Dentist, Are You Ready For The Relationship Marketing?

The other day I received a mail newsletter from one of the local dental practices. It is the only newsletter I’ve ever received for the past couple of years. I was curious enough to go through every articles and news there. I would agree that they have done a great job, not only by delivering valuable information but by building its brands. Although it is costly to do that mail-out campaign, it is effective in building relationship between patience and its practice- just by that 2-page color printed newsletter.

As a matter of fact, dental patience tends to easily switch to new practice every time they see a coupon somewhere. While most of the dental practices have been aware of that, they fail to use various marketing ways to build the brand loyalty with their existing customers.

We are talking about relationship marketing more and more. Because to acquire new customers takes about 80% of the time, effort and money, but the revenue which generated is only 20% or less at the beginning. With the royalty relationship building up, we are going to generate more and more revenue.

There are some online relationship marketing tools other than those traditional ones. For example, email newsletters, coupon offers, rewards program, sweepstakes, etc. Stats show that over 90% of the people download or print coupon in the email; over 75% of people will purchase product offline because of the information he gathered from emails; over 70% of people will click the link to read company or brand content; and over 65% of people will share and forward the coupon in an email to their networking.

We also need to change the way of just thinking about coupon-based incentives to building brand loyalty based on more intangible, emotional values. Cone found that users developed positive feelings toward brands they felt they could interact with on new media channels. New media channels include videos, audios, photos, blogs, online social networks (i.e. twitter, facebook) and so on.

According to a survey conducted in September 2009, 74% of the respondents agreed that after interacting with companies or brands with new media, they generally have a more positive impression of the company or brand; and 70% of the respondents said that they are willing to engage with company or brand who has a presence in new media.

It is our goal as an online marketer to create on-going conversations with your new and existing customers to build brand royalty by various online relationship marketing tools.

Dental Patients Cancel Visits A Lot, It’s Time For Online Marketing

It was inspired by one of the report in Walt Street Journal. The headline goes: Dentists Step Up Marketing as Patients Skip Their Visits.

Because of high unemployment rate (9.1% in BC), as more patients lose jobs and employer-sponsored insurance, fewer come in for major treatments or even routine cleanings. A lot of dental practices here in BC already experienced big appointment lost as what happens to the whole dental industry in North America.

That means more dentists see the need to step up the marketing of their services. Most of them increase their spending in traditional marketing, for example ads on yellow pages, newspapers, direct mails. Since it gets lower and lower response rate by traditional marketing. Some of the dental practices have started to take advantage of online marketing to push their businesses and brands through internet.

Many small dental private practices are still preferring doing dental surgery as well as marketing by themselves. But the problem is, in dental school, most dentists learn that good location and personal service will earn referrals to new patients. But these days, the old ways alone aren’t enough to cut it and dentists with slumping business want to know what to do differently.

The lack of time and experience in marketing could make all the marketing money and work in vain. Dentists have to outsource the marketing jobs to the experts, who will make huge return to their dental businesses.

Google Tells What Most Popular Dental Services Are

Do you know what’s the most popular dental services your potential dental customers are searching for?

Do we guess or study the true stats and trends? Of course we have to look at what Google has showed us. Because over 70% of people in Canada are using Google to do online research, Google results are more likely showing a bigger picture.

Below is a chart showing all the hottest dental services I found through Google Insight:

That lovely chart clearly shows us that dental industry here in British Columbia Canada is somewhat a seasonal market. Because people are searching much less about any dental service from the beginning of November to the beginning of January. And the hot season for dental services (especially implant or implants) is from May to September.

So if you are thinking of launching your biggest dental marketing campaign, you’d be avoiding the whole Winter. When market is picking up in Spring, that’s the time for massive dental marketing until the end of Summer.