Dentists can develop excellent clinical skills, a soothing chairside manner, and an awesome team to take great care of patients. They can invest in a good location, necessary tools, and reliable practice management software. However, dentists should also take time to focus on dental marketing.
Spending energy to develop a solid dental marketing plan will increase your practice’s potential for success, from day one. I want to guide you through identifying the factors that go into developing a great marketing plan so that you can enjoy a successful practice, where you can perform the type of dentistry you find most enjoyable and profitable. Answer the questions below, then contact me, Shauna at Identiwrite Creative, for a complimentary consultation about to discuss your target market and dental practice marketing plan.
The answers to the following questions will help you:
- Determine your return on investment for marketing.
- Identify the dental services you need to focus on in your marketing efforts.
- Identify the age, income, race, gender of your dental office’s target market so that you can focus on marketing to this group. With your marketing company, you’ll consider where these potential patients go, what they do for fun, where they spend money, and how to attract them to your practice.
- Identify the best cities in which to focus your marketing efforts, both in print and SEO/web.
- Determine if what you’re doing now is working so that you can seek out potential problems and correct them OR alter your marketing strategy.
- Create a keyword list for SEO that will cater to the search trends of your ideal patient, as well as your most lucrative services.
- Build a brand that will speak to your target market.
- Develop a smart marketing plan with executable agenda items that suit your budget and aim toward your target market.
Set aside an hour or two to work through this questionnaire.
- Identify your ideal case.
- What 3 dental services do you most like to perform?
- From which services do you make the most profit?
- List your top 10 all-time favorite cases by service (not patient name).
- Identify your ideal patient.
- Who are your 10 favorite patients to treat?
- What’s their age range?
- How do they pay for dental care?
- Why do you like to have them as patients?
- Where do they work?
- Do they live with family?
- Are they male or female?
- What treatments have they undergone at your office (by service)?
- Study local demographics.
- Go to www.city-data.com and look up your city.
What is the population? - What is the median income range?
- What is the average household size?
- How many people live in a home, on average?
- Are there more multi- or singe family dwellings?
- What are the largest employers in your area?
- List cities within 12-20 miles of your office.
- Look up and note the demographics on those cities, just like you did with your office’s city.
- Look at the demographics of your patients of record.
- What’s the average age?
- What’s the average case cost?
- What are the main races?
- Do you have more men or women?
- What cities do they come from?
- Consider your past and present marketing efforts, as well as their results.
- Do you have a website?
Does the site have original text? - How many pages does the site have?
- What year was the site created?
- Do you have Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Google Authorship installed on your website? If so, do you analyze the data monthly?
- Do you conduct a monthly keyword ranking search via Incognito page on Google?
- Do you have a blog?
- How often do you post blogs?
- Are the blogs original?
- How many new patients calls do you get from your website each month?
- Do you have a Facebook professional page?
- How often do you post to the page?
- Do you have a Facebook business page?
- How often do you post to the page?
- Have you claimed your Google My Business and G+ listing?
- How often do you post to your G+ business page?
- What other social networks are you involved with?
- How often do you post on each profile?
- Do you have any online reviews from patients?
- If so, where?
- Are the reviews positive or negative?
- If negative, have you responded publicly?
- Have you received any new patient calls from your social media efforts?
- Do you send email reminders, e-blasts, e-newsletters, or print newsletters to your patients of record?
- Do you have an email list of current and/or potential patients?
- How many new patients do you get from word-of-mouth referral each month?
- Do you invest in paid online ads, and if so where and how much do you spend on each monthly?
- Do you invest in print marketing, and if so how often and how much do you spend monthly?
- What other marketing do you invest time and/or money in?
If you have trouble completing this questionnaire, skip the hard or irrelevant questions. Once you’ve gone as far as you can, or if you have questions along the way, call Shauna Duty at Identiwrite Creative, 940-395-5115 for assistance at no cost. You can also pose your questions on www.Facebook.com/Identiwrite Creative or email [email protected].
About Shauna Duty: As a copywriter, copy director, and owner of dental marketing companies, Shauna has worked with hundreds of copywriters, developers, and SEO experts. Today, she hires only those with high standards for excellence and quality. Shauna owns and manages Identiwrite Creative, a content marketing agency that caters to dentists, dental specialists, dental consultants, and dental website and SEO agencies.
