A Dental Corporate Marketing Debacle

Have you taken over a dental practice recently? Don’t do this!

Some years ago I wrote about how successful marketing often falls apart when a dental corporate takes over a local practice. What I discussed back then was primarily about how corporates often “knee jerk” into consolidating practice websites into a single corporate website resulting in a huge loss of Google rankings and new patient enquiries. Some of them have learned from their mistakes although this still goes on unfortunately.

Today’s blog is in a similar vein but the outcome was potentially even worse; I’ll explain more in a moment. This is important in that it not only serves as guidance for corporates, but also for practice principals who are working out their retainer period and who are potentially still subject to performance objectives. If the corporate messes up the marketing, it’s going to be difficult to deliver on those objectives.

Background

My company, Dental Media worked with a dentist for many years, helping to build her practice from a squat through to a highly profitable multi-surgery general, specialist and implant practice. To ensure top Google rankings and to maximise patient enquiries from the web, we built three separate websites representing key areas of her business. These sites were optimised over the years so that they all reached top Google positions in what is a competitive city location. Returns were excellent, consistent and helped underpin the success of the practice.

In addition to the websites and Google SEO, we also ran a range of paid ad campaigns to extend the reach of the practice and further maximise potential. These campaigns were also very successful.

More recently, a corporate approached the dentist and subsequently purchased the practice, keeping the principal on for a period of time as is fairly usual these days.

Initially we were introduce and advised that the marketing we’d always assisted with would continue unchanged, however this lasted no more than a couple of months before the corporates own marketing team decided to get involved. What happened over the following three months effectively destroyed the success that had patiently been built up over many years.

The corporate marketing decision

The first thing that was requested was that the social media ad campaign was halted, this despite data to show earlier success. We initially thought that the corporate internal marketing team would take on the advertising, but no, it was just stopped. This fairly quickly resulted in a “gappy book” for the resident implant dentists but nothing was done to re-instate the campaign.

Next there was a decision to update the general practice website via the corporate’s preferred web designer. The result was a poorly optimised site which was about as engaging as concrete and which subsequently fell several places in Google. We also had landing pages in place on our version of the website which were removed without notice when the new website went live. This resulted in the paid ads campaign faltering significantly until we realised what was happening. It then took the corporate marketing department 5 weeks to get the landing pages reinstated.

So far then, the practices social media presence and enquiries had been destroyed, their website tanked in Google and their Google Ads campaign compromised. Frustratingly, our repeated concerns fell on deaf ears.

So could this have got any worse? The answer is “yes” even though the former owner and now associate dentist had stepped in to express her own concerns. At this point, the corporate decided to also close down the implant and specialist websites, both of which were doing really well at the top of Google and bringing in lucrative treatments. Quite unfathomable really and all done without explanation.

Fortunately our last set of concerns was finally acknowledged and the suspension of the implant and specialist dental services websites has been placed on hold “awaiting further evaluation”.

The results?

We know from our long association with practice team members that things are no longer buoyant. Previously the practice had done extremely well but now gaps in treatment books are unfortunately commonplace. Much of this results from the previously steady flow of new patients from the web and social channels being effectively cut-off. I guess someone somewhere in the new organisation must be seeing this and wondering why? I’m also guessing that our concerns never went higher than the marketing team as they were probably too embarrassed to explain what was happening to regional management.

Summarising

Before working for Dental Media I worked in corporate life outside of dentistry and I’m acutely aware of pressure from the top for efficiency gains and consolidation. However there comes a point, like in this example, where consolidation comes at the expense of sales and profitability. I suspect that someone envisaged considerable savings from only running one website but they failed to look at what the effect on returns would be – it was actually huge. Additionally, shutting down complementary marketing channels also proved to be a significant mistake, not fully remedied yet.

To any senior corporate staff reading this, please be aware that there may be members in your team who, for whatever reason, are making poor decisions and compromising your operation. This could be inexperience, incompetence or simply a drive to achieve unbalanced objectives. It also pays to speak to third-party teams who have been performing well, rather than just side-line them while “Rome burns”.

If any of the issues above resonate with you or you would simply like advice regarding marketing of a dental practice at any stage in its evolution, please call the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion. We also carry out marketing audits on behalf of existing practice owners and those who are evaluating potential take-overs.