There is no automatic system for acquiring customers

A few years ago, among the people enrolled in one of my social media marketing courses for optical practices, two names appeared that I did not know. Looking them up online I found two very young men in suit and tie, presenting themselves as "marketing experts for optics": photocopied websites, the exact same service, paid Facebook campaigns to generate leads. Neither of them was the child of an optician, had studied optics or had set foot in an optical practice.

During their strategy calls they asked me, as peers, why their campaigns gathered leads but not sales. The answer is all there, and it is the reason this story is worth telling.

The formula that promises everything and explains nothing

The model they had learned from their "masters", the various marketing gurus with a villa in Dubai, is always the same: find a profitable niche (never mind if you know nothing about it), apply a standard lead-generation scheme, sell that same scheme. Copy-and-paste texts for the ads, the website, the emails, the cold calls. As if a marketing consultancy could be photocopied from one business to another and work the same.

The paradox is that the funnel model is correct. I use it too. But in the game of telephone from one course to the next, the information that matters got lost: you do not become an expert in a niche by snapping your fingers, copied content stops setting you apart the moment the others copy it too, and every sector has its own levers, optics more than most.

Why those campaigns do not convert

The ads are almost always based on a hyper-attractive offer: something free or a big discount, with a request for an appointment. The result is predictable: few leads per view, few sales per appointment, a low average sale. The campaigns do not pay for themselves and do not bring customers you can retain.

A promotional activity is like a seed: if it falls on fertile ground it grows, if it falls on dry sand it does not.

The ground is positioning, reputation, the trust the practice has built in its area before starting with promotions. A price-only offer, moreover, attracts people who look only at price: hard to move to a higher-end product and hard to keep over time. It is the same reason why the problem is not the number.

The system exists, but it is not automatic

A steady flow of customers to the optical practice can be built, but it is neither automatic, nor fast, nor cheap. It takes continuous work on every lever, the ones I gathered in the Optical Retail Marketing Wheel, culture, consistency, and the support of someone who really knows the optical market from the inside. The most profitable part, by the way, is not acquiring but retaining: I discuss it in CRM for the optical practice.

Do not let someone who uses few words, and badly, get their hands on your business. If you want a plan built on your numbers and your area, the starting point is Trade Up in Italy and The Charismatic Practice elsewhere, within the theme of marketing for the optical practice.