The answer here, perhaps unsurprisingly, comes down to the level of resource available, the extent of training and willingness\/competence of those involved.<\/p>\n
Some larger practices are starting to incorporate marketing staff as part of the team, whereas smaller businesses are exploring the opportunity to leverage on the skills of existing team members to help with the web marketing initiatives; for example social media and blogging.<\/p>\n
So for larger teams, with the scope to employ an experienced marketer, it is reasonable to assume that some of the initiatives can be managed in-house. Indeed we work with a number of practices to provide mentoring and training services but with the “leg-work” being carried out by members of the dentist’s team. This can work very well and very cost-effectively as long as the correct training and structure is in place. Some of our larger clients now manage their pay-per-click, social media, blogging and (to a degree) SEO, in-house and get great results.<\/p>\n
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All well-run business tend to review their staffing level regularly and dentists are no exception. This is more evident over the last couple of years as austerity measures have taken hold and surplus staff have been trimmed from the headcount. Against this back-drop, it’s easy to see why smaller dental practices struggle to free up resources to manage marketing initiatives<\/a> alongside the day-to-day running of the business.<\/p>\n For dental businesses of this nature, different resourcing is needed; typically the use of outsourced services for much of the marketing activity. This is particularly so for some of the more complex work, for example search engine optimisation. Some activities, e.g. blogging and use of social media, are relatively easy to learn, but SEO is a much broader discipline which requires a lot of experience and knowledge to do well. This is particularly so in more recent times and definitely now that Google has clamped down on the “easy” SEO wins of a few years ago.<\/p>\n