10 Common Dental Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid in Order to Dominate Your 5 Mile Radius

Dental marketing can help you grow your practice. Mistakes, however, are often being made in the process to the detriment of your dental practice’s goals. Here are some of those common mistakes you should avoid.

• Working the wrong community – Targeting an upscale neighborhood a dozen miles away from your middle-class neighborhood dental practice location is a waste of advertising dollars. Your marketing should focus within a 5-mile radius to effectively attract patients.
• Failing to track advertising results objectively – Don’t just rely on stories or opinions from your staff about which marketing approach is making an impact. You have to know which patient came from which source so you can see which one is working better and which approach to dump for being ineffective. There are dozens of tracking system software that can help you out in that regard.
• Focusing more on services, not patients’ needs – Your marketing should be about your patients. A little less trumpeting about your newest expertise or the bleeding-edge machines you have in your office and more addressing patients’ common dental/oral concerns in your ads would be great.
• Not taking advantage of all available channels – There are a wealth of ways to let people know your dental practice exists, so don’t just pick one or two that’s convenient for you. Use them all, from social media ads to email newsletters.
• Not blogging – Blogging is great when you focus on educating readers, not selling services and products to them. If you don’t blog, you miss using a powerful tool for dental marketing.
• Writing your own ad copy – Writing for your blog is all right, but your ads are an entirely different thing. Leave the ad copy to the specialists whose set of skills include art direction, copywriting and editing, SEO and analysis, among other things.
• Ignoring the competition – Don’t turn a blind eye to your competition. If you know what they’re offering or the things they’re up to, you’ll be able to match or even exceed their efforts.
• Same message, different patient groups – It would be annoying for patients who just want their gums to stop bleeding to receive a slick marketing email offering to make their smile perfect and sexy. Your messages should be tailored to the needs of different patient groups.
• Sending mobile unfriendly emails – More than 75 percent of people read email on mobile devices, so your emails should be properly formatted to ensure that tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices can read the messages clearly.
• Not providing fresh email content – Readers will just tune out if you keep rehashing the same content or just providing links to your blog with every email. Give your audience fresh and compelling relevant content, and they’ll have a reason to read your messages and pay attention to your dental practice.