Orthodontic Contests
Imagine a marketing tool that created incentive for your patients to go out and introduce you to everyone they know as their orthodontist. They could use email, social networks, blogs, and word of mouth to drive their friends, families, and colleagues to your site in order to find and vote for their smiling photo with the caption, “Thank you Dr. Ortho for giving me a reason to smile.” You can stop imagining … this is the Ingenuity Online Orthodontic Contest Platform.
Ingenuity creates web-based Orthodontic Contests that incentivizes your patients to actively promote your practice to their friends, families, and colleagues all in the name of “fun.” The contest site is hosted by Ingenuity, but ties directly in to your existing website, regardless of who built the site or where it is hosted. For a practice with site name, e.g., www.OrthoSiteName.com, the contest would be found at contest.OrthoSiteName.com and linked to the main site seamlessly. The orthodontic contest site is designed such that it mirrors the look and feel of your practice website so that the brand image is maintained. The site is simultaneously integrated into your page on Facebook.
Perry Stevenson Orthodontic Contest
Once the site is built, the practice simply announces the contest by handing out professionally designed and printed information cards that describe how the contest works, timeline, etc. In a typical contest, the patients compete to get the most votes for their contest entry, whether it is a picture, video, or essay. For the practice, the goal is to get as many patients to enter as possible. The entrants use their email lists, Facebook contacts (or any social network), and word of mouth to drive their contacts to your contest website to vote for them. Thus, for 100 contest entrants, the average number of individuals coming to the site to vote is over 3,000; that is 3,000 people in your market that receive a direct introduction to your practice. And what’s more, the introduction is not passive, but rather is made by a patient or parent playing the role of advocate on your behalf. And because the orthodontic contest site is fully integrated into Facebook, voters can easily post the entries to everyone they know to drive votes, therefore spreading the practice introduction friends of friends of patients and beyond. The practice brand is shared exponentially throughout the community.
The online contests are not dissimilar from in-house contests that many practices currently employ. The patients are competing to win a prize as provided by the practice. However, the scope and methodology employed by Ingenuity creates a platform by which the competition is taken to the world outside of the practice. The community at large is invited to participate.
Completely outsourced and managed by Ingenuity, the contests are hosted on the web and integrated into the social network. Every entry and comment is reviewed by Ingenuity before posting to check for acceptability. Ingenuity also monitors voting to ensure that fraud is minimized and that the outcome is fair. The end result is a competition that is simply fun for the entrants and voters. As such, the online orthodontic contests are not perceived as marketing, but rather as testament to the “coolness” of the practice.
Very much a part of social media, the strength of orthodontic contest marketing is rooted in the fact that it is personal. The contest is a communication tool, akin to a phone call, that your patients use to tell everyone that you are their chosen orthodontist. Patient referrals are thus made by way of the platform but come not from the contest, but from your patients advocating on your behalf.