#3. Hippo dentist: use digital marketing to enter dental care industry
1000 dentists registered
30 cooperation clinics
30,000 WeChat subscribers
over 1M RMB revenue brought to dental clinics
5M RMB angel round investment
Bio of Founder Shi Jun(Steve)
18 years experience in marketing & 1 year in dental care industry.
Worked at 24/7, DoubleClick before.
Founded CatchStone at 2007, whose revenue reached 300M RMB at 2010.
Sold CatchStone for 950M RMB at 2012.
Motivation
On one hand, As more people move to cities, they have little knowledge about where to find reliable dentists. Besides, majorities do not have a clear understanding of dental services standards. It is quite normal that customers will reach out to their friends or search baidu to find a dentist.
On the other hand, clinics and dentists depends heavily on reputation in terms of attracting new customers, which is very limited and inefficient nowadays. Or they could spend large amount of money on baidu ads services.
At the moment, the dental industry is quite like the internet industry in 1998. The next 3 to 5 years will witness a rapid development. — CEO of hippo dentist
Existing problems in dental care industry
High Cost — If you have visited a dentist before, you should know that the bill is pretty expensive. If the cost can be lowered, customers can spend less and dental clinics will have more customers too.
Ambiguous Service Standards — The service standards are not clear in many small clinics. As reported in many news, after a treatment, many patients suffer the pains again after a short period of time. If there is a service standard, customers can protect their rights easily.
What they do
Copy the relationship between car dealers and car marketing agencies to dental industry.
On one side, they are helping customers to find reliable dentists. On the other side, they help dental clinics to promote their brands and services, therefor attracting more customers.
Now they have released two apps, one for patients, and the other one for doctors. Patients are also encouraged to use WeChat to make a booking or simply give hippo dentist a call. Hippo dentist now have a call center to deal with booking requests or general enquiries.
How they do marketing on C(customers)
They are doing marketing across multiple channels, including Wanke — real estate company , Banks, Wall Street English — English education company, etc. Basically, they can cooperate with any of those who have many customers. For example, banks can provide dental services to their VIP customers. By this way, customers can feel special and valued. So banks would like to cooperate.
Furthermore, they are also hosting education programs on weike and some offline activities, such as how to prevent children dental health common issues. Many young parents showed strong interests in such activities.
Australian Market
Over 100 dental clinics in Sydney CBD only. Many use google ads services. A huge profitable industry waiting to be explored!!!
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