Dental Marketing Tips

Dental Marketing – How Much Should You Spend?

Different dental practices have different marketing needs. But often a practice will allocate a flat sum to its dental marketing – a monthly budget. This budget is most often set by the dentist himself based on what he feels he can afford and what he feels is “a lot” or “enough”.

Why A Flat Budget May Not Be Right for Your Dental Marketing

Why Use Percentage of the Gross towards Your Dental Marketing? The best answer to this is marketing momentum. If your marketing is working well and your dental practice has a good month that means marketing gets more money. That money can then cause another even stronger month and marketing gets a little bit more again. What this does is allow you to fan the fire. Good marketing results in more good marketing and you get steady expansion. Steady expansion is good because you can also steadily hire and train new staff and grow in a controlled fashion. Using a percentage of the gross means that on lean months, when you have to cut back you can. But all this requires that you set your marketing up in such a way that you are not locked into a fixed budget.

Don’t Get Locked In. Companies that offer marketing services normally do so on flat monthly rates. They also normally insist on longer term contracts. Thus when you set up your marketing you are normally locked into set amounts for your marketing and flexibility is not an option. This is a “fire and forget” approach. You set it up and you can just let it run till next year. It is much harder to find companies that can move your budget around. The problem is that you can get loaded up with ineffective marketing and a complete lack of flexibility. Then you are stuck till the contracts expire. It’s more work to set up flexible marketing and then adjust monthly. However it is also more effective if you have control of your marketing budget and can shift it around. Try to set up flexibility into your marketing efforts right from the start. There are companies that offer this (such as ours). Also internet advertising can be pushed up and down fairly easily.

Seasonal Factors: December is often a slow month for dentistry. January can be strong as people start taking care of dental issues they put off over the holiday season. Each practice will see its own seasonal factors. If you have flexible marketing you can push harder in the slow months and ease off in the strong months. This helps even out your schedule.

Percentage Based Marketing is the Recommended Standard: The Small Business Association and many other references point to percentage based marketing as the correct method. See below for some quotes regarding this.

Effective dental marketing must take into account a number of core factors

Numbers vary a lot for marketing. In some case 6% is recommended all the way up to 12%. Here are the factors you should consider when setting your amount.

Size of existing Client Base. The larger the client base, the stronger the referral traffic. If you have a small client base you must push your advertising budget up.

Length of Time in Business. The longer you have been in business the more brand awareness you have. New practices must advertise harder because they have little brand awareness in their communities.

Size of Practice. This is largely determined by how many dentists you have and how many chairs are available. It can be strongly influenced by how skilled your dental assistants are. A single orthodontist could have thirty chairs and a single family dentist could have three. Your income potential is controlled largely by those two factors. Your marketing should be pushed up or down based on your potential to deliver.

Competitiveness of Your Area. You have to look at how hard other dental practices in your area are advertising. If you do not have aggressive competition you can keep your percentage low. But if there are other dentists who are marketing very aggressively you must compete or they will capture the area.

The Profit Margin of Your Speciality. Cosmetic dentists, implant dentists and orthodontists generally have a much larger profit margin and handle larger fees per client. But they have very little repeat business compared to general dentists. Because of this the specialities advertise much harder than general and family dentists. If you are delivering higher fee speciality services, you must push up your advertising percentage.

Using a Percentage for Your Dental Marketing: References

Small Business Association:

As a general rule, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing. This budget should be split between 1) brand development costs (which includes all the channels you use to promote your brand such as your website, blogs, sales collateral, etc.), and 2) the costs of promoting your business (campaigns, advertising, events, etc.).

This percentage also assumes you have margins in the range of 10-12 percent (after you’ve covered your other expenses, including marketing).

If your margins are lower than this, then you might consider eating more of the costs of doing business by lowering your overall margins and allocating additional spending to marketing. It’s a tough call, but your marketing budget should never be based on just what’s left over once all your other business expenses are covered.

From the Small Business Association Website

EHow

Percentage Spent on Advertising

The most closely followed guideline for large consumer companies is to spend about 7 or 8 percent of their revenue on advertising, with half that devoted to the labor involved in the project.

Consumer focused companies spend larger amounts, up to ten percent, while business focused companies spend around five percent. According to a 2007 IDC survey, companies had an average of one marketing professional for every $16 million in revenue they had.

