Professional Practices

Professionals also need marketing

Marketing a professional practice can be difficult. Product marketers deal with tangibles, but you cannot see or touch a professional service. In fact, it's often difficult for customers to judge services since most don't even exist until they have been delivered. As a result, marketing plays a crucial role in building service businesses.

Take 3 practices for example:- a dental office, massage therapy service, and chiropractic clinic - use marketing to overcome the challenges of selling the invisible. While taking slightly different approaches, each has used creative marketing to build a healthy business.

Internal marketing is key to the dental practice he shares with fellow dentists. Most new customers arrive because of referrals from current patients.

Internal marketing is done through making customers as comfortable as possible in every aspect of the service delivery.

Customers have a short code to lodge complaints, send compliments or speak to the professional in general through the SMSS system. The message is send via sms to a short code, and it reaches the professional instantly and is also displayed in his or her's email, for later resolutions.

External marketing is minimal. Customers will do viral marketing for your practice if they have a service that's efficient, quick and less complicated. Customers can be reminded about their appointments through setting up a scheduled sms message once and the SMSS system will do the rest! No more calling to confirm, missed calls, busy lines, etc.

Another useful marketing tool is MMS advertising. Because their service is personal and hands-on, they include their photos in the ad. When you are selling a massage, you are really selling yourself. It's important that clients feel comfortable with who is providing the service.

Marketing should also be done to keep existing customers and attract new ones.

The largest marketing tool is education. Chiropracters can offer free back care workshops which introduce the concept of chiropractic care, explain why and how it is done, as well as how it fits in with the traditional health care system. The workshops help current and potential customers to take care of their spines. And they also help to generate referrals. General questions and problems can be done on an automated basis with a keyword and short code number, and the best part about this, is that it's available 24-hours a day to your customers.

And as the above businesses demonstrate, when you are selling a professional practice, intangibles like customer service make all the difference. That is where SMSS offers the perfect automated solutions.