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How One Trick & $100 Helped Us Kickstart Our Dentistry Business

Dr. Harry Trott

November 28, 2013

Early last year, we launched a private dentistry in Parramatta, a large suburb of Sydney, Australia. This is a suburb that is pretty close to a number of large hospitals and other reputed private practioners. So while we did realize the challenges that lay ahead, we were pretty confident of pulling it through. Except that, the growth never happened as much as we would have liked.

After three months of waiting for the word-of-mouth referrals to kick in, we decided to start marketing our business. We tried buying a sponsor board on one of the popular malls in the area - there seemed to be little impact. We announced referral bonuses for our patients who would refer us to their friends and family. It hardly created a ripple. Finally, after burning cash on a number of marketing strategies that didn’t work, we landed on a cheap, yet amazing marketing trick - flyers.

Flyers, or more simply direct mail distribution is not exactly a novelty and has existed for decades, if not centuries. However, because it was cheap, it hadn’t registered in our mind since we had good cash to burn on marketing and were occupied with exploring other expensive alternatives. The strategy simply involves printing small pamphlets containing our marketing message and distributing it to people who are likely to be our customers.

We got started on this when we received a flyer ourselves from a local plumbing company. It was coincidentally the day we had a water leak to fix ourselves. The flyer came in at the right time that we immediately set up an appointment with the plumber and got the issue fixed. That got us thinking, ‘how many people in Parramatta could probably be mulling over a potential teeth whitening or teeth straightening job right now? What if we could target them with a flyer?”.

We started creating our own flyer - a small message about the services we offered, our location and phone number. It was everything that could be printed over an A4 sheet of paper, yet not too cluttered. After setting up a basic design for the borders, fonts, etc., we used our home printer to publish over 500 flyers.

The next step was in distribution - we heard about fiverr.com and how we could find anyone from anywhere to do jobs for as little as $5. After finding a user with good reputation in our neighborhood, we got them to meet us and collect the flyers to be deposited on to the mailboxes of every household across 2-3 important streets in Parramatta.

Less than 4 hours after the distribution, we had our first call from a mother looking for an appointment to help straighten the teeth of her 14 year old daughter. We soon had a couple of more enquiries for other dentist jobs. In all, we got 6 enquiries and 4 conversions helping us more than recover the cost we spent in printing and distributing our flyers.

Flyer distribution became a regular part of our marketing over the next 6 months when we tried various marketing messages. It was a period when we learned a lot about how marketing works. Over this period, we must have spent close to $1500. But this was sufficient to get our name popular among a lot of residents in Parramatta - today we are a well established dentistry in our suburb and flyers are a prime reason how we managed to get here.

Author Bio: Dr. Harry Trott is a dentist with over 10 years of experience. He launched Parramatta Dentists in March 2012.

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