– Ehow Article

Chief Marketing Officer Council Website

Companies who drive more than 10% of total sales from the internet allocate more of their budgets to marketing (16.4%) than companies with less than 10% of their sales coming from the internet (10.2%). August 2012 11

Marketing spend represents 11% of their firms’ revenues, up from 8.5% reported in a similar Duke University study conducted in early 2012. August 201212

From this article

How Dental Practices Are Being Ripped Off Their Marketing Dollars

After years of providing marketing services for dental practices as well as other health care professionals, I have seen quite a few ways that they have been lied to and deceived about what they are getting for the hard-earned cash that they are investing in marketing.

Most dental practices know that some form of marketing and promotion is necessary to be able to fill the schedule and truly be successful, even if only done during slow periods. Most dental and health practices are contacted by a wide array of marketing companies trying to sell them on all manner of marketing ideas – from billboards to yellowpages, postcard mailings, coupon mailings, radio and tv ads, websites, internet advertising and more. Some offer bundles, such as if you advertise in their hardcopy directory, they will also do internet advertising for you, and, and, and…

Since we have tested pretty much every type of marketing a dental practice might do, I can tell you what ones truly give the best return on investment. (This is something I will cover in more detail in another article.) But I can tell you right now that the #1 form of marketing that will get you the best ROI is most definitely through the INTERNET. Though there is a downside.

With the world going more and more internet, including through mobile devices (phones and tablets), your internet presence is most important because when it is done right, it performs head and shoulders above any other form of marketing you can do. If it is NOT performing, it is simply not being done, regardless of what you are being told.

The downside of the internet world is that this is where the greatest rip-off occurs – because it’s not something that is as easily tracked as a postcard, a billboard or a Yellowpages ad.

Here are the most common services where practices get ripped off and lied to:

1. Internet Advertising: only a percentage of what you think you are paying for internet advertising actually goes to Google. This percentage can range anywhere from 80% (unusually high) to as little as 10 or 15%.

For example, if you pay a company for $1000 per month for internet advertising, most likely anywhere from $500 or maybe as much as $900 of that money is going in their pockets and only a percentage gets paid out for the actual advertising on Google and other providers. Most companies will not disclose to you how much that percentage is. And often any numbers they do give are not specific breakdowns. An ad on Google is worth more than an ad on Yahoo. Knowing exactly what you are buying is vital.

2. Package “deals”: Some companies will offer you a package deal of a listing in their hardcopy directory and then also offer online listings, plus internet advertising, plus lead tracking. These can also be deceptive because no breakdown is given of how much of your fee actually pays for internet ads. Another problem can be that the internet advertising goes to some sort of mirrored website for you (so they can track the traffic that they generate for you). The problem is that traffic on your website increases the overall search value of your site- so you end up paying to push lots of traffic to a website that you don’t own. That could be adding to the power and performance of your own website.

3. Cookie-cutter content used in websites and blog posts. When getting a website built or expanded this is deadly. What I mean by this is that the same text used on your website and blog posts has been used on numerous other similar websites – it’s not unique. When this is done it looks like honest good work has been done, but actually it is doing more harm than good as your website will be penalized in its ranking for using copy from other websites. Your website and any blog posts must be unique.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services: Because the work that is done to optimize a website (for improved performance in search engines and better visibility of your website) is technical and generally you have no idea what actual work is being done, very often you can pay thousands of dollars for this service and only get a few hundred dollars worth of actual work done. You have no way of telling really unless you know how to check this.

How to get past the “smoke and mirrors”:

