Top Dentist Dental Marketing Faq: What Should I Do?

Most dental marketers have this answer­ to the what-should-you-do question––what "we" specialize in. There is quite a bit of conflict of interest in this response, but often they are correct by default. Doing "something" -- even their thing -- can work. However, the results these one-legged solutions create are often short-lived.

The market changes, consumers evolve, and competitors compete. Therefore, the second stage Top FAQ becomes: What do I do now? A question I hear a lot more frequently.

When I started, some dentists were marketing outside of the Yellow Pages, but few were doing anything else consistently. In the intervening 10 years, more and more dentists have been proactively getting their message out. While the level of "direct dentist competitor marketing" is still not overwhelming, if one or two dentists in the general area have been getting their message out in some way, your local market gets squeezed.

Your "new" entry into the market is then going to compete with that pressure. Added to this is the price pressure your competitors have created by presenting the concepts of FREE and discounted dental services. With the value of dentistry already greatly influenced by insurance reliance and general oral health ignorance, price marketing makes anything beyond the basic dental services seem outlandish.

Consumers do not want to pay a lot for anything. Once your competitor says they can pay less (which suggests they were paying too much before), you seem to be put in a position only to compete on lower price. The other extreme that was the dream 10 years ago, which has been largely dismissed, is the high-end cosmetic practice. In a tough economy, this concept is severely pinched and probably not viable in more than a dozen markets. Department stores have dropped significantly in their popularity and the "dental-mart" concept is also hitting its height of effectiveness.

These consumer and market pressures and realities restrict the value of any one dental marketing strategy. Everything that once worked great now has limitations. Here are a few trends I have noticed from "inside" the dental marketing industry…

New Marketing Concepts Often Have a Great but Short Half-life

1. Email was going to make marketing free and almost effortless. Now the effects of spam and email overload greatly limit its original value. About eight years ago when my former employer did their first email campaign we received 20 calls from dentists within the first few days and that was sent to about 900 dentist emails. Within about a year, it took 30,000 emails to create a few phone calls over many weeks. Back then just having a website meant we were going to get one client a week. Now only having a website means you… have a website.

2. Three years ago when I started PPC advertising on two services (Google and Yahoo) I received 25 emails a month from prospective dentists. Now I am also on a third PPC service run by MSN (they were linked with Yahoo originally) and get less than half the responses while spending 5 times what I did that first year. While it is still viable for me to do PPC, it will never give me the type of advantage it did that first year.

3. You might remember that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was all the rage before PPC. Search engine gurus were all over the Internet. They could provide you will top ten results - guaranteed!!! My site is search engine optimized and I now get top ten results for "almost" everything dental marketing. However, this is not easy to accomplish (and hold on to) and there are various "trapdoors".

First, it takes constant effort and some SEO companies are more into "tricks and scams" than building real value. Second, my web guy always used to comment that these same SEO gurus were often NOT in the top search engine position themselves. The competition squeeze is a force of marketing nature--even they cannot escape.

Finally, without a niche--within a niche--you will not be successful long-term. From my perspective, I cannot compete directly against website companies in PPC or SEO rankings. This is because everybody and his brother thinks they can create a dentist website so there are 5,000 "dental website" companies battling in that keyword arena. Therefore, dental websites is NOT a niche, which is a big trapdoor for me to avoid.

Going directly against competitors can be very wrong even though others have been very successful. Just because Wal-mart is making billions does not mean Target wants to go there. Microsoft makes billions but selling iPods seems to do well for Apple.

If dental websites are all my competition does and they have a big corporate advertising budget, they can out buy me on the PPC stage. These crank tons of generic website corporations also can greatly improve THEIR search engine visibility because they are able to "link" back to them. If I try to compete with them head on--a trapdoor opens for me.

Conversely, Niche Dental does not have links on our client sites because we are about building your value first not ours. We want to build YOUR search engine ranking and bluntly if SEO is not viable for you -- or even a website - we are not going to try and sell you those concepts. Something else might work better first! Like in-practice marketing or a direct mailing campaign.

You Can Do It Yourself: Dental Marketing

One of the first dentists I worked with as a dental consultant back in 1998 called us because of his marketing effort that died a quick death. He sent out three letters. The first one got two patients. The second one attracted 10 patients and the third one was a "failure". His small direct mailing campaign--about 2-3,000 prospective households--had basically the same message each time.

Ironically, his dental marketing was very successful. But this dentist was very frustrated -- his marketing did not KEEP working well. He wanted to know what he was doing wrong. If you refer to my examples above, you will see that he did nothing wrong except he stopped--in two ways. He not only just stopped sending letters; he did not realize that he had never sent letters before.

The keys to dental marketing success are to "keep doing" what you did before with a variation on the theme (different presentation/message/etc.) and then add something "new" to the mix. New does not necessarily mean the latest technology - but to find arenas where the public has not seen your message.

I also recommend sticking with high value presentations. This is not about "boutique esthetic" dental practices or extreme makeover concepts -- it is about presenting the dental consumer with "more" than they thought was possible. Offering promotional incentives and dental service discounts can be beneficial, but if a dentist in your area already has that niche or no one does - the high value strategy could provide you with more options. Going the price route is very difficult to pull out from once you get into it.

My Best Marketing Recommendation

My recommendation has always been to utilize at least three proactive dental marketing strategies. One will work well, one will be a work in progress, and the third will be changed within the first six to nine months of the year. Either start all at once or develop your three-pronged campaign in stages, but do not end any of them until all three have worked together simultaneously for at least four-six months. They will often work off of each other.

For example, one might build your credibility. The other might inform and one might encourage consumers to act. As you see what they are doing, you can decide if one needs to be dropped and/or if another one should be activated to keep the momentum going. While saturation is possible, completely closing a valve to patients that had worked before is not always the best decision.

The three-pronged (or more) approach gives you a matrix of potential and improves the power of any one element. Conversely, spending your entire budget on one concept and then waiting for results is very risky. The SEO guru, the PPC concept, the emailing company, and the mass mailer group are often too inflexible to provide the comprehensive strategy you will need to have a long-term successful business.

Dental Marketing: Go it Alone, Maybe Not

Developing and implementing this strategy is something you can do on your own. Many dentists do fine without a dental marketing company. That is not all: I knew one dentist that did his own veneers (prep and all) looking in a mirror I guess.

However, even though I could get all the design software to create websites and marketing materials for my clients, I decided to run my business by having a person with this deep skill set do my dental designs. That is why Matt, a national dental design award winner, and owner of The Peripheral Vision, fills that role.

Because your local market and marketing is always evolving you might need someone on your side now (or in the future) to explain, develop, and/or implement your strategy. To have someone on your team that is flexible and not stuck in past or "caught up" in promoting the next best thing - call Niche Dental and you can talk directly to me (Dick Chwalek) about what is possible (and legitimate) for your dental practice.