10 biggest mistakes dentists are making with their marketing – Part 2

Continuing with our series on the top 10 mistakes dentists are making with their marketing, this week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor, the founder of Dental Profit System, will be asking you a few critical questions that will get you to rethink your marketing strategies.

Transcript: The top 10 mistakes Australian dentists make with their marketing (Part 2)

Hi everyone. Angus Pryor here from the creator of the Dental Profit System. The co-author of the Kindle crushing book, The Better Business Book, bringing you this week’s Marketing Monday. The weekly show designed to boost the marketing at your dental practice.

The series that I’m in the middle of. Two weeks ago we looked at the first three biggest mistake that I see in marketing for dentists. This week we’re going to look at the next three.

Mistake number four, in fact, I’m not going to tell you what it is, I’m just going to ask you this question. I want you to imagine that a business approaches you and says “Hey look, we’re quite good at what we do. We are pretty similar to other businesses in our space. In fact, there’s nothing particularly unique about us, but we do deliver that service and we’re quite good at what we do. Would you be interested in becoming our client?”

How do you think you would react to that if a business comes to you like that? And yet the reality is that’s what I see dentist offering every day of the week. It’s what I call vanilla flavored marketing, where the dentist failed to actually identify themselves as somehow being different or better from the other dentist that are out there. Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla. Think about what it is you can do that makes you unique and really highlights you as being different from the other dentists around.

To give you an idea. If you’re saying, well, we’re friendly, we’ve got good customer service, we’ve got good technical skills. I want to tell you as a dentist, it’s what Mark Kostas calls the tickets to the dance. It’s like, that’s how you get to be in business, that’s expected. Think about what you can do that’s actually different. All right, that’s number four.

Number five. On your website, one thing I don’t see very often and you really should do is on every single page, have a really obvious call to action. If you’ve got a page that’s about crowns and at the bottom of the page you say, to find out the difference that crowns can make for you, call us now or book an appointment. You know, whatever the page is make it really, really obvious what it is that you want people to do. Mostly, I just see this information, and the problem with that is that people read the information and go, oh, that’s nice. And they get distracted or whatever and they don’t do anything. But the whole point of all those different pages on your website it to get people to do something. Decide what it is. Make it really clear on your website.

Mistake number six that I see. Unless your practice is booked four weeks in advance, six weeks in advance and people can’t go in, in my view you are absolutely barking mad if you don’t have a referral system in place. Now, referral systems can work in different ways. It’s really awesome. There are two main ways you could do it. At a minimum, if a client refers a new patient to you, send them a card through the post, at a minimum.

Even better than that would be to actually send them a card and perhaps a voucher or whatever with a personalized letter. Because as we worked out a few weeks back, one of the things you need to do is know what the value of each patient is. But I can tell you from the times I have done that down in Australia, it will bring 500 and 1000 dollars a year. Do you think you wouldn’t send a toot or a card through the post? That’s one way.

Another way is to actually set up a competition for referrals. Obviously, you want to ask people who are happy in your business and maybe every month or two you give away a tele or a tablet or a night out on us or whatever. Interestingly, that type of promo seems to work really well in a kind of middle to middle lower socioeconomic area. I used to work in that space a bit, repping many years ago. And any kind of freebies and stuff they love that stuff in that kind of area. That’s tip number six.

All right. That’s it for me for Angus Pryor. We’ll see you next week for the next in our series of Marketing Mistakes by Dentists. Until then, see you next week.