What you want is full disclosure and transparency. Demand to know upfront what exact percentage of the money you pay for advertising will actually go to Google, or if not Google, which advertiser you are paying for. If they won’t tell you and put it in writing or if this figure is less than 70%, don’t hire them.
Find out from your marketing company what key search terms they are targeting in the advertising that they are doing for you. Then you can search those key terms to see if your ads show up on the first page. Do any such search in the afternoon or evening as low budget advertising might be running in the morning but will disappear once the daily budget is used up.
Demand reports of the exact work that has been done each month for SEO services. It takes 10 minutes for them to detail out what unique content was added to your site, what valuable links to your website on other websites have been set up, what unique blog posts were done, etc. These can all be checked to see if the reporting is true.
Don’t let advertisers speak to you in terms you can’t understand. A true professional can explain things to you in a way that you can understand, and would do so out of courtesy. If you are getting a lot of technical babble – realize that someone is hiding behind a smoke-screen of “this is too technical for you to understand” – and take it as a red flag that you are likely being ripped off.
Periodically check your website in the search engines by searching key terms for your practice to see where your website comes up. Make sure to use a different browser than you normally use as likely you have logged on to your website from your normal browser and your browser will not show give you the same results that everyone else sees. If you use Chrome, then look it up in Firefox or Safari, etc.

Marketing dollars can build your practice up or drain it down. We offer free website analysis and internet advertising reviews. If you are concerned that your advertising dollars have not bought you what you were promised, I strongly recommend getting a free review as a second opinion. We will provide you with an unbiased report with specific issues that you can see yourself.

Call us: 210-601-1050

Dentists Best Use of Social Media

It is generally understood that the power of social media is something that any business must harness and use if they expect to get ahead of competitors in today’s busy marketplace.

However for dentists, social media is a bit more obscure. There are some age groups and activities that lend themselves very well to social media. Fashion has always been driven socially. For a business to understand how they can use social media they have to understand the two very different approaches.

First you have activies that have been driven by social pressures in the past and likely will be always driven by social pressure. Fashion, dining, most sports and many other activities are social activities. They are done with other people and driven by interaction. Any activity that is actually social can and should be driven hard with social media.

Dentists are Not Inherently Social Media Driven

The big question looms, “how can an activity that is done alone and which is not social driven, use and benefit from this strong medium?”.

Dentists have asked me this question many times over recent years. The problem is that things you do alone are not driven by social pressure. They are driven by other pressures. Beauty can be social driven and thus cosmetic dentists can focus on beauty and create followings and engagement. The more social an activity, the easier it is. Thus a cosmetic dentist has a harder job than a fashion designer. Similarly orthodontists can tap into the beauty pathway and also into the teen age group and effectively use social media.

The other approach is indirect and requires following your own interests to create a social media following and then use this to direct people to your specific services.

For example, a dentist who is also a tennis play can drive his social media through tennis. If you are imaginative and fun, you can gain a following and use this to direct your social circle to your services as they need them. This is a less direct path, but much more effective than just sticking to dentistry and trying to create a social following about a technical subject such as dental care.

Engagement comes first and if you have set yourself up well, this results in visibility and branding. Learn more about social media and our related services.

Obviously with enough investment of time, anything can be done. Any that includes building a huge following for your dental practice. But in real-life that costs a lot of money and the actual return on investment is very low. This is a case where for a dentist, social media works in reverse to say a fashion designer. A socially driven activity can get a big following very inexpensively and thus get a big return of sales on a small investment. As a dentist, the reverse is true. You must do a lot of work to get a large following and generally you will get poor sales compared to time/money invested. So seeking a huge following and spending a lot of money on social media is not a smart strategy. What is a good strategy is finding group-driven things you enjoy and then personally building a wide following or circle and using that presence to bleed visitors to your main website. Then you get the cost way down, the return goes way up and bingo, you are mining a great source of patients for your practice.

NEW Patient Strategies…That Work!

After having worked with dozens of dental practices on the full spectrum of marketing ventures – including television ads, radio, billboards, Yellow Pages, major newspapers and local publications, websites, internet marketing, direct mail, newsletters and email marketing – we know what gets the best results. Our years of experience gives us insider perspective and context to be able to hone the strategies for attracting the most new patients for the least monies spent.

Why Internet Advertising Should Be the Backbone of Your Paid Dental Marketing

Internet advertising is by far the best method of dentist marketing for new patients. In the past two decades, most prospective customers have come to depend on the internet, not only for online shopping, but for researching, discovering, and comparison shopping of real-world service providers, such as dentists and professional offices. Especially effective is “Pay per Click” (PPC) search advertising, when it is set up professionally.
PPC advertising is very cost-effective and inexpensive compared to broadcast and print media advertising – you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Search targeting delivers ads contextually – your ads are seen only by people specifically searching for “(your city) dentist” or “cosmetic dentist.” And these ads are seen above and to the side of the search results.
Search ads can be targeted closely by geography, and in some cases, by age, gender and interests.
More than any other media, search ads can be tracked and analyzed. Results can be continually tracked and integrated with analytics, allowing quick monitoring of ROI. This means your ad performance can be tightly controlled and adjusted on the fly.
The internet is always “on” and accessible to customers. It doesn’t depend on a customer being in front of a television or listening to a radio at the time your advertising airs. It also does not depend on a customer turning to a particular page of the newspaper.

