The top 10 mistakes Australian dentists make with their marketing (Part 3)

Continuing with our series on the marketing mistakes dentists are making, this week on Marketing Monday with Angus Pryor, the founder of Dental Profit System, Angus will be sharing with you some great ways to attract new clients to your practice.

Hello, entredentists. Angus Pryor here, the creator of Dental Profit System, co-author of Kindle crushing book, the Better Business Book, bringing you this week’s Marketing Monday, the weekly show designed to boost the marketing at your dental practice.

Now, today, we’re going to talk about top 10 mistakes that most dentists are making in their marketing. This has been part of a series. If you want to see the other ones, get onto my Facebook page, and you’ll see we had one to three. We had four, five, six, and today, we’re going to do seven, eight, nine. Number 10 is coming next week.

The one we want to look at for number seven, the mistake that I see dentists making with their marketing, is not partnering with local businesses. I want you to think about something. If your business has less clients than you want, there is a non-competing business that’s near you that already has a relationship with their clients that would be ideal clients for you. Have you ever thought about that? Somebody else who is not competing with you, who’s nearby, has got a relationship with your perfect client.

The reality is if you can set up on an arrangement with them, then you can have something that’s mutually beneficial. To give you an idea, as a dentist you could set up something with a pharmacy, you could set up something with a doctor, something with a physio, an audiologist. There’s a range of sort of physiological overlaps, which is pretty obvious, and maybe business overlaps. That’s a mistake there that’s not that difficult to set up, and you get a real opportunity.

Mistake number eight that I see relates to dentists that are not marketing to their existing patients. Some of you will think, “Well, you know, that’s a bit uncool. Like, if they’re existing patients, why should I be marketing to them?” But I don’t want you to think for a second just because someone turns up once every six months or every 12 months that they’re somehow fully engaged with your practice, and fully engaged with what you could do for them.

One of the things that you could do is it would be completely acceptable to be emailing your patients, maybe once a month, whether you do that where you highlight a particular situation that’s going on, for example, an email about maybe bleeding gums. I’ve seen some data that suggest as high as half the population is struggling with that. Maybe there would be something that you could draw to their attention so you could send an email once a month.

You could have a newsletter. It’s said that people only do business with people that they know, like and trust. The fact is if you’ve got a newsletter that you can inject some of your personality there where they’re getting to know you more as a person and actually know your business and you can provide some information, etc, etc.

Other things are birthdays. What are you doing to existing patients in relation to their birthday? You send them a card? Are you sending them a text? What if you were to partner with like a local restaurant that had a voucher that said “Free dessert” and you could send that out? That’s another really important way of engaging with your local clients, your existing clients. Because, at the end of the day, the more engaged they are with you, the more likely they are to actually be doing business with you. When it comes to you, for example, if you’ve got a treatment plan for them, the more engaged they are with you, the more likely they are to accept that.

Number nine, signage. Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that you don’t have existing signage. But do you actually measure how successful it is? One of the first things that I mentioned in this top 10 mistakes is not measuring your referral sources. I had a client I worked with recently where we measured their referral sources over a three-month period. They’re on a busy road, and they didn’t get a single client mention that they came to them by virtue of their signage. What that says to me is the signage is not working.

Now, there’s really two factors where the signage is: How big it is; if you’ve got a little brass plate and that’s it, if you’ve got something that’s really big, and, secondly, how memorable it is. I saw some data recently that suggested we could have as many as a million messages that we receive, whether it’s every week or every month or whatever the case is. A case in point, when you drive home today, try and pay attention to some business that’s sitting on the side of the road that you’ve been driving every day. That you’ve been driving past every day for months and you’ve never even noticed they’re there, so signage is really important.

All right, so that’s it. Partnering with local businesses, marketing to existing patients, and signage. Is it actually working? Is it actually generating clients?

Well, next week, we’re going to look at number 10, but otherwise, if you want some further information, head across to dentalprofitsystem.com. We’ve got a very limited number of places for a one-hour session with me where we will do a bit of an audit of your practice and come up with a plan for the next year. Otherwise, for me, Angus Pryor, signing off. See you next week on Marketing Monday.