Should you outsource dental marketing services to a dental marketing company

December 24, 2018, STRODIN Dental Marketing

If you’re a dentist or a dental office manager looking to grow your practice, two important questions trouble you:

Is is necessary to promote your dental office (even if you already have a decent client base)?
Should you hire a dental marketing company for these dental marketing services or you can have your own team do it?

Let’s take them one by one.

Is is necessary to promote your dental office (even if you already have a decent client base)?

Let’s take the case where your dental practice is pretty well positioned and you have a steady flow of customers.

Why should you bother marketing your dental practice if you are already almost full of patients?

The truth is, you shouldn’t. At least not for the short term.

But what happens if more and more practices start popping up in your area? Well, here you need to promote your office if you want patients to choose you and not the dentist next door.

But what if you don’t have much competition? What if there are only a couple of dental offices in your whole area? Is it still worth it to market your dental office?

It’s pretty simple. Let’s say you want to increase profits. And you simply raise prices. What happens then? How do you convey to your potential patients that they should come to you and not go three blocks further to another dentist?

Marketing kicks in.

A lot of people don’t think about this because they think marketing it’s just about bombarding people with ads.

In fact, marketing is communication. You communicate that you are the best in your field. You are communicating that you are the most trusted advisor of your patients. You communicate the fact that it’s safer to go with you than with your competition. Hence the higher price.

For all this, you need marketing. Because people who pass by your dental office won’t know this from the logo that’s upfront your practice.

Ok, let’s say for now you started taking into account that you need to promote your dental office.

Do you hire a dental marketing company or consultant or is it much more effective to do it in-house?
 

Should you hire a dental marketing company for these dental marketing services or you can have your own team do it?

Since this article is written by a dental marketing consultant, you might expect to go with the first choice - hiring a dental marketing specialist.

The truth is, it depends and the answer will shock you a bit. Let’s break this question down to see which option suits you best depending on your team structure. 
 

1) Does your team have the time to promote your office?

If your team is already full, don’t expect them to do a good job with this. Patient marketing isn’t just about creating some simple dental ads that say: “hey, we are a dental office. Come visit us. We’re great”.

Coming up with creative dental marketing ideas (not to mention putting them into a cohesive dental marketing strategy) takes a lot of effort even if you are an expert in the dental industry.

And this leads us to our next question. 

2) Is your in-house team or person a dental marketing expert?

There’s one thing to brainstorm for marketing ideas for your dental office and there’s a completely different thing to put all these ideas into an dental marketing strategy that works.

Only a dental marketing expert with experience knows how to prioritise ideas based on effectiveness AND resources.

Let me illustrate.

Let’s say your dental office needs patients fast. But someone who doesn’t know the marketing channels very well and doesn’t have the proper experience, might suggest to use SEO to get traffic and patients or guest posts on other websites.

SEO is a great way to get new patients. But not in this case.
Why?

Because it takes time until you rank in Google. Depending on your competition it can take from 6 month to 1 year for your website to show up when someone searches for “dentist in + your town”.

A better dental marketing strategy would be to get traffic fast through Google Ads or Facebook Ads while investing in SEO for the long term.

To conclude this point, if your in-house team doesn’t have marketing experience, it’s better to hire a dental marketing company.

But what if you know someone who is good at marketing, should you still outsource the marketing part?

You’ll be a little surprised to hear this from a dental marketing consultant, but the answer is no. It’s better to have someone in-house.

Why?

Two reasons.

1) That person can concentrate full-time to grow your dental practice.
A dental marketing company has other practices to focus on too, so they’ll not dedicate full time for your project.

2) An in-house dental marketing consultant can get live feedback.
This is crucial. If a patient is not happy with the services or if a patient is amazed by the quality of the services, an in-house dental marketing expert can get all this feedback and incorporate it in his dental marketing plan.

So, should you outsource your dental marketing to a dental marketing company?

The answer is no. If you have a marketing expert who can work 100% in your practice, you shouldn’t.

But if you have to choose between having your team handling the marketing part for your dental practice and hiring a dental marketing agency, freelancer or consultant, you should outsource it.

In the end it will be cheaper and much more effective. 

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