Preparation at the practice before starting out with SEO, pay-per-click or social media marketing.
Dentists often ask us to undertake “fully outsourced” marketing for them because they have “no resources” at the practice to participate. Whilst we can cover most of the bases for this, it’s actually impossible to carry out fully outsourced marketing for several reasons, and where companies claim to do this, you need to be a little bit wary as follows.
Even where most of the activities are outsourced, there will always be some input from the local team as I’ll illustrate. In fact the most effective campaigns are typically those where activities are shared between the external dental marketer and nominated and trained members of the practice team. This balance of marketing “done for you” alongside marketing “done by you” always tends to work best.
The basics
Whilst a good dental marketer will be able to generate numerous high-quality leads for your business, if your business is not set up correctly to receive and process them, then the overall initiative has failed before it starts. Indeed we’ve recently paused two pay-per-click campaigns which were yielding good returns in terms of enquiries but the dentist’s reception team were not handling them professionally; so collectively we agreed to pause whilst the appropriate, proactive staffing was put in place.
So as a minimum, the front-desk team needs to be trained in and receptive to dealing with an influx of new enquiries. This does not simply mean booking new appointments but also being able to use recording systems to try to identify how the enquiries originated. This is essential to help determine how well the various aspects of the marketing campaigns are working, alongside the reporting from the external marketing team.
Additionally, if you’ve embarked on social media marketing, for example Facebook advertising, there must be proactive monitoring to ensure that new enquiries or questions are responded to promptly. Don’t leave it to your marketing team to do this for obvious reasons.
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I recently read a blog post from a dental coach where he noted that a few of his clients had significantly wound back their spend on external marketing in favour of prioritising their internal marketing efforts. What we didn’t learn was whether this initiative actually worked, but it’s certainly worthy of more discussion. Just before we take a look at this “strategy” in more detail, let’s recap in the broadest sense, on what those marketing terms actually mean. These are not concrete definitions (indeed there are several different views on what internal marketing means) but they will serve for the purposes of this discussion:
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As you’ve possibly gathered if you’ve read other articles in this blog, I spend much of my time working on