Most large ad agencies believe you can persuade consumers to buy services through ads with cute or bizarre content. Their ad reps will usually tell you their purpose is to attract attention and create consumer awareness. They assume their creativity will entice people to desire what they are promoting. Rarely, however, do they make an effort to prove their clients' services are any good. Nevertheless, their methods work, so long as they outspend their competition, and their competitors’ promotion fails to convince prospective buyers that their services are of better value. This weakness is inherent in every form of typical ad-agency marketing, including websites, online yellow pages, traditional media, and other forms of online advertising.
What Is Wrong with Today's Marketing Communications?
Most medical, law and accounting practices do understand that Madison Avenue ad agency trickery will not work for their practices. Unfortunately, in part due to the Madison Avenue mentality, how to market with integrity and ethics is a lost art. Today, professional service business promotion is loaded with meaningless platitudes, fluff, and generalities that make little if any impression. Trite examples of these we see everywhere include statements like we care about our clients (or patients), over 30 years of experience, our staff is warm and friendly, and we have highly skilled staff. What would you expect a practice to say… we don’t care about you, we’re inexperienced, cold, and unfriendly, and our staff have little training? These clichés are a given. So, why do practices stick banal statements in big, heavy type in their marketing communications when these phrases are nothing more than minimal expectations of consumers?
Honesty, Ethics, and Competitive Advantage
When we say integrity, we mean the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. The most accurate definition of ethics we believe is degree and contemplation of optimum survival. Thus, an ethical act is one that not only benefits, you, your family and your business, but also your clients or patients, and your community.
Our website homepage states that the goal of your marketing strategy should be to convince your prospective clients or patients
they would be making a huge mistake to choose any business but yours for the type of services you provide. The only long-term way to achieve this is via honesty and impeccable ethics, and offering more value to your clients than your competitors do. Superior value can be in terms of quality, customer service, convenience, consistency, or value. Although it is ideal for a professional service business to be superior in every category, being clearly better in one or two of these areas can be sufficient so long as your practice are good in the other areas. Here are four examples:
• A woman who knowingly sees a chiropractor whose reputation is only good but may not be the best because he offers evening and weekend hour appointments whereas the other local chiropractors do not,
• A primary care physician who in not board certified but has a great bedside manner and provides a comparable level of care to the most seasoned board certified internists and family practitioners,
• A local attorney in solo practice who has an excellent reputation with local judges as opposed to a larger law firm whose attorneys have superior credentials but are not as well thought of by local judges, and tend to be arrogant and not fully trusted by judges,
• A small accounting firm that is available year round and provides free unlimited tax planning advice to their clients unlike some nationwide tax accounting firms that heavily advertise but only provide services during tax season and provide little or no tax planning advice.
Why Capture Your Markets Must Be Selective in Choosing Clients?
Practices we work with are either better than their competitors in at least one of the five areas mentioned above or are willing to work actively with us to innovate their practice so they will soon provide superior value. The greater the disparity between our clients and their competitors, the more aggressive we can be with our messaging. In fact, we prefer to work with practices who are driven to continually innovate what they provide even when they already offer superior value. Because of the power of the methodology we employ, it is only ethical for us to market businesses that deserve to capture marketshare.
