About the Client

Dulwich Podiatry was established in 1948 and has provided chiropody and podiatry services ever since. The current practice was taken over by Deborah Delves in 1995. Mrs Delves leads a team of podiatrists who specialise in different areas of podiatry and have access to the latest equipment.

The practice has been accredited by the College of Podiatry since 2006, in recognition of their high standards.

The Project

Since the change of ownership in 1995, the practice has seen a high customer retention rate. However, the nature of the customer demographic means the practice always needs to attract new patients. Recently, attracting new patients had been more challenging. Strategic Discourse were approached to conduct a review of the current marketing practices utilised and support in the adaptation of these to convert leads into customers.

Our Approach

In order to propose any necessary changes to marketing and drive the successful conversion of leads into sales, Strategic Discourse needed a comprehensive understanding of Dulwich Podiatry and the internal and external factors affecting both the marketing process and the success of sales cycles. Initially, the team held interviews with several employees. This is an important aspect of understanding the internal factors as different employees may have a different perspective and will look at things from a different angle. Staff were granted anonymity in the interviews.

By ensuring staff anonymity, the team was able to get greater feedback from the staff than was normally provided. The information gathered was extremely pertinent and senior management stated they were unaware of some of the factors highlighted.

The team used a mixed methods approach to gather research on external factors affecting the marketing process, both primary scoping activities and secondary literature reviews into micro and macro factors were conducted.

A full analysis report was produced for Dulwich Podiatry, highlighting a few key improvements that could be made to the marketing cycle.

Strategic Discourse continued to assist in the implementation of some of these improvements, ensuring that direct marketing was given greater precedence than it had been in the past.

The Outcome

With the support of Strategic Discourse, Dulwich podiatry were able to redesign the majority of their marketing materials and ensure that these were optimised for their target audience. The client also changed their marketing channels, mediums and platforms utilised after following the suggestions made in the overall report.

In the fiscal year following the implementation of these changes a Dulwich Podiatry realised a 15% increase in revenue derived from sales.

The owner of the practice was incredibly satisfied with the work of Strategic Discourse as she had found it increasingly hard to attract new customers over the previous few years, and had started to see some stagnation of sales.