Despite everyone’s new-fangled mobile gadgets, has marketing really changed that much? Amanda Lohan investigates
In May 2009, CoreData surveyed more than 1000 Australians and revealed that 58 per cent of respondents would stop having the Yellow Pages delivered if they had the choice. Since then, the physical size of the directory has almost halved. Some believe
this spells the end of print advertising, however many Australian dentists are
still finding value in the more traditional forms of advertising.
“There’s no doubt the way consumers search for information is changing,” says Yellow Pages group product manager, Simon Uzunovski. “Print was the only way consumers could find a local service provider, nowadays, more and more consumers rely on online, via mobile, the iPad, and the iPhone to find the information they need.” Uzunovski cites 18 months of growth for the Yellow Pages’ digital properties as evidence of this trend towards online information gathering. However, he adds, a large portion of the population still prefers to use the book. “As long as there’s demand we’ll continue to print and distribute it,” he says.
The Yellow Pages are undoubtedly the stalwart of print advertising in Australia, but Uzunovski says they are changing with the times too. With the Yellow Pages Digital Network attracting more than nine million visits a month across mobile, desktop and tablet devices, it’s one of the largest digital advertising networks in Australia.
Uzunovski says that geographic region plays no part in a person’s reliance on the Yellow Pages, although Chloe Colantoni, practice manager at Denticheck, disagrees. Colantoni believes that her Hobart patients rely more on the printed edition of the Yellow Pages than patients in bigger cities. As a result, she has chosen to maintain a large print ad at an equally large cost. “We track every new patient through our software and we have done for the past five years,” says Colantoni, “We can quantify everything, including how they found us and whether they become long-term patients. By a long shot, the Yellow Pages are still the first port of call.”
Despite the printed Yellow Pages continuing to exceed online referrals to the Hobart practice, Colantoni says that online referrals are on their way up.
Colantoni manages all of her digital advertising campaigns through this website. New software provides access to a number of interactive marketing channels such as patient emails and SMS reminders and allows her to track each of these channels in detail. This has resulted in a need for Colantoni to spend far more time on marketing than she used to, however, she says that the ongoing process allows her to stay up to date more easily.
“We can quantify everything, including how they found us and whether they become long-term patients. By a long shot, the Yellow Pages are still the first port of call”. – Chloe Colantoni, practice manager, Denticheck, Hobart
Apart from appointment reminders, Colantoni’s strategies include an email reminder to use annual private healthcare benefits before they expire; a program she says generates an instant response. Colantoni says that, initially, she was wary of overusing technology and bombarding patients with gratuitous messages. Careful attention to appropriate message targeting and a focus on providing useful information, however, have resulted in an overwhelmingly positive response from grateful recipients.
Interestingly, the ‘2012 Yellow Social Media Report’ (which surveyed almost 2000 Australia businesses) found that an increasing number of small and medium-sized businesses are now using social media as an alternative way to connect with their customers. The report also revealed, however, that many of these social media campaigns lack a clear strategy, generally failing to provide the sort of information consumers look for when they use social media (namely, giveaways and discounts). When it comes to these social media marketing channels, including Facebook, Twitter and user review-based TrueLocal, Colantoni prefers to steer clear. “It’s very messy with privacy laws and you need to sit on there all day, every day to keep it interesting and handle comments-I don’t think it’s right for our industry,” she says.
In working with the previous principal to establish the right marketing mix for her Hobart practice, Colantoni says that it took some convincing to pull away from the channels that-based on her data-weren’t working. One area of print media that Colantoni eventually pulled away from was the local newspaper. “We used to do a lot more of it. When I started, it was probably our main form of getting the word out there but we never knew whether it was effective… we haven’t done it in the last few years. I tracked it and it brought in maybe two new patients. No existing patients saw it,” she says.
A move towards digital channels did not, however, mean giving up the tools that were still effective, and even now one of Denticheck’s most popular marketing tools is their printed reminder notice. Using variable digital print technology, the reminder postcards show an image of a foggy bathroom mirror with the patient’s name scrawled across it. “They cost a little bit more to do, but people love them and put them up on their fridge-kids have even taken them to school.” Following the success of an early postcard campaign, Colantoni forwarded a sample to Denticheck’s head office, who are now using it as an example for other practices.
The key to Colantoni’s success has been a strong focus on evidence-based strategies, making use of software to test and track the effectiveness of each campaign and establish Denticheck’s optimal marketing mix. Uzunovski says no one solution fits all, so this kind of research is essential. “The first thing any dentist should do is work out who their customers are, and where they search for a local service provider. Is it in print? Online? Mobile? Search engines? Once a dentist knows this information they can spend their marketing and advertising budget accordingly.”
“The most important thing is to make sure you have a presence in the places your customers search.”
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