4 Marketing Mistakes Dentists Make

Transcript:

Hey I’m back again and this time I’m here to talk to you about four common marketing mistakes I find dental practices constantly making.

If you are new to this channel, my name is Marli Espinales, founder of Clicc Media Inc where we help dentists and other service-based businesses grow online and generate new clients with the help of web design and internet marketing. Here you will find tips across all spectrums from how to improve your site, to social media, content marketing, improving team morale, and more. So if you’re interested in joining the following and learning more click on that subscribe button below and don’t forget to hit that notification bell so you know when we release a new video.

Now, let’s dive into these four mistakes which you, yourself, may be guilty of today.

The first marketing mistake dentists make is NOT having a marketing plan. Seems pretty obvious but you would be surprised as to how many of you tend to jump into tactics without having an actual plan, this is very common with social media marketing and ads. Trust me I completely understand the eagerness of wanting to get online and post your first funny photo at the office or incredible teeth transformation or running an ad for a special. But without having a clear target goal in mind you may not yield the results you might be expecting to.

So before you jump into its Instagram to post something or Facebook to run an ad I first want you to stop and take a second here, sit down with your team, office manager, partner, whomever, and think about the following: who is your target patient? Where do they live? What is your unique selling proposition that is going to allow you to separate yourself from the other top dentist in your 3-mile perimeter? This planning is designed to help you align your message so you can consistently stay talking, educating, and promoting the message through content online from social media posting to ads to blogs.

Without a plan, you’re basically trying to aim your darts on the board and hoping that one lands and scores you something big. This is a waste of time, a waste of money, and waste of resources. Take your time to plan things out and set yourself up for success.

Now let’s say you actually have a marketing plan but it was executed externally by an agency like ours. A second common mistake we see practices not assigning an internal marketing liaison to work directly with the marketing company. If you are a dentist watching this I know that you are a very busy person and you have many hats you are already worried and more often than not I will not have its ability or time to take care of marketing assigning a marketing liaison to work with the marketing company allows us to have a constant and clear line of communication should any problems arise for example should we need someone to immediately respond to a negative review, or to help us answer a question of concern on social media.

Especially to provide us marketing numbers at the end of the month like how many new and returning patients actually came in to get a procedure done from online efforts and the revenue generated from those patients to be able to properly track your marketing ROI.

Consider social media marketing yes we can create posts for you, but having someone internally in your office who we can communicate and plan with, who can provide us a constant stream of images and videos from the office, you know and the actual team, can help us personalize your content which is what your followers aka community want to see and engage with. So make sure you assign someone who is tech-savvy, trustworthy, understands your patient database and software, and who enjoys social media marketing.

Mistake number three is not establishing a marketing budget. When you’re sitting down with your team you need to also talk money. How much are you gonna allocate to AdWords, Facebook Ads, content writing, SEO, magazine ads, and keeping your website up to date? Having a budget helps you control the dollars you are spending on a month to month basis instead of just burning through a random number and understanding where all of your revenue is going to.

Having this information provides you the power of knowledge for your upcoming business years to know if your marketing was enough to help you reach your goals or if you need to raise it or reduce it.

Jumping on the back of this is our last common marketing mistake which is not tracking your data and ROI. How will you know what marketing channel is producing more new patients and revenue if you if you’re not tracking data, KPIs (key performance indicators), and ROI? You may be spending way too much on magazine ads that only bring one to three new patients a month when one Facebook ad brings in 10 for a fraction of the price.

Knowing this information allows you to reallocate funds and make sure they are used more effectively while also reducing the chances of eating up your budget at a quicker rate by doing so you can focus on areas of marketing that work best for your practice and eliminate the ones that don’t. Remember what may work for you may not work for someone else.

So sit down and figure out what data is important to track – like leads, actual number of close patients, revenue generated, website traffic, etc. You want to see how many dollars you are making versus that you are putting in. Track your numbers on at least a month to month basis. Having this information lets you plan for long-term growth and can justify your team’s or marketing agency’s efforts.

I constantly come across business owners who don’t always see the value in marketing and more often than not it’s because they ran an ad and they received little to no leads from it or they find themselves constantly posting on social media but rarely anyone engages. If you go into marketing blindly without an actual game plan then you will get back lackluster results.

So if you really want to see your practice grow avoid these common mistakes. Invest properly in your practice from the beginning or else you’ll end up spending way more than you ever wanted to.

Well, we have reached the end of our video and I appreciate you sticking around till the end. If you have any questions regarding the points I brought up please go ahead and leave them in the comments below and I will be more than happy to start a conversation and help you out with anything you may need.

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