In dental school, we were taught all about drilling and filling, placing a crown, providing an implant, you name it. However, we weren’t taught much about the business side of things. Crunching the numbers of overhead is difficult enough, but there are even trickier facets to tackle—like marketing.
There are reasons marketing companies exist, after all, and it’s largely because people just don’t want to do it themselves—and not just dentists. Marketing can be a headache to take on, to say the least, especially when there’s so much money involved in the process.
But marketing isn’t something we have the option to do or not do. If you want your dental practice to succeed, you’ll need to implement effective marketing strategies. However, the question is, do we hire someone else to do the job?
1. What might go wrong with hiring an external company to take over your marketing?
Outsourcing your marketing to a company can be a gamble. Oftentimes, they’ll throw your practice on autopilot and assume money will trickle in thanks to basic strategies used by many before. You pay them a good amount of money to manage your ad spend but, ironically, you don’t have money leftover after you pay them to throw into ads.
They might find great success for the dental practices they manage in one area but can be unresponsive to how the market is trending in your specific location. There’s also often a slow delivery to actually get things up and running once you do hire them. It can take months and months for them to actually formulate a campaign tailored to the needs of your practice and, even then, you may be unhappy with their formula.
When we’re running our own practice, there’s a lot of emotions involved. When it comes to putting together a “proper” marketing campaign, we want things to be done right and care a lot about what we’re investing our capital into. While emotions aren’t always the best recipes for running a business, they do mean that we’ll care more about every pivot we make and put more thought into creating unique approaches that’ll work for our model.
However, for many of these larger marketing agencies, you’re just a number to them. They’re managing the ads of a multitude of dental practices, and they don’t carry that same emotional investment that you do. They’ll likely incorporate tried-and-true strategies that are no different than those they incorporate into other practices, which means you won’t have a crafty approach that stands out from the herd.
2. Can they do a better job than you?
That said, there are some marketing companies that you can rely on to shake up the status quo and offer a different dynamic. They can work intricately with your practice to create an approach that is tailored toward your clientele, location, and so on.
These marketing companies offer better results and a more personalized experience, but they’re harder to find. If you’re in a city, they might invest more in billboards. If you’re living in a more rural area where social media isn’t as popular, they might turn to more direct mail. Perhaps they turn to placing radio ads. The list goes on.
The point is, you don’t want bad results that you have no control over. It’ll be frustrating to waste your marketing dollars on ineffective strategies. But, the truth is, it doesn’t always work out that way—a marketing company can be helpful. They allow you to focus on dentistry rather than driving patients to your practice. With a good marketing company, you can depend on them to get the phones ringing and the schedules filled.
3. Are you prepared to play a numbers-based game?
To be a good marketer, you need to be a bit of a data nut. It requires having spreadsheets full of statistics with depth and complexity where you’re tracking important metrics and measuring your progress, success, etc.
So many dentists want to do marketing—they want the results—but they fall short on the collecting and tracking of data over time. They get lost when setting up a system to accurately track new patients and hold their team accountable for those patients. Therefore, their data gets muddy. They don’t really know how many of their new patients come from organic efforts versus the new tactics they’re deploying versus other things they’re doing.
Having the best data possible is what will allow you to be an informed marketer and market effectively over time. When you have a down month, you may see that your bottom line is suffering but be unable to pinpoint the causes without the data. You may be able to discern that your issue is patient retention, a lack of new patients, etc. You’re able to identify what, exactly, fell through that month. This can be hard to stay on top of, though, which is why it can be helpful to outsource your marketing.
4. Will handling your own marketing be too much of a drain on your valuable time?
Marketing can be a drain on your time if not done properly and, as an entrepreneur, time is your most valuable resource—so you ought to invest your time wisely. If you’re spending your time and effort trying to get patients to come into your office, other aspects of your practice may not get enough time and effort spent on them.
Could you be doing things in your office and influencing your team to have a better culture, offer a better patient experience, and sustain better patient retention? Are you ensuring that every single one of those patients is coming in actually converts to treatment and gets dentistry done and sticks around? If not, then marketing might be in your bandwidth time-wise. You better buckle down on those areas before you start tackling any marketing, and outsourcing may be the best option for you.
Think about it. You’d have to put in a whole lot of elbow grease to ensure you’re not marketing with old-school, obsolete strategies. Would you be able to keep abreast of what is current with what Google ads behave like today? Remember that what the algorithm is doing today is way different than what is was doing six months ago, two years ago, or even five years ago.
It’s up to you.
It can definitely go both ways when outsourcing your marketing efforts to someone outside of your practice walls. But sometimes safe isn’t better than sorry. You don’t want to end up tied down by your marketing and become distracted from what you do best. In the end, it’s up to you.
I run a community full of dental professionals who can give you some nuggets of wisdom about marketing in a dental practice. So, join the Nifty Thrifty Dentists Facebook group and reach out! People from all across the globe will be happy to let you in on their two cents.