Advertising Strategies for Dental Practices

A successful dental practice can only be seen from the work performed and the services offered. Even if a certain medical institution has the best dental specialists, they have to advertise their work for the public to notice it otherwise no one will know about it. Marketing can be defined as the process through which businesses create awareness to the public about the goods and services they offer. Marketing of goods and services is not an easy task for businesses. Every business wants to reach out to a large number of customers at the same time to improve on sales and productivity. This paper presents an organization that offers dental services and it wants to use advertisement as the strategy to market its services to the public. It is therefore looking for the best advertising agency to handle the task on its behalf. Therefore, this paper will give some of the best advertising appeals that can be used to advertise dentistry in the best way that to attract more clients.

Analysis

Advertising appeals can be defined as communication strategies used by advertising and marketing personnel to get people’s attention and persuade them to act or buy. The aspect of appeal can be found in rhetorical theory. As found in rhetorical theory, Aristotle identified three main appeals in communication which in modern are referred to as emotion, credibility, and logic. In other words, if someone can establish oneself as a credible person, that person has the potential to persuade other people. The same way, if someone can hit their audience’s emotions, or present to them a logical argument, then it is possible to persuade the audience to act. Therefore, for an advertisement to be able to persuade people to act, it should be credible, have the potential to affect people’s emotions, and make logical sense.

Ian Whitten, the creative director has proposed an advertising approach on basis of humor. Humorous advertisements make the most memorable ad campaigns. People tend to remember more or get more attracted to funny advertisements that create humor. Such advertisements are remembered for the longest times because they don’t fade away easily (Martin & Ford, 2018, p. 114). However, humor is not suitable for all advertisements. There are some advertisements that cannot be done on the basis of humor. It all depends with the products and services being advertised. In this case, DeeTeen which is a chain of twelve private dentist practices wants the best advertisement approach to market its practices for a minimum of two years through different media.

In this case, a humorous advertisement approach would not be the best in dentistry. Humor cannot be applied to any medical care advertisement. The following are the reasons why humor may not be the best advertisement approach for DenTeen dentistry practices:

i. Medical care matters are serious and they should be advertised with the seriousness they deserve.

Humor is a good way of doing advertisements but this cannot work when it comes to medical care practices. Dental care involves all the medical practices involving the teeth in general. Humor is not a strategy for advertising serious matters. When designing an advertisement, the important factor is the target audience and the message that should be put across. In this case, the target audience is the teenage patients. Teenagers are very keen about their general appearance and the teeth contribute the appearance as well. Therefore, most of them continuously seek dental services to ensure that their teeth are taken care of. When advertising for such a matter, the advertiser should avoid humor so that the message is taken with seriousness.

ii. Patients need healing not entertainment

The audience for the advertisement is patients with dental problems. These are people who are desperately seeking solutions to their dental problems but not to be entertained. Dental patients will focus on an advertisement that is promising and seems to provide a solution to their problem but not an advertisement that is just entertaining.

iii. Medical care practices are facts not fictions

In most cases, advertisements based on humor have some kind of exaggeration or factious images or even false content. They are meant to entertain the audience and make them remember the advertisement. For example, an advertisement based on humor may include cartoons conversing with one another. In reality, cartoons do not speak but they are used to draw the attention of the audience. Such exaggerations are not allowed in medical care practices. Whatever is included in the advert should be the exact services that are provided.

Alternative appeal types

Instead of using humor as the advertising appeal for medical care practice, the following are some advertising appeals that the creative director might consider for the client’s campaign. 

Rational appeal

This is also known as logical appeal. Gupta states that rational appeal mainly focuses on the consumer’s need for functionality and practicality in a product (Kujur & Singh, 2018, p. 185). When putting up the message to the audience, advertiser touches on the cost and the features of the service or product. In this case, the audience needs assurance that DenTeen services are the best and effective. This kind of appeal seeks to inform the audience on the benefits of using their products or services. Apart from just mentioning the benefits of the services provided by DenTeen, the advertiser also has to provide proof from previous cases of people who benefited from DenTeen. Showing proof is a way of creating trust and interest from the audience. Proof of previous success cases motivates the audience to also try the same.

The main aim of advertisements is to attract more customers. In this case the customers are patients therefore to attract patients; the advertisement should include proof of healed patients. This can be achieved through individual testimonies or documents showing successful dental cases. Mr. Whitten could consider this appeal by putting a claim on the advertisement that the client provides the best solutions for tooth decay and also provide some backup information from a patient who was treated with tooth decay and he or she has recovered fully.

There are many other facilities that provide dentistry services out there. Therefore, to attract more clients, the advertiser should include a feature that makes Den Teen to stand out. This could be lowering the cost of services provided, increasing the working hours for more availability, and more experienced staff for more effective results in dental care.    Patients will be attracted to cheaper excellent services. No one who does not like saving their money, therefore, reducing cost is very significant. However, reducing cost should not be at the expense of the quality of services provided.      Increasing working hours makes the facility more efficient and dependable. This would attract more people because of the fact that the facility is always available. The advertisement should also indicate that Den Teen has qualified and well-experienced stuff. This makes the clients feel at safe hands. 

