One of the clients with which I had the pleasure of working while in my previous firm was OrthoSynetics. This is a great company that partners with hundreds of orthodontic and dental practices across the country to help with a full array of services for those practices — marketing, accounting, payroll, etc.
It’s a great business model and the company has done very well.
In our work for the company, we met Dr. Bill Pickard, who runs Arkansas Orthodontics (with offices in Fayetteville, Bentonville and Fort Smith.)
Dr. Pickard’s office is a testament to the fact that online tools and some creativity can create an online communications plan that provides real results to your small business.
Yes, his practice has a Web site with flashy photos. And, yes, he has a Facebook page that he promotes heavily on the site and among his patients.
But that’s not the true strength of his program. They do some truly creative things that really make the difference.
First, they don’t limit the content of their site (or corresponding blog) to boring news about their practice. Dr. Pickard has been known to post photos from his family vacations — and they even have a page with online games for younger patients.
They also have a page at which they offer coupons and other collectible schwag.
They also run an annual contest called Idol Smiles (yes, patterned after American Idol) — a competition in which patients of the practice submit photos of themselves in braces. Twelve winners are selected by patients, the community and their peers to represent the practice in various print, Internet and media advertising. Click here to view the winners from 2008-2009.
The Idol Smiles contests draws traffic to their sites, creates buzz and develops customer loyalty.
Perhaps the coolest program they run is a program called Smile Pix. The practice actually hires photographers to attend local events, such as high school football games, to roam the events and take pictures of local kids. After being photographed, each person is given a special code, which they can use at the Smile Pix site to view and download their photos. In order to view the photos, they have to enter the code and their email address.
It’s patterned after the FanPhoto program used by Major League Baseball, and it’s a great, creative way to drive Web traffic and build an opt-in list of “hot” online leads for the business.
Dr. Pickard’s is a valuable case study for any small business wondering how they can leverage online tools to build their business. And he has been building his business in a big way. According to this blog post on the OrthoSynetics Web site, Dr. Pickard’s “practices and personal income have grown more than 1,000% since joining OrthoSynetics” earlier this decade.
Now, that’s a lot of growth.
It shows how a little bit of creativity, combined with these inexpensive tools, can pay off big-time.