Dental Marketing Sucks

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with some soon to be out-of-business dental practice owners.

One thing they keep bringing up is “HOPE”

“I hope the economy gets better.”

“I hope Obama gives us a tax break.”

“I hope I have a good year.”

You know what, F*ck hope. It’s ridiculous to think that hope alone will get you what you desire.

You can’t cash hope at the bank. (That’s why banks don’t give loans to broke people. They don’t want to get repaid in hope.)

Hope without action is just egotistical laziness. Thinking that  anything will change just by hoping it will change is ridiculous.

Look, as I said here, you’re the boss, and it all comes down on your shoulders. If you want things to get better, you need to do something about it. Hoping, dreaming, and thinking about it gets nothing done, and gets you nowhere closer to your goals, and keeping your practice chugging along.

Your patients don’t just hope that their dental problems will go away, that’s what they have you for. In fact, you see a lot of patietns who have hoped for too long, and now their problem is bigger than it started out to be.

So, quit hoping and start doing. Take action and do something to make your desired outcome become a reality. Quit F*cking hoping!

Ok, now I am going to hope there is enough vodka in the cabinet  for another White Russian.

The saying goes: “What a lovely grain of sand, too bad you’re lying on a beach.”

It should be changed to: “What a lovely dental practice, too bad it’s exactly the same as the rest of them.”

Hopefully, as a business owner, you’ve heard of a U.S.P. or Unique Selling Proposition. It’s what makes your practice different and unique from all the other practices out there.

If you are truly unique, your advertising and marketing is easy. You have a solid message, and it’s easy to communicate that with your audience.

But, for the most part, dentists have set the bar incredibly low, and have a very tainted idea as to what makes them unique.

For instance, that CEREC machine sitting in the corner gathering dust may have made you unique 10 years ago, but now every dentist has one of things.

Oh, and the fact that you care for your patients… that’s not unique either. In healthcare, caring is implied. You cannot be unique for something you are supposed to do.

Dentistry has become a commoditized service due to the relative marketing ignorance of the whole. This goes from top level boards and educational facilities down to you, the individual dentist.

A  dentist is a dentist is a dentist as far as any consumer is concerned. People are indifferent to even their own dentist due to the fact that there are few, if any, that are truly going out of their way to stand out.

Your office color, your location, and even how long you’ve been in dentistry is not good enough to differentiate you from the crowd. Oh, and the dental spa… that discontinued being popular and unique once the housing market went in the shitter. Everyone calls themselves a “dental spa” now.

What’s truly unique? Maybe the dentist with an alien themed practice complete with UFO style reception desk and hot pink furry exam chair.

Or maybe the dentist with a wine tasting every first Thursday of the month to show his passion for wine. No shameless pitches for a FREE exam with every tasting, just some like minded people getting together in a location and doing something they love.

It could be the Ultimate Fighting fan dentist that plays UFC fights non-stop in his office and has a cage theme in his exam rooms. (This guy kills it with the 25-45 male crowd. You know, the ones that don’t buy from you.)

There’s even the pilot dentist who has his old flight pictures, military flight suits, and even a propeller from an actual P-51 Mustang in his practice. His patients love to talk with him about his new project and even gives away flights to top patients every now and then.

WAIT, if you notice, the real thing that makes the practice unique is the personality of each dentist within them. They have taken something about themselves, and made it the focus of the practice.

This allows them to do something they love while they also run a successful dental practice.

It also makes sure that they look forward to Monday mornings.

So, what the hell are you really doing to make yourself stand out. If you’re boring, quit doing that. Find something you love to do and figure out how you can make it the pinpoint of your practice.

Then you can stand out among those average frustrated dentists out there.

Twitter sucks…

There I said it, and someone had to. There are too many marketing types spreading the word about Twitter as if it’s the second coming of the Marketing Jesus.

But the truth is, Twitter sucks…

OK, so I use Twitter, and I like it, but as a marketing medium, I have yet to see any return whatsoever from it.

There are three main reasons Twitter just doesn’t cut it…

In many cases, your “tweet” will be seen only by less than 10% of your followers.

This is because as the Twitter stream progresses, your message moves down the page.

If your followers aren’t watching at the moment you make a post, they’ll most likely miss the message all together.

and… the more people your followers follow, the quicker your message gets pushed down the page.

In fact, those who follow 100 or more people, they won’t see a thing unless looking at the page immediately after you post.

#2: You’re competing with more than other dentists.

It’s hard enough to get your message noticed just in your local neighborhood, but on Twitter, you’re trying to compete with everyone… worldwide.

Every dentist, lawyer, and candlestick maker who jumped on the bandwagon is clogging the Twitter stream with their BS hoping that it will land in the right hands.

And… of all the dentists I see on Twitter, many of them are boring as hell, you included.

“Click here for a dental appointment” doesn’t cut it. Your message has to be good (and not boring) to get noticed and passed on.

My advice: QUIT BEING BORING!

#3: The connection on Twitter is loose at best.

This is a big deal. Word of Twitter does not equal word of mouth for the same reason that phone-sex does not equal real sex.

There is no intimacy, no face to a name, no emotion.

Rarely do many Twitter users actually know or meet those that they follow. They follow someone like Shaquille O’Neal or Oprah because they’re famous, not because they are really friends.

The whole point of this article is to let you know that Twitter is OK, but there are many more ways out there to build real relationships.

Get out of your mom’s basement and make a few phone calls, or better yet, put some pants on and go to that networking event and create some real relationships.

Twitter followers are just that… followers. Not real friends, not “connections” and definitely not reliable referral sources.

Be on Twitter if you like, but it (or Facebook, or email) will never replace true person to person, face to face communication.

P.S. Look around, look around a bit. Do you notice that the only ones making real money from Twitter are those selling “How To Use Twitter” courses?

If you’re living under a rock, I give you a free pass. You have no idea what may be going on with this whole internet thing.

Or, perhaps you are like most dentists… you paid some crazy 5-figures type amount to have a crap website created so you could have your practice online.

What you ended up with was an exact replica of your lame practice brochure in electronic form.

The only problem with this is… here it is 3, 5, even 10 years later, and you still have the same lame website.

Your practice has changed, your staff has changed, and hell, even you’ve gotten rid of the mullet, but on your website, you still have the same old pictures.

Oh, and the bell-bottoms and polyester has been out for a while too.

But you paid thousands upon thousands of dollars for your site right, you don’t want to change it… that’s like a waste of money right?

Get with the program doc, the whole exciting part about the internet is that you can change and add and modify your website on the fly.

Your unwillingness to give up that old dinosaur of a website is hurting your practice, and it’s not helping you in the new patient flow department either.

Oh, and as for search engines… they won’t even come near it.

You see, Google likes things that are “relevant” and “timely” because people search for things that are relevant and timely. New information is what people look for on the internet.

What people don’t look for is lame brochures disguised as websites. So Google, and many of the other popular search engines don’t even care.

The biggest f**k up on your part is the fact that the internet has changed in such a way that it won’t cost you $10K more to make the change. There are a lot of frameworks out there (available for free or very cheap) that will help you build a search engine and patient friendly website you can update at will.

Look, I am not going to pitch you on my DentalZip practice website service (click the link), but I want you to get over yourself and come into the 2000′s.

A website is no longer a set it and forget it type deal. If you wanted that, you could buy one of those Ronco infomercial ovens.

I said the above quote to someone today and they asked what I meant.

I said… “If I have to explain it, it ruins the beauty.”

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There was a time back before you were a dentist that it sounded like the perfect life.

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