What goes around comes around, they say, and we thought it was time for these questions to make an encore appearance.
If you don’t have a dental marketing company, the odds are that you will at some point. And the odds are good that you’ll part ways with that company after they disappoint you with the results they produce. Then, it will be time to begin the search for another provider.
With both of those points in mind, here are SmartBox’s Top 10 Questions You Should Ask Your Marketing Company… current or future.
For brevity’s sake, we’ll feature the first five in today’s post, and the remaining five questions on Thursday.
- Do you work ONLY with dentists?
Dental prospects have a unique set of wants, hopes, and fears. “General” marketing techniques don’t speak to those concerns. You’re not a lawyer trying to attract accident victims, you’re a skilled medical professional who changes lives. You need a dental marketing company with a firm grasp on how to motivate dental patients to choose your practice rather than a competitor’s.
- Do you guarantee SEO / organic placement?
Whenever a new website is launched, even at the same URL, it takes time for the search engine web crawlers to find and index it for search. The same holds true for paid media.
Beware of your new provider using “black hat” SEO techniques that are not only unethical but illegal in Google’s eyes. Your practice could be facing penalties in search results when – not if – Google discovers their tricks. This means big penalties to your rankings in the search engines.
- Are you fully transparent in monitoring and tracking my campaign results?
SmartBox tracks and records all your new patient calls and segments them by marketing campaign. SmartBox’s team of (real, actual people) analysts reviews every call and marks them by category – scheduled new patient, not scheduled new patient, not answered, existing patient, miscellaneous. Our fully transparent, HIPAA-compliant PracticeHQ
dashboard is available 24/7 so you can review key reporting indicators and patient attraction metrics that really matter to you.
- Are you managing onsite and offsite SEO?
If that question yields nothing but a blank look, it’s time to run for the hills! SEO is a big, complicated, vital deal. You’ve got to be sure that your marketing firm can do it flawlessly. Onsite optimization uses tools such as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and heat-mapping software.
SmartBox’s onsite optimization includes, but isn’t limited to, keyword research and optimization, content optimization, schema markup, internal linking, title tag creation & customization, and page speed load optimization.
Offsite SEO includes competitive research, link-building, social media sharing, blog integration, social publishing, search engine submissions, and directory submissions.
- Is the content on my site 100 percent custom? Who’s writing it?
Duplicate (plagiarized) content is a great way to get unranked by search engines, and it’ll damage your SEO. Deliberate plagiarism can even get you banned by the search engines. Firms that outsource content writing to freelancers risk your business, your market, and your prospects being misunderstood … or worse. That’s a recipe for failure.
Food for thought, yes? Check out Thursday’s post when questions 6 through 10 will appear.