Optometry Marketing
Don’t you love the freedom of being an Independent Optometrist?
You have the freedom to choose what you offer patients, including frames, lenses, contacts and vision therapy types you offer. And you also have the ability to make your practice look and feel the way you want.
This includes your Practice Logo.
A fresh Practice Logo is like a coat of paint- it can inspire you and your team, and give more energy to your practice.
But it can also give you free advertising. As an Independent Optometrist, who wouldn’t want free advertising and awareness?
Before we get to that, we need to think about who we want our logo to appeal to.
Your Ideal Patients
Your logo is one of the first things that gets noticed by potential patients, from your website and social media pages, to your office signage and letterheads.
It needs to be done right.
Your logo should appeal to your ideal patients. These are the people who best support your practice, through appointments, dispensing and treatments. These people aren’t strangers to you or your team. They come in regularly to update their glasses or see what’s just arrived.
Professor Chris Lievens, Chief of Staff at Southern College of Optometry, spoke at the 2015 Southern Regional Congress in Melbourne. He said that baby boomers “need us more than ever before”. He added that “they are all presbyopes and 90 per cent of that population is coming in routinely for eye care and vision problems.”
Use your Software
Have you looked through your practice software to find your ideal patients?
Using our practice software, I created a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet of patients who had been to our practice, and had spent over $100 (plus consults) in their lifetime. You might choose a higher number. My choice was to highlight the best supporters of our practice.
When I looked through our practice software, I knew that I didn’t want to have a broad age range for our ideal patient. For example, parents between the ages of 45-54 years are very different people. The forty-five year old likely has all of their children in primary school. The fifty-four year old may be an ‘empty nester’. Or perhaps a young grandparent. So choose a narrow age range to find your ideal patient.
Other categories that I found from our practice software included Lifetime Value, Gender, Suburb, and Private Health Insurer.
How Facebook can help
Facebook helps you find out even more about your ideal patients. Facebook Audience Insights allows you to find out more about people in your area.
You can type in your city or region and see how many people are on Facebook. From my area, there are between 6k-7k monthly active people. Then I can narrow this to see general data about Marital Status, Education Level, Job Industry, Common Devices used (e.g. iPad), And whether these people are more likely than the average Facebook user to make a comment or like a post.
Talk to your team
It also helps to get your team involved. Ask them which local retailers that your ideal patient shops at. (Bonus points: look up their Facebook Pages and see what posts are the most popular)
When you find your ideal patient, you can also talk to them when they come in for an appointment. Ask them more about what they like or who they follow.
Putting all of this information together gives you a powerful picture of who your ideal patient is. And where he/she likes to spend their time.
Getting a Designer
Your ideal patient should love your logo. But who do you get to design it?
Do you hire a local Graphic Designer or use a company like 99Designs?
I’ve used both. Here are three reasons why I believe that a local Graphic Designer is better.
- Originality– your design is more likely to be unique, compared to some of the templates used on 99Designs
- Time– there can be pressure to write critiques on all designs by a deadline.
- Language– some designers speak broken English (and may live on the other side of the world, which can delay design tweaks)
Collect great designs
How do you know what designs you like? Let others inspire you.
Do a Google Image Search for “optometrist logo” “optician logo” “optometry logo”. Create a folder on your desktop. Save logo designs that you like into this folder. Have a team member do this too, then combine the folders.
Then go back and have a second look at the logo folder. Eliminate any that you don’t like. Aim to have around twenty-four designs at the end.
Ask your colleagues to vote on the twenty-four designs. Ask them to list their top three designs- even better if they don’t know what others are choosing. Collate the three most popular choices.
Would you like to see our top three designs?
They were Outlook Eye Centre (http://outlookeyecentre.com.au), ifbOptical (https://ifboptical.com/) and Claremont Optical (http://claremontoptical.com.au/)
Next, our designer then came up with three original concepts, based on our feedback. Here they are:
So how did we get free advertising?
As you know, everyone loves to give their opinion. I recalled a highly popular post from a company asking for feedback on their potential logos on on LinkedIn. They got a huge response.
So, we asked our Facebook Followers to vote on their favourite design. All they had to do was choose one option (A, B or C) and write their preference as a comment. We posted it on our Practice Facebook Page. Then asked each of our team to share it with their friends.
What we found was a huge response from our community.
On our Practice Facebook Page, we had over 113 comments and 11 likes. And more than 9 times greater Organic Reach than our other Image Posts on Facebook.
I reposted the image onto the Optomly Instagram (@Optomleigh) and Facebook (@Optomly):
On Facebook @Optomly (955 people reached, 38 likes/comments/shares)
On Instagram- @Optomleigh (309 people reached, 79 likes/comments/shares)
(A big thank you if you voted on the designs above! If you’re interested to know, the winner was A.)
What did we achieve by asking our Facebook Followers?
- Free advertising for our Independent Practice on Facebook
- More engagement from our Facebook Followers
- More recognition of our practice in our community
- Reinforcement of our radio advertising and recall letters
Next time you’re looking to refresh your logo, make sure that you ask your followers on social media. And you’ll get more than simply Free Advertising for your Practice!