So what is your marketing budget? How much are you willing to invest in promoting your practice? Are marketing gurus hunting you down on social media, via emails and personal phone calls? Are they promising to take your marketing and your business to another level by offering ‘fool proof’ marketing strategies that your competitors aren’t even aware of? Can you read through their scam? Have you fallen prey to their scam only to realize you did not really get the return on investment they promised and you anticipated?
Too many questions up there with not many answers? Okay I’ll stop. What if I told you marketing really isn’t about the big investments but rather about finding the right little tweaks? Would you believe me? No? How about I show you exactly how?
I can almost feel the hope, the uncertainty and even a little scepticism from dentists on the other end of the screen. And I don’t blame you. Marketing budgets are costing an arm and a leg for most businesses, but the returns aren’t even getting a glove or a sock back in return. Does that mean you shouldn’t be investing in marketing? No! All this means is you should be investing more time and effort in the small things that are often overlooked and seldom acknowledged for the power that they hold. Down below are the little things in marketing that can help you generate bigger results.
The Market for Little Things
The little things are the offers on the third page of your flyer that most prospective patients overlook. You have free Wi-Fi? Your patients can book appointments online? Do your patients know that they can? Well they should! So you need to make extra effort to let them know that their comfort is important for you, and doing so doesn’t really require a mega marketing campaign, just a little personal message or an added amenity can easily do that.
Understanding your Patients
Marketing does not work the same way for everybody. What might attract one consumer might actually dissuade another one. So you need to really understand and cater to your different types of patients. For instance, remedial patients are looking for a dentist that has the training, the experience and the equipment to offer a pain free treatment. You’d need to let them know that you’d be accessible in case something goes wrong so maybe a direct contact number might attract them, or an easy process for booking an emergency appointment. So basically you need to apply marketing methods to build trust with them.
While trust will be equally important for cosmetic patients, they would likely be looking for success stories of other patients.
You need to understand your prospective patients and cater or market to them accordingly. Again, you don’t need big budgets to do that. Just checking through your website and social media for the right wording and imagery to sell your services accordingly can help.
Designating the Right Jobs to the Right People
I see so many people going to web designers to design their websites, without consulting any marketers first. A web designer can design a pretty website, but he may not be able to generate traffic or convert it into sales. It is highly important to designate the right job to the right people. Similarly, don’t let your secretary post important updates or respond to queries on social media either; unless of course she is trained in customer support. An in appropriate response to a query or a grievance posted on social media can do a lot more harm than you think.
The Marketing Marco Polo
Regardless of what the marketing gurus have you believe, nobody has figured out the guaranteed marketing technique yet. It is a hit and miss process; which is why I say focus on the little things, because they do ultimately make for bigger results. But the trick is to keep on experimenting. Did you try changing the fonts or the size of the reviews? Maybe make them more visible. Did it make a difference? The idea is to keep testing new things and then continuously assessing the data to see if it actually worked or not. Are you getting warmer, are you getting colder, basically playing Marco Polo. This way you can invest more on what’s working and ditch what isn’t.
Make it Personal
I am a big believer in old school marketing. Where marketers took the time to give a personal phone call or knocked on your door to talk about the products they were selling. And that one-on-one experience is really missing today. How many promotional emails can you read or respond to in a day, especially when none of them talk about you but rather about themselves? What if you received a box hand delivered to your door? You know the kind that has a little marketing present in it for you? Doesn’t that make you feel cared for? And considering that not many are doing it, it would make a “standout” statement.
It’s not about doing things the old way, but rather just making your contact with patients more personal and unique. If you are sending an email reminding your patients about their approaching appointment try to be more personal. You can remind them why they need to keep that appointment and that you care about their health. Put them first in all your communications.
Final words
Here’s a round-up of the little marketing tweaks that make big differences in marketing:
- Focus on the small efforts.
- Keep track of what is working and what isn’t.
- Don’t designate jobs to those who aren’t trained for them.
- Look for the unique! Do what no one else is doing.
Always put more effort in reaching out on a personal level.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:
- Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here - Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here - Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here - Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
