The Cost of Dental Marketing
See if you can relate to the following. You spend thousands of dollars a month on marketing. Marketing Company A sends you reports each month showing great success with online analytics and phone calls but you’re still not seeing as many new patients as you would expect.
You switch to Marketing Company B who talks about all the mistakes Company A made but after a few months, the lack of results is the same.
Consumer Behavior
So what gives? Marketing is an art and a science. It’s great that a marketing company can place ads for you, work on SEO and deliver some great analytics. That’s the science. What about the art? Do you actually have a campaign in place or is it random ads with different messaging running over numerous platforms without consistency? This might be your issue, but you need to understand why.
People need to be “primed” to make a decision. That one ad most likely won’t lead to a new patient unless you caught that person in a very desperate situation. When I talk about priming an audience I’m talking about creating messaging that triggers people to think about the dentist when they see your branding. They won’t act right away but over time they will trust your brand and make a decision.
What does that look like?
Have you ever heard of “loss aversion?” Essentially it means that people don’t want to make a decision because they want to keep their options open. If someone makes a decision to schedule with your office it means they have eliminated all other options but you. That’s scary enough but add that to the other factors people openly admit like cost, don’t feel they need care, don’t have the time, etc. and it makes choosing any dentist a hard one.
So what do you do? The bottom line is that people will either not make a decision as discussed above or they will subconsciously ask “out of the available options I have seen, which experience do I want to have?” There’s your opportunity. Create a brand, create a message, and create campaigns that people can relate to. This helps them dig into their subconscious and “feel” something for your practice over others. Let them experience who you are before they ever walk through that door.
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Here are a couple of great examples:
In full disclosure, this is a client that we did not make this suggestion to. We encourage every client to think about who they want to be. I’ll admit I might have been slightly skeptical at first, but I was excited they wanted to show off their practice personality and was curious at how this would influence their community.
Prior to this campaign they averaged 40-50 calls on their direct mail and had a 20% spike in their website traffic. After this campaign, they saw over 75 calls and a 60% spike in online traffic. It resulted in 25% more new patients that month and has encouraged them to keep the creativity rolling!
Here’s another great example of being unique and creating a brand using video. This is not our client but they obviously don’t need any help! Great work Tracy and Bright Inspired Dentistry
The bottom line is that people won’t talk about the awesome crown you gave them at the next holiday party but they will say I go to the dentist with the awesome videos.
