Do you want to promote your dental practice, but don’t know what to expect when you hire a dental marketing company? Don’t know what you should ask for, what type of results should you expect, in how much time or how is the working process?
By the end of this article you’ll know exactly how a good dentist – dental marketing agency should be so that you know that you hired the right (or the wrong) one.
Let’s see what it’s all about!
1) Expect (and ask) for specific goals
A professional dental marketing agency should have specific, measurable goals for your dental practice.
Why?
Because without specific goals, you cannot know if your money is well-spent or not. Plus, you will dilute your marketing efforts by trying to do multiple things that don’t help you (or them) reach your goals.
Let me explain.
Let’s say a dental marketing agency says they can bring you “more patients”. If you start the collaboration with them with this goal, it’s a red flag, right from the start.
Why?
Because if they bring you 5 more patients at the end of the month, they’ve achieved their goal. But will you be satisfied with this result? I guess not.
Here’s an alternative: “let’s get 20 new patients every month starting from month 3 and increase to 30 new patients every month starting from month 5”.
You see, now you have a specific, measurable and time-bound goal. You know exactly WHAT you will get when you hire this dental marketing agency and you know exactly WHEN you should achieve this goal.
And in this way, you can filter out the marketing channels that don’t help you reach your goal.
For instance, in a brainstorming session, your dental marketing company or consultant may come up with several marketing ideas for your practice like: Pinterest, Instagram or even Snapchat.
But, if you know your goal is to get 20 new patients, you’ll know that Pinterest and Instagram are not the right channels for the dental industry.
Yes, they might help you with your brand awareness, but brand awareness doesn’t pay you the bills. Customers, new patients are.
2) Expect from them to master the main dental marketing channels
There are a few marketing channels that work like crazy for the dental industry.
These are:
- Google Ads
- SEO
- Local Business optimization
- Facebook Retargeting
- Email marketing (only if you have the right leads)
These are basic stuff. If your dental marketing agency masters these, plus, if they know conversion rate optimization, they can bring you some good results.
If they go just with the flow or the marketing trends, this might be a red flag.
For instance, Instagram is huge right now. The problem is, it doesn’t work as well for the dental industry.
Why?
Because you go to the dentist when YOU NEED something. Going to the dentist isn’t like shopping for sneakers: you see a nice ad, you like the shoes and you buy them.
Instagram and Facebook are demand generation platforms. This means that you try to generate the demand, you put your dental practice in front of people who probably don’t need your services right now.
On Google (Google Ads, SEO, local business) on the other hand, people go with an intention. People open up Google to search for “dentist in New York” only when they need one. They don’t do it for fun.
This is why your money are much more well-spent on these former marketing channels and you’ll have to find out what results did your future dental patient marketing agency bring to their past customers.
3) Expect (and ask) for constant ways of improvement
Dental marketing services shouldn’t be a “set up and forget” thing.
Why?
Because there’s always ways for improvement.
You can improve the overall conversion rate for the website. You can improve the emails you send. You can A/B test different offers or different texts on your website. You can A/B test email headlines to find new benefits that might resonate with your patients.
You can A/B test ads. You can A/B test call to actions.
You see, these little tests, these little findings add up and can yield some huge results in the long run.
A little test might not make the difference, but if you add them up, you can double or even triple your conversion rate which means that you can pay the same money for three times the results.
4) Expect (and ask) for periodic report
A periodic report helps you with 2 things:
- You make sure the dental marketing company does its job
- You can quickly see if you’re on the right track or not.
Sometimes dental marketing companies can get really busy with clients and they might put things off for some of them while working hard for other.
By “forcing” a dental marketing company to send you periodic reports, you force them in a way to constantly work on your business and not postpone things that should have been done, things that are written in the initial dental marketing strategy or plan.
