Calling all pharmacy owners who want to gain new patients!
Promotional products can be a highly effective tool to help you grow your pharmacy profits and add new patients to your pharmacy.
It’s no secret that marketing and promotional strategies can go hand in hand. Using promotional products to promote your pharmacy is key to selling the benefits of your pharmacy, and it’s a tactic that’s been used since 1789.
What’s the Big Deal About Promotional Products?
As a low-cost way to advertise, it keeps your pharmacy top of mind for patients, doctors, nurses, and anyone else you’ve marketed to. The right promotional product is more effective than a business card. When you give out useful products with your name, people keep them around and use them.
I branded everything I could in my original pharmacy, from pens to balloons to backpacks. I recently had a patient from long ago send me a picture of a pen from my old pharmacy – even after all these years, she still uses it! Yes, marketing works, and yes, promotional products can amplify your marketing’s success.
Pharmacy Gains New Patients
We recently talked to Truman Warren, from TruMed Pharmacy in Texas, a pharmacy owner who created an impressive advertisement clipboard that he distributed to doctor’s offices. Truman’s clipboard included attractive graphics, the right colors, and super relevant text; he immediately saw great results. Truman got ten new patients within seven days of giving out his new promotional clipboards. See the picture of his clipboard below and listen to his success story here.
His marketing advice to pharmacies is to promote your brand and make it very eye-catching. Then get them out so potential patients see it as many times as possible.
Turning An Idea Into Reality
Truman reached out to DiversifyRx when he had this idea to ask where to get a clipboard made. DiversifyRx has worked with Promosuns for many years for all kinds of promotional products. Jessica Sun, the head of Promosuns, walked Truman through the entire design process and came up with the final design. Within a short amount of time, Truman had his clipboards in hand.
Benefits Of Promotional Products
Here are some benefits of using branded promotional products in your pharmacy marketing.
- It can be a low-cost, effective marketing tool
- Your pharmacy has long-lasting exposure
- It increases your brand awareness
- You’ll see an increase in sales and profits
- It helps increase customer loyalty
- It promotes your pharmacy’s value
- It’s tangible, so it encourages repeat exposure
- It works like a business card for potential customers and patients
Getting Started
You wouldn’t go out and buy a new kitchen appliance if you didn’t know what you would use it for. The same goes for marketing and promotional products.
Define your target audience by deciding which products will go to which audience and how they will use them. Products like pens and pads are pretty generic and can be given to various audiences. Still, some products might be directed toward a particular audience, such as Truman’s clipboard for prescribers.
What works for one might not work as well for another.
Designing Your Product
Add additional graphics to get your message across, especially if you want to highlight a particular product or service because it can quickly communicate what you offer. A perfect example is what Truman Pharmacy did with its promotional clipboard idea. With Truman, Promosuns designed it to fit his audience (doctors) and created the design, graphics, and content around the clear message he wanted to deliver. For example, they included a car on their clipboard to quickly show they offer free delivery. The use of the graphic is a perfect example of how getting creative pays off.
Using Promotional Products
Determine who you will share your promotional items with. Will you need 5,000 pens to hand out to every customer, or will you need 40 clipboards to attract new prescribers? I like to leverage one item for many uses.
One of my favorites is drawstring bags. I use them for new patient packets, community events, prescriber office visits, and our school backpack program in my pharmacy. When you use a promotional item in many ways, you will need a larger quantity which helps lower the per-unit cost.
Have Fun
I have run contests where I asked customers to post pictures on their social media with my branded promotional products, and it turned out to be a pretty cool experience for everyone. I heavily pushed this one summer. We ended up getting pictures with our t-shirts and drawstring bags from The Great Wall of China and over 25 states! You can have a lot of fun with branding!
Tracking Results From Your Promotional Products
If your promotional product mentioned “free delivery,” have you seen an uptick in free delivery requests? If you said “compounding” on the product, how many more compounding orders have you seen rolling in?
Understanding your KPIs and your lead and lag measures helps you track the correct numbers since promotional products aren’t directly trackable like a Facebook ad. You should know what your average number of new patients per month is. So when you hand out clipboards, you will know if those prescribers sent more patients your way by seeing an uptick in this number.
Promotional Product Ideas To Gain New Patients
Jessica from Promosuns can help you find unique and memorable items for your pharmacy. Choose things that are reusable, functional, and last a long time. Here are a few promotional product ideas:
- Clipboards
- Drawstring Bags
- Pens
- Hot/Cold Packs
- Calendars
- Vaccine Card Holders
Where Do I Buy Promotional Products?
Promosuns is a promotional product company with an incredible collection of promotional products. They’ll hold your hand through the entire process, their product availability is impressive, and they have a great assortment of new products. Not to mention they have incredible pricing and service too!
I love working with Jessica because she’ll help you select high-quality products that are just right for your pharmacy or project. You can email her with your product questions here, and you will receive a discount when you mention DiversifyRx.
It can take a couple of weeks to pick out your products, design them, place the order, and process the shipment, so don’t wait too long to get started.
If you haven’t tried using promotional products in your pharmacy, now is a perfect time to get started.
For more pharmacy marketing tips, check out these articles:
How To Leverage Community Sponsorships
Massively Gain New Patients With A Pharmacy Referral Program
If you would like additional information on how to grow your pharmacy or ideas on improving your marketing efforts, join our private DiversifyRx Facebook Group today.
