By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business

These days everyone is piling their money into online marketing, and you can’t blame them; the internet has completely reset consumer behaviour patterns and, if we’re honest, we still haven’t fully come to terms with how it’s transforming our lives at an accelerating speed.

One of the most powerful things it’s already done is to democratise communications. These days, if you want to broadcast video content to thousands of people, you just post it online. If you run a business, you can create a slick shop window website for a modest fee and disseminate any communications you want on it, as often as you want.

To do the same kind of thing in the early 90s would have meant paying a huge broadcasting corporation to run your content – not cheap. Furthermore, you would be going up against global brands with serious muscle, so the game seemed rigged for the biggest players.

The story with print media is a bit different because the internet hasn’t and can’t simulate the feel of flicking through a Sunday newspaper over a fry up. Even so, most smaller businesses have totally abandoned the well established channels of newspaper advertisements and direct mail in favour of online marketing.

This is a curious thing, especially in dentistry, where the ‘worried well’ over-50s, who are most likely to respond well to physical communications because it’s what they grew up with, constitute such an important segment of the market (being wealthier and more in need of high value treatments than, say, under-30s who pretty much grew up online). But even forgetting that, there’s new evidence from a Canadian neuromarketing firm that paper ads can be more memorable and have more impact than digital ones.

Actually, taking a step back, it’s fascinating to consider here what the biggest IT company of them all did with regard to physical marketing: Apple did a load of print ads, set up an online store, then went back and set up a load of high street shops which became the most valuable retail spaces on the planet. Why? People still want to feel and see what they’re purchasing, and they want to deal with humans, especially when buying intimidating big ticket items.

It’s not actually very helpful conceptually separating digital and non-digital marketing any more, because the data you get from digital helps you understand who you’re targeting with non-digital (take the increasing divergence among over-65s segment I talked about recently, for example). The two approaches must seamlessly complement each other if you want to create a consistent brand experience. Top brands use traditional media to direct listeners, readers and viewers to their digital marketing assets and you can do the same, provided you appear in the top three search results and your content is compelling.

It’s worth remembering that newspaper ads are still significantly cheaper than before the 2008 crash and are being underutilised by dentists, so they offer an affordable chance to stand out. Also, print works: as reported by Marketing Week, for every £1 adult-only hotel chain Warner spends on door drops it gets £3.49 in bookings; and property business Loyalty Street saw a 10% conversion rate from its first direct mail campaign that used locally posted mail with traditional stamps.

Print can perform as well if not better for dentists because it engenders trust among segments of the market over a purchase that is not only very personal and expensive (like holidays and houses), but scary. You could say dental care is one of the most emotive purchases any of us ever make, so why jettison a proven way to get potential patients to trust you?

There is a caveat here though: many dentists fail to consider the intricacies of media planning and how marketing channels support each other. With print, for example, I see them buy on price and volume alone to be left wondering why a poorly planned ad hasn’t worked. Plan wisely, orchestrate a marketing mix that seamlessly uses the best channels, regardless of media, and you will be rewarded.

If you’d a like a free no obligation chat about your marketing planning options, I’d love to hear from you. Call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.