The hidden dangers of hiring a dental marketing company

You are a busy dentist and your time is already spread thin. You are a specialist in the dental industry, not in the marketing one.

But you need to promote your dental practice and you want to hire one of the top dental marketing agencies and not some amateur guy who wastes both your time and money.

Because if you hire the wrong person, you risk not only losing a lot of money on marketing campaigns that don’t perform, but you also risk of damaging the brand reputation of your dental practice.

So how do you know which dental marketing company or consultant is legit and who’s not since you don’t know much about marketing or online marketing?

Let’s find out.

How to hire a dental marketing company (even if you know nothing about marketing)

It’s simple: you have to ask the right questions.

And you need to know what would be good answers and bad answers to this question.

And if you know nothing at all about marketing a dental practice, fear not, we’ll discuss everything you need to know here.

Check if they have a dental marketing strategy to grow a dental practice

If a marketing consultant or marketing agency which doesn’t have a proper plan they follow, it means they don’t know what they are doing.

Even if at the first meeting they don’t have a personalized dental marketing plan for your particular case, they should have an idea on how they tie together all the dental marketing ideas.

Their dental marketing plan should have clear goals such as:

• Increase the traffic on the website by 50% till [introduce date here]
• Increase the conversion rate on the website by 30% till [introduce date here]
• Attract 40 new patients in the first month of collaboration

The plan should also detail the main marketing strategies for your dental practice:

• Content marketing
• Paid marketing
• SEO
• Referral marketing

Each of these strategies should be detailed and prioritized based on your resources and the specific context of your dental practice.

Check if they have specific and measurable goals

Here’s the thing: you don’t want to hire someone to promote your dental practice without first having established some SMART goals.

Why?

Here’s an example. Let’s say your dental marketing agency or consultant starts a campaign with the following objective: “let’s get more patients” or “let’s grow your dental practice’s brand awareness”.

If this marketer brings you 5 more clients than you used to have, he attained his objective. More patients isn’t something specific.

“50 new patients every month starting from month two” is a SMART goal.

Check if you can measure the dental marketing efforts in some way

Marketing isn’t an overnight quick fix. This is why it can take some time till you see some results. And the results you should see are more patients at the end of the month.

But till then, you should see how your dental marketing efforts are progressing. How?

Well, you can set up intermediary goals that can help you reach your main objective.

For example, the traffic growth in Google Analytics. Or the number of newsletter subscribers.

Or you can see how many people complete a form to schedule an appointment on your website (you can see this with Google Analytics)

Avoid vanity metrics like: number of likes on Facebook or number of followers. It’s not that it’s not important to invest in social media marketing, it’s that increasing the number of Facebook likes won’t necessarily increase the amount of new patients by the same factor.

Check how well they know the available online marketing instruments

There are so many things you can do nowadays thanks to these online marketing tools in order to market a dental practice.

To find out how expert they really are, ask them to give you a few online dental marketing ideas.

For example, a great way to get new patients using Social Media Marketing is to retarget people who visited your website but didn’t take any action.

What does retargeting mean? Let’s say someone visits your website, but doesn’t take any action. You can then show this person an ad on his Facebook newsfeed and send him some more content that could convince him or her to come back to your website and schedule an appointment.

What can you show him? Maybe testimonials from previous patients. Or maybe you can answer some of the objections he might have like “will teeth whitening damage my teeth?”.

What else can you do?

You can do A/B testing which means showing people different messages (both on your website and in your ads) to see which converts better.

Do they pass the beer test?

You can hire the best dental marketing agency in the world, but if you don’t like the people, things won’t end up well.

This is why you need the beer test which is pretty simple. Just ask yourself: would you go out to have a beer with this agency?

If the answer is no, or “hell, noooo!”, then try another one.

What is their oldest client?

Dental marketing services aren’t quite as a quick fix as a visit to the dentist where you come for teeth cleaning once and that’s it.

Marketing is an ongoing job. This is why top dental marketing companies usually have clients that stick with them for at least one year.

So, asking your next dental marketing consultant what is an average period of collaboration with his clients is crucial if you want to be sure you make the right decision.