Dental marketing contract “tie-ins” to be wary of

Avoiding common lock-ins your marketing agency might try

Regular readers of this blog will know how frustrated we get with the questionable tactics used by some companies who offer marketing services for dentists. Whether it’s simply purchasing cheap £50 WordPress templates, adjusting them slightly and selling on for thousands, or onerous long-term contractual lock-ins, unfortunately it’s all out there and way too prevalent these days.

So in today’s blog we’ll take a quick look at some of the ways a marketing company will try to lock you in and make it very difficult for you if you want to transfer your business elsewhere. In effect this should serve as a handy check-list when you are considering signing up for new services.

The long-term contract

This is a simple one still used by many in the business. But why would you really need to sign up to something where you may get poor results and be unable to do anything about it for a long time? A prime case is SEO where companies will try to lock you into a twelve month contract with no results based components. If they don’t perform and you want to leave, then unless pay off the remainder of the fees, you’re likely stuck.

Non-portable website

This is where your website is built using a custom, in-house content management system which isn’t supported other than by the company who developed it. They may well be able to deliver a decent-looking website for you, but try to move it elsewhere and you’re stuck. We’ve encountered this on three occasions in the last couple of months where dentists wished to transfer to our services but the process was less than straightforward due to how their websites had been developed.

Using WordPress – badly!

This is similar to above but quite a specific case and one to be fully aware of. A lot of dental design agencies use WordPress to build websites because they can purchase pre-built templates for very little, add a few assets to make them look “dental” and then roll them out to unsuspecting clients as bespoke designs. The problem here is that the templates they use to deliver these websites often become defunct and unsupported and break as the core functionality of the WordPress system updates. So initially you get tied into a contract to do all of the maintenance that comes as standard with WordPress but then ultimately your website breaks anyway, or worse, gets hacked.

If you try to transfer a system like this, a more diligent marketing company for dentists could well reject you or advise that the website needs to be re-designed.

Onerous licence arrangements

Some designers for dentists may try to sell you a website which is wrapped up in some form of onerous licencing “agreement”. We recently had a transfer request from a dentist who had been recommended to our services only to find that they had apparently signed up for a website “leasing” agreement and that they didn’t actually own the website or content. Closer inspection showed that there wasn’t actually such an agreement in place and eventually we were able to complete the transfer after much wrangling with the original provider. So please make sure that you own the website as soon as you’ve paid for it!

Summary

Providing marketing services for dentists is increasingly more competitive and some companies are trying various tricks to tie their clients in. Please watch out for this and check the issues noted above before you commit to anything. There are a few companies left, Dental Media included, who will not tie you into anything and still work on reputation, trust and ability to deliver.

If any of the issues above are affecting you and you’d appreciate more clarification or advice, please get in touch with us on 01332 672548. If you are subject to an onerous contractual tie-in but still want to move, we’ll do our best to help.