You can set your monthly budget at whatever level you want and it won’t overspend.

Find out how internet marketing can make a difference in your practice with a free internet marketing evaluation.

Second best is direct mail, which traditionally has a high response rate, and is relatively inexpensive. Direct mail can also be tightly targeted to a specific geographical area and also to specific income levels. Direct mail however has to be well done, or your postcards and brochures simply slip into the mass. Postcards can be very wasteful if not well planned. We have found that humourous cards get better response. People get too much regular promotion in their mailboxes so if they get a card that is more alive, humorous or in some way engaging, it gets a much better response. Don’t do plain or boring.

Special Offers- Reduced Cost Exam, Cleaning or Whitening

Special offers have an upside and a downside. The downside is that you don’t want people travelling from all over town to take advantage of your special offer and then going back to thier regular dentist the rest of the time. This actually damages your office because it ties up your staff doing the introduction process for patients who will never be coming back to you anyway.

The upside is that special offers DO get new people coming into your office and this can lead to a lot of repeat business.

The Secret: You must strictly control your special offers to the geographical area directly around your practice. Do NOT put special offers on your website or in your internet advertising. Definately DO put special offers in postcards and brochures that are being distributed locally. If it’s going out local- put the special offer. If it’s going out wide- do not.

Use special offers to pull in people who are close to you anyway. Then it is very likely you will be seeing them again for more services.

Referrals are Free. So “Care to Share” and “Spread the Smile”!

Of course referrals are the bread and butter of all dental offices. They form the foundation on which a dental office rests. So anything you can do that increases referral is a good thing.

We often will print a 6 month supply of “Care to Share” cards for as little as $250. These cards can contain some simple (and acceptable to the Dental Board) incentive to “Spread the Smile” by referring a friends and family to your dental clinic. Any program that is pushing for referrals is a good thing. Cards with incentives just help the process along. If your patient appreciates your work, they won’t throw it away. They will give it to someone. Someone that you might be seeing in a month or two. Get something printed up. Postcard size is good, some practices like business card size. Either way it is more than worth the couple of hundred dollars to print these up.

A five-step strategy to avoid being ambushed by Internet customer reviews

Pro-Active Public Relations

Fierce competition among internet consumer review sites this summer underlines the growing importance of online customer reviews to consumer researching products and services. Small businesses can avoid being ambushed by reputation-damaging posts by adopting a five-step strategy, according to Cook Profitability Services’ social media consultant. More on Public Relations Strategy.

Increasingly, consumers head to search engines and review sites before deciding on purchasing products and services. Customer reviews often provide the first – and potentially strongest – impression of a business and product reviews and ratings provide the first impression for potential customers. The growth of Google Places and its reviews, and the growing complaints of rival review sites that the search giant was stealing review content to boost Places, recently led to Google’s decision to eliminate outside reviews from its own listings.

Unfortunately, many business owners have not done the same research as consumers, and are shocked to discover what people are writing about them.

Public Relations Expert Wayne Baumgarten

“Many of our clients are stunned the first time they Google their practice,” said Baumgarten. “What they often find is a series of customer reviews stretching back months or years. And the bulk of reviews are often bad – even vicious.”

Consumers’ power tools

Today’s consumers have powerful tools, to have their say and even strike back by posting reviews and ratings on Google, City Search, Yahoo Local, Yelp and hundreds of smaller or local directory sites, bulletin boards and online forums. And the ability to read and post reviews on the fly is enhanced on rapidly spreading mobile devices, with some apps and sites even encouraging interactions while at the business. A customer upset about a long wait may well spend the time complaining about it online while sitting in your waiting room.

Public Relations and Social Media

“This is social media too,” Baumgarten said. “It’s powerful, with real-world consequences, and it may not be warm and fuzzy.”

