Marketing your practice

Part 1 of this series (Optician, March 30) presented a structured approach to marketing which involved understanding clients and their needs, recognising a practice's strengths and weaknesses, and forming a strategy to meet customer needs.

Here, we discuss an in-practice technology that is already widely used in mainstream retailing, and suggest how it can be used in optical retailing.

Maximise the opportunity

AIDCA is an acronym for 'attention, interest, desire, conviction and action'. It describes the various stages involved in guiding a prospective customer to maximise the opportunity in achieving a sale or a preset goal. Although the processes vary for different products - in terms of duration - almost every customer must be moved from each one of these stages to complete the process of making a purchase.