During Covid-19 restrictions, some dental practices have struggled to survive whilst others continued to thrive. Of course there was a significant lull during full lock-down but what became clear was that those practices who were on-the-ball pre-covid, were similarly mobilised and active during the crisis.<\/p>\n
Now as we start accelerating back to some form of normality, it is clear that those practices who \u201cget it\u201d are continuing to do well; indeed they are prospering even more as other practices fall by the wayside.<\/p>\n
So what are the key marketing characteristics which those successful practices exhibit? Let\u2019s take a closer look.<\/p>\n
Leading practices understand the need for a finely-tuned sales process which turns leads into treatments. All too often, marketers deliver great leads to dentists<\/a> but half-hearted response from the practice team means that those leads don\u2019t convert. Effective tools and procedures must exist to capture those leads and allow follow-up in a prompt and well-defined manner. Do this too late and\/or half-heartedly means that the lead will evaporate. Potentially worse is that your local competitor will likely benefit. The patient journey, right from the start through to treatment and after-care, needs to be exceptional and with the whole team on board.<\/p>\n Similarly your team needs to be able to filter those enquiries which will likely lead to nothing. Whilst we can target marketing efforts to those most likely to take up treatments, some channels will still deliver a lot of speculative enquiries. Some of these will be \u201cgolden nuggets\u201d but others will need to be offloaded as the enquirer may be unsuitable for treatment or perhaps have no way of paying. This needs to be done before the valuable time of a TCO or clinician gets wasted.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What I mean by this is that you need to develop web assets which truly reflect your services and how you can make a patient\u2019s life better through having treatment with you. Too often we see dentists running pay-per-click campaigns, radio ads etc and paying thousands of pounds but then neglecting the landing pages and websites where they are directing the traffic. So the primary campaign is working, but the potential new patient is not engaged and compelled to proceed once the ad has been clicked.<\/p>\n So please ensure that the content you develop to help promote your services and convert enquiries is top notch. Please don\u2019t skimp on this \u2013 the success rate of a great landing page can be several times that of a poor one.<\/p>\n Only this morning I\u2019ve been discussing pay-per-click for a dentist who has a budget of \u00a3200 per month to try to gain new Invisalign enquiries. I\u2019m afraid this is nowhere near enough, particularly as the guy was in a particularly competitive location. In reality he would need several times this amount to start gaining any traction. The same goes for dental implants and indeed any treatment which attracts a premium. I\u2019ve covered the reasons for this in detail elsewhere in our blog, but in simple terms, let\u2019s assume that an implant click costs \u00a33. So for a \u00a3300 budget you get roughly 100 clicks. 4 or 5 of these may make an enquiry of which a couple may convert to treatment. So you can likely cover the cost of the investment, but low budgets will not bring in lots of new cases unfortunately.<\/p>\nCreation of compelling content<\/h3>\n
Matching the marketing budget to the ambition<\/h3>\n