Is your image of a consumer someone who uncritically chooses the goods or services that businesses offer? You’d better rethink that, because the rise of “consumerism” is changing the face of commerce.
Take smart phones as an example. Every new phone has a huge marketing push, and some people seem to be compulsive adopters of the “latest and greatest.” Most other people, however, will wait for the independent reviews to come in from the first adopters. Based on comparability in features and price, it’s likely that cell phone coverage, phone reliability, and user-friendliness will be the determining factors.
With the availability of huge amounts of information online– more information than at any time in history – consumers today aren’t limited to just a few choices in service providers. They can pick and choose based on independent online reviews.
In other words, neither your marketing nor your website will necessarily sell potential patients on the idea of making you their dentist. You’re going to have to do much more to convince prospects to choose you instead of a competitor.
You Don’t Need Every Dental Patient
That’s practically capitalism heresy, but the fact is that you’re better served by better patients, not just more patients. You’ll do best to position yourself as the only logical choice to solve those better patients’ dental problems. Those are the patients who have the ability and willingness to pay more for a dentist who they like, relate to, and trust as a concerned dental expert.
They won’t just take your word that you’re the right choice, although you can cover some of the ground by establishing a strong online presence – blog posts, social media posts, free white papers, and the like.
But producing a steady stream of quality dental content is a time-consuming process, and not one that most dentists should take on. You make money by seeing patients and solving their dental problems. As essential as marketing is, it doesn’t make you one cent. It merely provides more people to make money on by providing services.
So, if today’s “consumerist” consumers take a lot of convincing, but it’s not economically feasible for you to produce a steady stream of proof, what are your options? Some dentists have chosen buy pre-packaged dental content from firms that produce it. That’s a very bad idea. Producing that content is expensive, and most of the providers, even if they tell you that it’s exclusive to you, will sell the same product to many, many dentists to make more money.
Google is death on duplicate content; only the first instance of it appearing online gets the boost in search engine results page rankings. The other websites on which it appears can actually draw a penalty or even be banned from Google search.
Another option is to ally yourself with a marketing firm that specializes in dental practices. There are fewer of those than you would think; the vast majority try to apply general marketing practices to dental patients’ particular needs. That’s an approach that almost always fails to attract the patients dentists need to grow their practices.
Even worse, most marketing firms take the traditional approach to dental marketing. You wind up being “just another dentist,” and that’s not who your better prospects are looking for.
If you’re serious about getting not only more new patients, but better patients, here’s a suggestion.
Visit www.patientattractionblueprint.com and sign up for a Blueprint session. We reserve those sessions for dentists who want to see a Patient Attraction System™ that can double or even triple their practices.