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LNCtips.com: 4 Creative Marketing Techniques


What do TV beer commercials and perfume ads have in common?  Beer and perfume are both commodities that can't be experienced though visual media.  After all, you can't smell the perfume or drink the beer that's being advertised on TV.  In fact, in the United States, advertisers don't even show actors ingesting beer in the commercials.  Even with these restrictions, advertisers still sell lots of beer and perfume.  That's because advertisers use creative marketing techniques.  As a new legal nurse consultant, you can too. 

I first became interested in creative marketing when I was in high school.  At that time, there was a popular soap that was advertised as making the skin feel tingly.  I learned that the tingly feeling was caused by a skin irritant in the soap.  Turning a negative into a positive is one way that advertisers use creative marketing. 

A second form of creative marketing is promoting an atmosphere.  For example, beer commercials tend to feature either camaraderie, quirky humor, or both, as in Super Bowl ads.  Perfume commercials often depict women as strong, bold, sexy, and fashionable.  Think Charlize Theron in the J'adore ads.

Insurance is an interesting industry, which is only profitable if you buy their products, but don't use them much.  Many insurance companies use a third creative marketing technique, mascots and logos, to sell their products.  We're all familiar with the Aflac duck, the Geico gecko and Flo from Progressive Insurance as mascots for insurance companies. Travelers insurance uses a well-known logo, a red umbrella, and Allstate has used variations of its "good hands" logo since the 1950s.

A fourth creative marketing technique is to use statistics accurately, but with a twist.  I think the milk industry is a master of using statistics creatively.  For example, whole milk has about 4% fat in it.  When milk processors starting stripping fat from milk, they came up with the terms 1% and 2%, when in fact the fat-stripped milk is 25% (for the 1% milk) and 50% (for the 2% milk) of the amount of fat in whole milk.  Calling milk 1% and 2% sounds much better, doesn't it?

How can LNCs use creative marketing techniques?  The worst thing that you can do is to copy everyone else.  I've seen hundreds of websites that have the same wording in them about LNC services. Every website also has a variation of a logo that merges medicine and law.  Instead, identify your strengths and weaknesses and develop your brand (including a website) based on those. 

Let's use some of those creating marketing techniques. For example, let's say that I had 20 years of clinical experience as an OB nurse but no experience in other specialties.  Because of my clinical background, I would create a logo of a baby, a pregnant woman, or a mother and baby.  Then I would use the logo on all of my marketing materials, including website, business cards, blogs, business stationary, brochures, email correspondence, letters of introduction, etc.  I would use the same distinctive and persuasive colors for all my marketing materials. Kissmetrics has a good infographic on persuasive colors. If I had no LNC experience, I would emphasize my clinical experience and eagerness to help attorneys.  I would identify my target audience as attorneys specializing in bad baby cases.  I would create a tag line such as "Ready to review your OB cases!" If I could determine how many deliveries (or newborns or postpartum moms) I had cared for, I would include that statistic in my marketing materials.  "My experience includes 3,000 deliveries."   I might even go so far as to say, "Practice limited to OB/GYN cases" to turn a negative (lack of broad experience) into a positive. 

By using these creative marketing techniques, I've just established an atmosphere that strongly identifies my strengths in reviewing cases.

Jones