Bandwagon appeal

Advertisements based on bandwagon appeal makes the consumers feel that they are missing out a lot when they fail to purchase the products and services being advertised. It is a persuasion by numbers kind of approach (Lee & Hong, 2016, p. 366). This appeal can also be used by Den Teen to advertise for its dental care practices. The advertisement should make people feel like Den Teen offers the best dental care services and that; they are missing a lot by not seeking the services. The advert may indicate the results of a survey that indicates that the institution is rated so high by the public and medical officers. The ad may say “Den Teen has been ranked at nine out ten in performance and in terms of effectiveness of the services offered by the general public and medical officers. This shows the effectiveness of the dental care services offered by Den Teen. This type of advertisement appeal compares products and services with those of competitors. They try to put the advertised product on top of other similar products by other companies

Personal/ emotional appeal

Personal or else known as the emotional appeal is a strategy used by marketing professional to persuade people into buying a product or seeking for services provided by a certain company (Walsh, 2017, p. 32). The advertiser plays around with the emotions of the audience to make them want to purchase the product. Personal appeal is best done through images that evoke different emotions. In this case, for example, the advertisement may contain a person with teeth decay going through a lot of pain then immediately he or she receives Den Teen dental care services the person heals completely and gets back a healthy dental formula. This kind of approach makes the audience want to seek similar services as well for them to have a healthy dental formula. It starts by the sad feeling for the person with teeth decay then the healed person brings the feeling of anxiety or intense interest in trying out the same dental care services.

Statistics appeal

This is more or less like bandwagon appeal. People have trust in numbers and this appeal seeks to persuade people by use of numbers. Numbers are an interpretation that whatever the advert says is about the product or service is accurate. This kind of appeal is aimed to show the audience that many people agree with what the message that the advertisement is putting across. When people see that other people have benefited from the products or the services before, they also get interested in purchasing the same products to join a large number of beneficiaries. This appeal is applicable in this case in that; a video advertisement can be designed to include several people talking about their experience with Den Teen and how they have benefited from it.

Fear appeal

This kind of appeal is related to the personal appeal. It involves people's emotions. It persuades people by instilling fear to people for not using a certain product or service. It is mostly used in medical advertisements. A fear appeal can be used in this case to attract more people to get interested in trying Den Teen services. The advertising and marketing professionals can design an advertisement that creates fear to people such as a young person who is not able to feed well because of losing teeth at a young age because that person did not use products and services provided by Den Teen. Creating medical fear to the audience through a medical campaign will make them want to search for Den Teen services to avoid such fears in the future.

Recommendation

Visual communication skills are very crucial for one to make a good advertisement that will attract many customers and stay relevant for a long period of time. People are moved by what they see. In addition, people tend to remember what they see more than what they hear. Therefore, to make the best advertisement campaign, there should be images to accompany audios if the professional chooses to use a video. The media provides a platform for companies and other businesses to do their advertisements. It can be done in blogs, televisions, social media like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest, newspapers and so forth.

With that in mind, the best appeal recommendation for the client, in this case, would be a rational advertising appeal. This approach will help to attract more patients to Den Teen's dental care services because it will provide the audience with all the details about the services provided including the costs and the effectiveness of the services. The advertisement will highlight the benefits of using seeking the services provided by Den Teen. This will include low costs on services and the availability of the best dental care services.

This kind of appeal also provides proof about what is said in the advertisement. Therefore, it should include individuals giving their experiences with Den Teen and their opinions towards the services that they offer. This will help in creating a good image in the market. Many people will trust the services and get interested in trying them out. This advertisement will attract more people and as a result, Den Teen will gain more clients and that will boost the company. Therefore, Mr. Ian Whitten should abort the idea of using humor appeal for this client and consider a rational appeal to increase the chances of getting the business contract.

In addition, a rational appeal is best for a growing company. Den Teen is a new but growing company, therefore, it needs to logically present its services to the market for it to attract more patients to its dental care services.

Conclusion

Humor appeal is an excellent advertising approach that is applicable to almost all products because people like being entertained and they get attracted to entertaining content. Humorous advertisements never get monotonous in the media. People always find them entertaining and they are attracted to the products being advertised by such advertisements. However, humor appeal may not be the best idea for advertising medical practices especially dental care practices.

References

Kujur, F. and Singh, S., 2018. Emotions as predictor for consumer engagement in YouTube advertisement. Journal of Advances in Management Research, 15(2), pp.184-197.

Lee, Jieun, and Ilyoo B. Hong. "Predicting positive user responses to social media advertising: The roles of emotional appeal, informativeness, and creativity." International Journal of Information Management 36.3 (2016): 360-373.

Martin, R.A. and Ford, T., 2018. The psychology of humor: An integrative approach. Academic press.

Walsh, J., 2017. Jennifer Walsh,'13..