Dental marketing is tricky, challenging, difficult, and demanding. In this day and age, no one will tell you that marketing a business or a profession is easy. It’s frustrating to see your peers make it. It’s even more frustrating to realize you’re the reason why your dental practice did not succeed.
You could have made a difference in your dental marketing strategy if you listened to experts, followed trends, and asked for feedback from your patients. Isn’t it disappointing to realize you’re at fault? But it is true. Dentists and their marketers make silly mistakes because they are too stubborn to bend their so-called rules.
Not Updating Your Knowledge
The worst thing you could do for your dental practice is not to update your knowledge about how to attract new patients and retain old ones. This practice of rejecting ideas—whether new or old—is what’s going to kill any chances of you bringing traffic to your site and patients to your clinic.
You can update your knowledge about dental marketing in a variety of ways. You can subscribe to a marketing blog. You can watch YouTube videos. You can listen to TED Talks. You can attend industry events. You can enroll in a crash course. You can mingle with the community. From these activities, you’ll find out a lot about what your market needs from you.
Being Unmindful of Trends
Updating your knowledge about marketing your profession also means being mindful of trends—what will work and what will not work for your practice. Not every trend will target your market. Just the same, not all trends will be wrong for you. If you take the time to know about the different trends in the industry, you’ll be more empowered to find the right one that works for your practice.
In the past decade, we have seen how dental websites transitioned. Have you checked your website recently? Did you make a blog? More importantly, are you writing blogs regularly? You are never going to survive this industry without web and content marketing. At least for the time being, nothing’s going to trump these two methods of internet marketing.
Never Asking for Feedback
When was the last time you asked your past patients for feedback? They already told you how good you are at what you do. Why haven’t they left a testimonial on your website or social media page? Here’s why: you didn’t ask for it. That’s right. You have to ask for it. You have to remind your patients if they have forgotten to do so. It’s part of the job. It’s part of dental marketing your practice.