By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

If you’re hoping that your dental practice appeals to pensioners in your catchment area, do you know what type of pensioner you’re dealing with? It seems a good time to pose the question because the UK population is older and wealthier than it ever has been, but the over-65s are a complicated bunch.

Forgive me for stating the obvious before I continue, but we know this group is among the most valuable to dentists because their teeth fail the most, causing them to buy big ticket items like dentures and, the holy grail of big tickets; implants.

This is clearly a burgeoning market offering extraordinary demand, but it’s a market with diverging sets within it, which is why I was wondering which type of pensioner lives in your catchment (by catchment I mean the geographical reach of your practice, factoring in competitors and available treatments). Because to win these over-65s over – and ensure the ones on your books remain loyal – you’re going to have to speak their language.

According to a report by Experian, we shouldn’t keep treating pensioners as a homogenous group; the days of shooting bland printed marketing collateral in their general direction are well and truly over.

In fact, the 11 million people over retirement age in the UK are increasingly tech-savvy and expect tailored products and offers, so not only can we now reach many of them online (not so long ago considered next to impossible), we probably need to rethink the content we’re using in our marketing collateral.

Getting your content to resonate depends on pitching it to the right type of reader – there are four groups, Experian says, which are, in decreasing order of affluence:

Diamond Days: 520k, clustered in the South East.
Smarties: 1.3m, live in attractive market towns and cathedral cities like Evesham, Dorchester and Salisbury.
Senior Security: 4.9m, live in seaside towns like Bournemouth, Eastbourne and Hempstead Valley.
Vintage Value: 4m, reliant on state pension, least tech-savvy, live in social housing in the North East and Scotland.

So, which group do most of the pensioners in your catchment area belong to?

Let me know if I can help you communicate with them. Call on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.