Don’t Trust Everything Dental Marketing Agencies Say

5 marketing “gotchas” dentists should avoid in 2023

Over the holiday break I took the opportunity to scan the websites of several dental marketing companies to see what they are offering and if there are any worthwhile services or novel systems we may have missed to offer to our own clients.

What I found was that nothing much has changed in the last 12 – 18 months in terms of dental marketing techniques and services; however what has changed is the rather desperate rhetoric around how those services are being sold. As more and more marketers attempt to enter the dental space, the “moon on a stick” promises have clearly increased both in frequency and volume – and they were bad enough already.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at five of the main dental marketing “gotchas” and promises that agencies are spinning in an attempt to book new clients. Forewarned is forearmed!

“Your new website is your own and fully portable if you decide to move supplier” – this was claimed by an agency building sites on WIX and another agency building sites on Squarespace, two ‘DIY’ website building tools. What they don’t say is that those websites have to use the specific hosting services provided by those companies and hence the sites are not portable – you are always stuck with WIX or Squarespace and hence effectively only ever renting your website.

That may be perfectly acceptable for you (notwithstanding other major downsides with those tools) but if you do subscribe, be sure to know that you’re stuck with it and very few other designers will be able to assist in future.

WordPress is even more user-friendly, accessible and secure than even a couple of year ago and currently powers over 40% of all the websites in the world. It’s still growing fast and supported universally – so why choose a niche, inflexible DIY system for your dental practice website?

“We do all of your marketing for you” – lots of agencies claim to do this but never state the significant disadvantages. For example, with managed social media services, you’re never really getting a true representation of the practice and your social feeds are very likely being filled with generic content that the agency is also using for lots of other practices. Your users will easily spot this and the chances of any meaningful engagement from new patients are slim.

To succeed with social media, your team will have to make some contributions. For sure, use a specialist agency for social media advertising but make sure that your day-to-day posting and user interaction is managed by your team.

You will also need to get involved with other areas of “done by you” marketing e.g. managing the Google and Facebook reviews process and the day-to-day interactions with patients when they attend the surgery and ask about new treatments.

“We include SEO in your monthly maintenance retainer fee” – there are two things to know here. The first is that monthly maintenance retainers are not essential and only serve to line the pockets of the agency as very often they will not be doing any work on your website. But you’re still paying! The other important thing to know is that the ‘SEO’ element is just a throw away sweetener to help hook you in – there is no way that any meaningful SEO is being carried out unless you pay significantly higher fees. But by then you’ve been signed up and open to an up-sell a few months down the track.

Rather than simply sign-off on an expensive website maintenance retainer, look for an agency that offers services paid for on an ‘as-required’ basis – it will be way more cost-effective.

“You need to pay £10k for a website for it to be successful” – there is still an unfortunate trend in the dental industry to believe that “expensive is best”, certainly in some niches. This has resulted in a few agencies hiking website prices to eye-watering levels, often two and three times what general businesses are paying for their sites.

But are those websites worth it? If you believe the claims you may think so, but look deeper at Google results, technical performance and usability and you will find a different story. You really don’t need to fall for it so be sure to look around for high-quality work at significantly more affordable prices. Choose the right web designer and you’ll get something much better and much more cost-effective too.

“30 Invisalign enquiries per month or we work for free” – I’ve covered this in an earlier blog but it’s worth reiterating here as it really is something to be wary of. This claim is made by some social media advertising companies who will guarantee 30 leads per month or they don’t charge until that figure is reached. However what they don’t openly discuss or guarantee is the quality of those leads and the expected conversion rate, nor do they discuss the huge click budgets they expect you to allocate to get the results.

They will also class any enquiry, whether it’s a website request, social media message, landing page submission or lead-gen form as being a valid enquiry – no matter how speculative. That’s really not that difficult to achieve, particularly with big click budgets, so please be aware of what you’re signing up to.

As more companies start to provide social media ads for dentists, the competition increases and so do the claims of success. So be sure to validate the service before you sign up – and definitely don’t sign up to long-term agreements.

Summary

Those are five key areas we would highly recommend you look out for if you are starting up or renewing dental website and marketing activities in 2023. Sadly there are many more and I could write a small book given time.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to know who to trust, indeed we’ve even seen dental coaches espousing the benefits of questionable services, either through ignorance or maybe vested interests, it’s hard to know for sure, but please seek a range of opinions.

If you would like to discuss any of these topics in more detail or perhaps have other concerns or uncertainties regarding the services you use or propose to use, please call the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for impartial advice and guidance – it’s no-obligation and free.