Following are some advertisers in the Professional services industry. These are all,unsolicted testimonials. We have permissions, to display them here.

Here's a marketing niche you may never have heard of - restaurant air space. What do people do when they come into a dental-medical-veterinary office? They look for something to read to while away the time. There is always a wait (except in our offices, right!). In many busy restaurants, there is a longer wait than in doctors offices. Therefore, there is a wait worth exploring in the restaurant business.

Enter the Coffee News, a franchised newsletter with local advertising set in prominent places in restaurants, auto repair waiting areas, professional offices, hair salons, and the like. This twelve-year-old company based in Canada, sells ad space around the border of their mocha-hued newsy-artsy-lighthearted communique. As a company, they build the Coffee News name brand, develop a loyal readership and rotate the businesses' ads around the page to keep a fresh look. The local reps replenish the issues of Coffee News weekly with new generic topics and a section (20% of the news space) on local news.

The purpose of Coffee News is to entertain the customers during that time between their arrival and seating at the table (or auto servicing, dog washing, kid's hair cut, etc.) The news in Coffee News is always good, informative, humorous or upbeat.

One unique factor of the Coffee News is that its artwork ties into the text of the communique via subliminal guided pathways. That means that the reader automatically shifts his or her focus from the news text to the adjacent ad because of the flow of the artwork: the eye-catching open borders, the purposeoly broken lines, the intentionally curved lines, the art design and the fonts used in the ads.

What about the cost per impression for Coffee News? A year's worth of ad space cost me $1200 - about what value comes from one new patient in a year. Coffee News sells ad space by the quarter and half year also. They plan to place Coffee News in 70 restaurants and shops in the Lawrenceville-Suwanee area. Each advertiser has an industry exclusive for the Coffee News edition in which they advertise. Restaurants may do 100 - 500 meals per day. One issue may be taken home for family members to read or left for the next person. If 70 restaurants or other outlets times 100 meals times 300 days a year times only one half of the people taking the time to actually look at the Coffee News in the 12 minutes they are waiting on their food/see the ad. Well, that equals 1,050,000 impressions of your dental practice and better yet, your web site address in a year. The only thing I can think that would be better for you than that is to have you install a web surfing kiosk in each of those same restaurants that ties in directly and only to your web site. (That's in the works - don't laugh!!!)

So if we can get flashing lights or balloons tied to the Coffee News, acrylic display stands, we could probably get up to 2 million impressions a year from our $1200 investment. That would be 1666 impressions per advertising dollar, or 16 impressions per penny, or six on hundredths of a cent per impression. Dang, that's nearly free! Maybe I'm beginning to see why mass media (radio, television, newspaper) advertising works so well. No matter how much you spend, its nearly freel Right.

Like a bottomless pit, the endless night -sky or Pi, there is no end to it, to the benefits of making that many good impressions. Impressions equal new patients over time.

Going by the numbers, it takes 30 impressions to equal a customerin our case a patient. Your $1200 investment would thereby equal one million conservatively counted impressions. Divided by 30, that would equal 33,333 patients beating down your door if the numbers don't lie. Now, if you don't live in the midst of one million people, don't fear, this marketing method works in small towns just as well. It takes 30 impressions sent in the vicinity of just one person to get them to see scarcely a few of them. Over time, if you give them enough reasons, they should all come around. By logic then, you should eventually, perhaps as soon as in a year or two, have nearly every person in a town of about 30,000 as your patient of record. Thank God for expanded duty assistants and dental hygienistsl

Well, I know you don't want to work that hard, but you do, by now, see the benefit of putting your marketing dollars to work in a variety of venues. And, Web-Centric DIVID action plans all point to the practice website to lock in those referrals.

Next time our Web-Centric Top Gun newsletter will highlight a marketing concept called: If I could put time in a bottle, Time management in Dentistry. How do we do twice as much dentistry as some off ices in the same amount of time, with the same or less staff ? In the next newsletter, I will explore some of the ways we do it.

“I must admit, I was skeptical at first about advertising through Coffee News due to their different approach of reaching clients in a restaurant waiting area, however, the results we have received speak for themselves. As a result of our relationship, BNI picked up 20 new clients in Gulfport in just six weeks through the efforts of Coffee News.”

Wes Holsapple, Business Network International
Jackson, MS

Thank you, Coffee News, for pricing your advertising affordably for us!

Rev. Tom Sikes, Grace Chapel Presbyterian Church
Madison, MS