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Dental Marketing Coach
A marketing coach is a business advisor that will work with you to build out your marketing infrastructure. They usually don’t implement the strategy or purchase the media.
They are a completely neutral source that will help you make valuable marketing decisions so mistakes are avoided and marketing dollars are saved.
They focus more on the long term success of your practice and help you discover what it will take to get there.
Sample questions a marketing coach can answer:
- How do I get patients right now?
- How do I build a referral practice that’s not so reliant on marketing?
- Should I discount to bring in new patients?
- What media sources would work best for my practice?
- How do I improve my presence on Google?
- What digital marketing company should I go with?
- Would direct mail work in my office?
- What direct mail company should I use?
- What should my message be?
- What should my budget be?
- Should I sponsor local events?
- What should marketing cost? (A website shouldn’t cost more than $3,000)
- How do I go from being a Medicaid office to fee for service?
- How do I figure out if my front desk is converting phone calls?
- What tools should I use to get more reviews?
- What metrics or reports should I look at to know my campaigns are working?
- How do I provide an exceptional patient experience?
- How do I get my staff to communicate with each other?
- How do I get referrals?
- How do I get my associate more patients?
- When is a good time to re-brand?
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Dental Marketing Consultant
The biggest difference between a coach and a consultant is that a coach helps you understand what you need to do and empowers you to do it. A consultant tells you what you should do and has specific processes and execution strategies they implement on your behalf.
A consultant may be independent but that doesn’t mean they don’t work as part of a bigger group.
It’s important that their primary background be marketing with significant knowledge of dental. Not the other way around. They should be experienced in multi-channel advertising not just one source like digital or direct mail.
The primary reason to hire a consultant is to utilize their knowledge and experience to manage your marketing efforts.
Marketing Consultants usually:
- Perform market research.
- Create patient profiles.
- Create a marketing strategy.
- Do media planning and buying.
- Discover community opportunities.
- Help with branding and re-branding.
- Manage the development of websites.
- Create a search strategy through SEO and PPC advertising.
- Create a digital strategy using social media, programmatic, and display advertising.
- Manage professionals that are engrained in the Google culture and know all facets of Google’s services.
- Have reporting platforms and pre-set metrics to help determine the success of campaigns.
- Attend marketing conferences, not dental conferences to keep current on technology that will benefit the practice.
- Be excellent at sourcing. (Finding the right media companies to run your message.)
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So then what is Coasulting?
Coasulting bridges the gap. A Coasultant is more like a marketing director.
Take for example building a website. A marketing coach can help you understand what’s important on a website and probably may be able to point you to some resources. A consultant will most likely have the ability to do websites themselves or have close relationships inside the industry. The Coasultant will find the best website developer for you and engage you in as much or as little of the process as you want.
A Coasultant will:
- Help you develop a long-term marketing strategy based on the type of practice you want to be.
- Help you build your tribe. Not only for marketing but for business resources as well.
- Find an advertising agency that has developed successful campaigns for the services you want to promote.
- Find cost effective promotional companies to help promote your brand offline.
- Engage with media buyers that are excellent at radio and TV ads.
- Find events and sponsorship opportunities to help you engage directly with potential new patients.
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