and straight promotions advertising. Because the ads are generally quite low cost, it is easy to try many different options, see how they respond and adjust as we go.
Ultimately, we discovered reasonably quickly, the most popular advertising that led to traffic onto our website was informative articles, especially on back pain. Our “Article Wednesdays” consistently had the most amount of clicks onto our website. This then led us create a schedule of content for the next 6 months of articles that we published on “Wednesdays” for our advertising and driving traffic to our website. We shared the role of writing the articles amounts the staff (basically 2 articles per staff member per 6 months) was not a great burden and led to them learning a bit more about the topic (A bonus in terms of staff development).
Ultimately, this leads to an even better understanding of the customer and a larger number of enquiries to our business.
Write some options of what you are going to try and start. Give it a go monitor the result carefully
Adjust based on the feedback and try again until you hit your target
Was this campaign enough to hit our marketing target. No. We still needed a larger number of enquiries to hit our business objectives.
Does this mean that our campaign was a failure? No, but it was one step towards reaching our goals.
The next step was to continue to read, learn more about our target market and give more things a go. The following is a sample list of the other marketing activities we have tried (both successful and unsuccessful):
• Refer a friend marketing vouchers – Successful
• Maildrops – informative and direct selling – Moderately successful
• Google ad words – Unsuccessful
• Doctor’s and health professionals – Moderately successful – depends on the personality of the health professional
• Regular client newsletters – Successful
• Presentations to groups – When by invitation by a current client – Successful
• Networking groups – Successful
Write a list of the marketing activities that you are going to try in order to achieve your marketing target
Join the discussion and have your say?
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- Call us on (03) 9857 0644 or (07) 3505 1494 (Paddington)
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Our clinical staff would be happy to have chat if you have any questions.
