Is your practice marketing getting lost in the crowd?
Last week, I was on the phone with a long-time friend and dental school classmate. He told me that his practice had been slowing down for the past few years (along with the economy), and he was really beginning to get anxious. He’d never really paid much attention to his marketing before. “All dental marketing seems the same,” he lamented. “How do I create more noise and get noticed in an already crowded world of discounted whitening ads and $50 off new patient coupons?”
As the founder of Quality Dental Plan (QDP), it’s really the best question a dentist can ask me, because it gets right to the heart of one of the most fundamental elements of my program: fixing what’s broken when it comes to “same-old, same-old” dental marketing techniques. The question begins to address how your dental practice can be different in a world chock full of “blah” advertising and dental marketing sameness.
Your Practice is Unique – Your Advertising Should Be Too
Let’s look at what the average dental ad looks like:
- Your enticement options today are limited to discounted tooth whitening, a discounted first patient visit…and a free toothbrush. Exciting, no?
- You continue to rely mostly on word-of-mouth referrals while you spin your wheels and waste your money casting a wide net with advertising that you can’t track.
- Ads are most commonly placed in yellow pages, mailers, on your website, and now on Facebook.
So I tell my friend, let’s deconstruct this thing called marketing and take a hard look at what you’re doing wrong:
Your offering is the same as everyone else’s. Your call to action for new patients is the same as everyone else’s. So how do some dentists excel in this market, if all marketing is essentially the same?
The truth is that your marketing approach needs to somehow stand out. Your practice is unique, after all. Your prospective patients just need to know how – in a way that grabs their attention and gives them a reason to act.
Exclusive Benefits Your Patients Can’t Get Anywhere Else
This is where QDP can help.
Not every dentist offers a practice savings plan that trumps insurance benefit maximums. Studies show that people are motivated by club discounts like those at Costco and Sam’s Club. QDP leverages these proven buyer behaviors, allowing you to offer unique savings programs in your practice that can increase your practice revenue while helping your patients afford the dentistry that they need – without giving up all of your profit in promotional discounts or reduced fees for insurance companies.
You don’t want incremental growth, you want double-digit growth. You don’t want sameness, you want to be original. QDP’s program gives you a new message, a leg up, and a way to stand out from the crowd.