Dental practice marketing: Understanding the complexity of growth and the impact of marketing

Abe Kasbo

 

Every dental practice owner wants more patients, because there is a common belief that new patients mean growth. Additionally, almost every practice owner believes that attracting new patients is a marketing issue. Let me cut to the chase and submit that this is not necessarily the case, and I will go even further and say it is an unreasonable business premise.

Growth is not a binary issue in any business. Growth in the dental practice comes from many areas, and, therefore, your marketing communications must reflect the reality of your business goals. Today’s financial and competitive pressures make it more important than ever to understand the fundamentals of marketing. You must understand how marketing impacts your practice and how to use marketing to gain a competitive advantage while building long-term equity.

Before we go further, allow me to share how we define marketing at our firm, as it will serve as an important point of departure for this discussion: Marketing is the art and science of convincing people to buy your stuff. When done successfully, marketing makes people adopt your idea or buy your product or services over and over again, creating true believers until they advocate for you.

Marketing starts with defining your growth strategy

The marketing ecosystem is changing at lightning speed, which impacts every business including dentistry. Media fragmentation is taking its toll on businesses to the point where attention spans have dwindled to reading 140 characters or the newly rolled out seven-second TV commercial. We now live in a mobile world, where communications channels are constantly changing. This is why defining your growth strategy is imperative and even more important than your marketing tactics. While the internet may be a key driver of business for some practices, social search and voice technology may be what drives others. Regardless of technologies and advertising channels, in my experience, dental practices that start by defining their growth strategies inevitably do better than those that do not.