Marketing Your Optometry Practice To Baby Boomers

Dr. Gilbert Nacouzi

28 Jan, 2022

Marketing Your Optometry Practice To Baby Boomers

Marketing Your Optometry Practice To Baby Boomers

Born between 1946 and 1964, baby boomers are considered the largest generation that remains a critical segment of consumers that have been preceded by Traditionalists or Silent Generation up till 1946 and are getting eclipsed by Millennials since 2019. Optometrists have been working with baby boomers throughout the past seventy years and there isn’t a product or eye care service that they did not offer or sell to them. Marketing to baby boomers taught us plenty of characteristics of this particular generation:

  • Baby Boomers are traditional in nature and they embraced the 21st century marketing: most of baby boomers have accummulated enough wealth that they enjoyed or are enjoying it in their retirement.
  • They spend most of their time reading and they prefer computers and laptops rather than mobile phone which they perfectly use for texting.
  • Baby boomers learned how to use social media to interact and engage with friends and their grandchildren but they rarely respond to ads.
  • Perhaps the best we can learn about baby boomers is that they are loyal to brands they used all their life and they have the money to still buy and use them.

Like all generations baby boomers have jobs to be done, needs to be fulfilled, and constraints to be lifted. They respond to specific marketing channels that they are used to or have discovered through the years. among them:

  • Television
  • Signs in malls, and leaflets.
  • Email marketing: a huge 95% of Boomers will opt for email over instant messenger.
  • Boomers will also opt for Search (PPC, SEO and content (inbound) marketing) over viewing ads on videos watched on YouTube or Sponsored Ads appearing on facebook.

Baby boomers like to be treated in a special way other generations don’t receive. They spend their time at their favorite optometrists and opticians who give them plenty of attention employing face-to-face communication or friendly phone calls that last long enough to get a significant amount of answers, instructions, and recommendations. They significantly respond to formal invitations, birthday cards, reminders for scheduled visits, and they value expensive products they can get at a bargain price, appealing to their younger years and providing a way to improve their lifestyle. They prefer simple uses of technology over investing a lot of time on complex machinery and tools they think they can get through without them.