by Sponsored Content: SMC National
Here’s some life advice: learn to trust yourself and go with your gut. Wise words, right?
Yes. But the thing is, if you want to grow your dental group, you should ignore that advice. More specifically, you should ignore that advice when it comes to your MARKETING.
Dental marketing may cover a lot of ground – ads, web design, branding, and more – but it should all come together in pursuit of one goal: bringing new patients through your doors.
You start marketing your group (or hire a marketing company to do it for you) because you want to fill your waiting rooms.
Seems simple enough. But this is where many practice owners run into trouble. Why? Because they lose sight of that goal.
Say, for example, that you decide that you want to commission a beautiful new website for your group. Something that excites you or makes you feel like you’ve reached the big time — maybe inspired by Apple’s website.
Hey, who’s bigger or better at design than Apple? Good inspiration, right? And surely boosting your image this way will help you boost your business, too.
Wrong. You may spend thousands of dollars (if not tens of thousands), only to see little to no return.
Your mistake here is that you’re making marketing decisions based on your own instincts – on what sounds good to you.
But your marketing doesn’t need to appeal to you, because it isn’t for you. Your marketing exists to convince potential patients to schedule an appointment and show up. Period.
That means that good dental marketing often looks quite different than Apple’s website — or any other campaign you might personally find appealing. Because again, you’re not the target — your potential new patients are.
So here’s the secret to success in dental marketing. You need to start prioritizing DATA over feelings.
What this means is that you throw out all your old ideas about marketing and branding. Stop guessing at what will and won’t help or making decisions based on your sense of what does or doesn’t look good.
Instead, you need to build a basic marketing infrastructure based on best practices for your specific niche – and then start tracking and measuring every step of your marketing operation. This includes everything from your ad performance to your website to your call conversion rate to your overall cost to bring a new patient through your doors.
Then, you need to optimize each step of that process (which is also known as your marketing funnel). You need to make sure that your ads are correctly targeted, your copy converts, your website drives potential patients to contact your practice as efficiently as possible, and your call team can convert inquiries into appointments at a ratio of upwards of 70 to 80 percent.
Winning this game is not about aesthetics or developing the most beautiful brand. Unless you’re a concierge dentist in Beverly Hills with a roster of A-list celebrity clients, you don’t need to be the coolest looking brand on the block.
You just need to be savvy and willing to trust the numbers.
Now, if you want to do this the easy way, we’d like to introduce you to the experts at SMC.
SMC National can take marketing off your plate entirely – and give you stellar new patient growth. Perhaps the leading data-driven dental marketing firm in the country, SMC works exclusively with group dental practices to fill your waiting rooms and help every marketing dollar go further. Book a free welcome chat today!
