If you’ve ever been cold-called, you know the feeling. So why would you want to implement strategies in your dental marketing or dental advertising that come anywhere near a cold-calling approach?
Nobody, including your dental patients, wants to feel targeted. But isn’t that what marketing and advertising does – target a specific demographic, region, area, etc.?
Marketing is about focus. What you focus on, and how you focus on it, is essential to your dental marketing success.
What’s worse than overdoing it?
The old but never outdated idea that patient/client acquirement and retention are vital is spot-on. And your strategy for accomplishing that requires constant measurement.
You can overdo or overkill many of your strategic approaches to marketing. For example, too many direct mail flyers or postcard mailers promoting your latest deal-of-the-month can “numb” your list and prevent them from actually inquiring about your services.
Too many emails or blog posts that are veiled promotions can lower your click-through rate and increase your opt-outs.
Sure, your intentions with these and many more approaches are good but they can be overdone.
Worse than overdoing your dental marketing is not tracking your initial intuitions about your “market” and their responses to your strategies.
Second to that would be overthinking your strategy in a way that prevents momentum.
Your dental marketing “sweet-spot”
Find what works. More so find out all you can about “who” it is you’re wanting to reach with your dental marketing.
“That’s easy,” you say, “they’re people needing dental treatment.”
Right, but it has more to do with their motivation and the emotion your services tap into. The path to that effective measurement is engaging them in a conversation (we’ll talk more about that in upcoming content).
Dental marketing, like any other marketing effort, is about establishing trust through consistent communication that compels a response.
The core of your marketing strategy and three big ideas for implementation
First, stop trying so hard to be creative in your dental marketing. Instead, work harder at engaging your “audience.”
How?
1. Think problem-solution about every service you offer.
What problem does this service/procedure solve, why is it needed, and what causes a person to believe they need, want, or desire it?
2. Create pure informational content that answers every problem-solution question you discover about your “market.”
- Blog content that informs rather than promotes
- Email content linking to other content sources (blog, social media, etc) where valuable information is shared
- Social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) that creates feedback instead of feed filler
3. Always be listening.
Listen intuitively via every patient interaction, appointment, procedure, survey, and review. Train your team to listen for problems, emotional buying motives, and complaints about anything. Create content (see number 2) around the data you gather.
These and more can “warm” up any otherwise “cold” dental marketing efforts. Subscribe to our blog for more useful information about how to serve and engage your dental patients, and check out our financing program for dental practices.
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