Does your marketing have REACH and SHELF-LIFE?

There are two essential questions that you must ask about any marketing collateral created by your team:

1. does it have REACH?

2. does it have SHELF-LIFE?

REACH – how many people can potentially see this?

Although it’s a good idea, a business card passed to a patient is likely to have very limited reach – from zero to one person.

A 60-second video of a happy teenager at a de-bond (known as the “OMG – that’s amazing” moment) has a significant potential REACH if posted on the teenager’s Instagram account or the parent’s Facebook profile (with the appropriate consents in place).

So you can analyse everything you do, from a pop-up banner in your patient lounge to a leaflet drop in your post code and ask yourself “what is our potential REACH here?

It follows that selfies, videos and reviews have a lot of potential REACH.

SHELF-LIFE – for how long will people have the opportunity to see this?

The challenge with social media posting is that you are throwing a packet of information into a fast-flowing river of data – so the risk is that nobody is looking at the moment you choose.

SHELF-LIFE is what happens when that data sticks around, so that future observers can still get the chance to see it.

The pop-up in the lounge has shelf-life, as does a patient welcome pack, a brochure, a poster in a window or an A-Board on the pavement. However, they are static displays in a world of information overload (and it does your marketing no good to have a faded Invisalign poster that nobody takes any notice of anymore).

Videos are excellent for SHELF-LIFE, because you can post them on to social media channels and then create a gallery in which to store them, be that a video section on your Facebook Business Page and/or a branded You Tube channel for your business.

Reviews are equally excellent, as they can sit there on Google and/or Facebook and continue to earn a living for a long time.

It still surprises me that practices don’t go all-out for reviews. Google want you to have 100+ before they start to move you up organic search.

People read reviews nowadays before they make any significant purchasing decisions.

Patient newsletters can have SHELF-LIFE if you create an archive on your web site where the back-issues are stored.

Keep asking your self the same question:

Does what we are about to do have REACH and SHELF-LIFE?