“Social media strategy isn’t just about having a Facebook page or Twitter account,” he continued. “Social media is the whole range of tools that help people share ideas, information and common interests online. Some things you can control, some you can’t. A company may not need a Facebook page – although I strongly advise it – but it can’t opt out of social media. A business almost certainly already has a listing on a review site, whether they asked for it or not.”

“Even big companies have been blind-sided by social media, and most now have some type of social media strategy and dedicated people to monitor, respond and use social media in their customer relations,” Baumgarten said. “The big hurdle for our small-business clientele is to convince them that they involved, whether they know it or not. And if they don’t participate, angry customers may be in charge.”

Five-point public relations strategy to control internet reviews:

While they may not have the budgets to hire social media/reputation management experts, Baumgarten says, small business can work on their own reputation with a five-point strategy: acceptance, awareness, analysis, approachability and avoiding shortcuts:

1) ACCEPTANCE – Accepting the reality that your company is on the social media radar, willing or not, is the starting point in addressing online reputation problems. Denial and failure to act is devastating. On the other hand, it doesn’t have to mean surrender – for those that engage, there are positive aspects. Many companies – even those initially smeared online – have learned to turn social media into an important company resource that has dramatically improved their customer relations. A dedication to being transparent online can build your reputation for paying attention to customer concerns. And unhappy customers may be more inclined to talk things out.

2) AWARENESS – An essential first step is an immediate inventory of major review sites to find out what people have already said about you. Then you must develop a plan for monitoring of your listings regularly. It’s important to know about any new bad reviews immediately; the more quickly you can take action, the better. At some sites, you have the option of subscribing to any new comments on a listing.

3) ANALYSIS – It’s natural to get angry or panic when someone blasts your company in an online review. But it’s important to be dispassionate and to do “triage.” Your only options for action on a particular review are 1) let it slide, 2) post a response, or 3) appeal to the review site or take legal action in extreme cases. (This is a long shot; review sites generally don’t have the inclination, resources or legal liability to verify or review customer opinions.) Questions you should be asking include:

Is the criticism valid? Many have discovered real problems in their office by reading bad reviews. If the complaint is valid, set things right.
Is the criticism bogus? Do you recognize the complainer, and feel the review is just out of spite? You may need to set the record straight, in a professional manner.
Is the reviewer blasting your business on one site, or across multiple sites? Are you the victim of an organized campaign
Is the review visible? If it’s extremely old, or is buried, it may not be worth effort.

4) APPROACHABILITY – Often people turn to an online review site because felt they couldn’t speak out at the business, because they were intimidated, embarrassed or were dismissed. “Rude staff” is a very common complaint online. The best place to deal with customer dissatisfaction is at the office, where the customer should be encouraged to share their feelings and handle disputes on the spot. Customers should also be invited to share feedback on the business website.

On review sites it’s critical that businesses respond publicly to as many reviews as possible, good or bad, valid or not. Many review sites allow businesses to “claim” their listings, and then reply to reviews as the owner. Or at the least, the business can create a consumer account clearly labeled and transparent, and use it to participate on the forum. The message to people reading reviews is that your business is transparent, welcomes feedback, and pays attention to what consumers are saying, even if they don’t always agree. Even on a site with multiple complaints and low rankings, this gives your business credibility. While peer reviews are a powerful influence, most people understand that every business has a certain percentage of dissatisfied customers. A business can deliver an overall impression of credibility and care for customers on social media sites, even if it doesn’t please everyone

5) AVOID SHORTCUTS – The real solution to online reputation management is a long-term commitment to customer service, and a willingness to create a social media presence that puts individual complaints into perspective. For those unable to devote the time, a social media strategist can analyze the current situation, set up monitoring, and even handle ongoing customer interaction.

But businesses should use caution in hiring reputation management consultants promising quick and easy fixes. While many use legitimate strategies, others use questionable methods, misleading sales tactics, and even actions that may backfire on the business. Companies promising to remove bad posts or post large numbers of good reviews to drown out bad reviews through special relationships with review sites often are misrepresenting what they can do. And both review sites and the growing number of verified and trusted regular reviewers are quick to identify and take actions against businesses faking accounts or reviews.