My name is Nicholas Romano and I am the office manager at Ridgecrest Dental. It has been 4 years since I first started a full on social media campaign for Ridgecrest Dental. In that time I have researched, tracked, measured and analyzed what I could do to make them stand out as a business.
My findings led me to believe that it does not take a $2000.00 budget per month of print advertising, radio commercials or expensive software to reach your target market. I attended a whiteboard presentation on Demandforce last month ($350 per month!) and quite frankly was not sold. The main issue I had was that it did not integrate with our software. Secondly, it seemed that in an attempt to secure sales in every industry the software was unable to attend to direct needs that the dental world craves. Don’t get me wrong the program is very capable of building business revenues, but it was not the right fit for us.
I am a consumer just like everyone else, but it just so happens that I tend to be a little more aware of the marketing that company’s use to lure us into buying. My personal favorite are the logo urinal pucks in NFL stadiums, but I digress. I kid you not, the dental and medical world is years behind in terms of website development and social media. Searching for the correct Doctor or office can turn into a nightmare really quickly. In our demographic almost 70% of the Doctors do not have a website! We live in an time where patients want to have the convenience of scheduling online, paying bills online and researching what office to choose. Why not make their choice easier by creating an informative website! So how are Doctors supposed to market their practices?
A few questions to ask yourself before launching a marketing campaign are as follows:
- What do we do as an office that is better than our competition? Examples include: technology,patient care, state-of-the-art facilities.
- What type of patients are we looking for? What is our demographic? (age,location, ect)
- If asked why someone should visit your office, what would you say?
- Does my staff recognize and understand the vision for my practice?
- How do we provide our patients with the best possible care?
These are just a few questions to start off with and I’m sure many more will follow. Statistically, from the time I put our website online, our business has experienced 34.7% increase in brand awareness within our demographic. I did not do anything elaborate to enhance the website (i.e no paid advertising), but what I did do is use keywords correctly, periodically change testimonials and keep it modern. After a year of using Google Analytics (a free service) I was able to narrow down what words I needed to use. This service has helped me immensely, please check it out because it really can help your practice.
The benefits of an interactive website and social media has been a proven method to build brand awareness. We use bufferapp.com (another free service) to help us post effectively to all of our media outlets. Check it out because I promise it will make social media posting a whole lot easier. The Hubspot website grader (free free free) can help you track your performance as well! Marketing effectively is being able to do something different then your competition. Once you figure out what your competitive advantage is, market it using the above techniques and success will follow. There are plenty of other tools that you can use. Whatever your method is remember that the more exposure your office has, the patient is able to research you and make an educated choice!
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