Direct marketing for your non-direct marketing business
By Dan Kennedy

When you think “direct marketing,” you do not usually think “chiropractic.” Yet, you can do direct marketing for non-direct marketing businesses, even your chiropractic practice.

The secret: Follow 10 rules.

Rule 1: Always make an offer (or offers). Direct marketing is selling in print — selling with media. Your task is to make a direct-response offer. The more interesting and appealing the offer, the better. But the most important basic point is: Never end a “conversation” in any media without making a direct offer.

Check your yellow pages ad. Odds are, no offer. A lot of businesses even run newspaper ads with no offers. They have what’s called an implied offer. A lot of businesses run this kind of ad, which essentially says, “Here we are; here’s what we do.”

Rule 2: Give a reason to respond right now. Your offer must force and compel your potential patient to move now. Your goal is immediate response. A plain vanilla offer won’t do it.

Rule 3: Give clear instructions. When you put together any marketing tool — ad, flyer, sales letter, Web site, phone script, etc. — it should be a single, focused path that leads the prospective patient to a point of decision and action. At that point, you must tell the prospect exactly what you want him to do next, how and when, and what will happen as soon as he does.

Stop sending out anything absent of such clear instructions.

Rule 4: Track and measure. You need real, hard facts and data to make good, intelligent marketing decisions.

Tracking means accurately collecting all the information you need to determine what advertising is working and what isn’t, which offer is pulling and which isn’t, what marketing has traction and what doesn’t. Tracking leads to knowing what your return on investment is for each dollar.

Set up systems to capture the data you need. Set aside time to do the necessary analysis. If it’s painful and confusing at first, it’ll get easier. And it will prove profitable.

From now on, do not spend any marketing dollars without tracking the ROI.

Rule 5: Brand as a by-product. Traditional brand-building is fine for giant companies with huge budgets vying for store shelf space and consumers’ recognition. If you are the CEO of Heinz or Coors, playing with other peoples’ marbles, by all means buy brand identity.

But if you are an entrepreneur investing your own marbles, then focus on response and sales. If you develop brand recognition accident-ally along the way, great. But do not spend exclusively on creating it.

Brand-building is for patient people with very deep pockets. That’s probably not you.

Rule 6: Follow up. If a person reads your ad, calls your clinic, and asks a question, make sure the CA does something with that opportunity. The CA should capture the person’s name, address, e-mail, and offer to schedule a consultation — if that is what your offer was.

Another follow-up opportunity: Leads from screenings or referrals. Make calls and put those names on your newsletter mailing list.

Plan a sequence of things to be done to follow up.

Rule 7: Use strong copy. Sales and subtlety rarely go hand in hand. There is enormous, overwhelming competition for attention and clutter you must cut through. Use compelling copy in your marketing materials.

Rule 8: Mimic mail-order advertising. Any and all ads for any business should mimic mail-order ads.

Accumulate a file of full-page newspaper and magazine ads that are mail-order ads that ask you to buy or at least request free information. Whenever you prepare or approve your ads, flyers, sales letters, or Web sites, get out this file and compare. Yours should look like the ones in the file.

Rule 9: Results rule. Period. Opinions don’t count; only results.

If an ad brings in patients, it is good. If it doesn’t, it’s not.

Rule 10: Get tough; become disciplined. And go on a direct-marketing diet for six months.

When you go on a diet, you:

• Purge your refrigerator and cupboards of junk foods. And keep them free of them.
• Decide on an eating plan and stick to it patiently and persistently.
• Get some tools, such as a scale.
• Count something — calories, fat grams, or Weight Watcher points so you can subtract by the numbers and manage with numbers.
• Step up your exercise.

Use the same steps with your transformation to become a lean, mean direct marketer.

• Purge your business of junk — pretty brochures that violate most or all of the above rules, dead ads that just lay there, and gentle, subtle, boring sales letters. Out with the old, in with the new.
• Decide on a marketing plan.
• Get some tools, such as new ads, flyers, coupons, sales letters, Web sites, and scripts for handling incoming calls.
• Count. See Rule 4: Track and measure.
• Mentally exercise. Start reading books and articles, listening to recordings, and going to seminars about direct marketing.

You need to be very careful not to let anything into your new direct marketing world that doesn’t belong there.

Consider, for example, the bread the restaurant gives me with my salad. About once a week, I get a Caesar salad with grilled chicken from a nearby restaurant. It comes with a small loaf of fresh-baked bread.

When I get home, I throw the bread into the garbage can in the garage before entering the house.

Why? Because I don’t have as much discipline as I would like. If that bread gets past the perimeter into my house, I’ll eat it. So I can’t let it in.

You’ve got to do the same thing with your practice. Anything that doesn’t conform to the prior 10 rules, do not let it in at all. Just say no.

This is an edited excerpt from No B.S. Direct Marketing for NON-Direct Marketing Businesses (www.nobsbooks.com), by Dan Kennedy. © 2006 Entrepreneur Media. Dan is an author, public speaker, and direct marketing copywriter, and consultant to clients in 156 business and professional categories.