By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

We’ve been doing more diagnostic days, and people seem to like them because for a fixed cost we’re able to review the performance of the business as well as their suppliers and present some options when things don’t feel right.

On a typical diagnostic day recently we discovered that our client had been paying a number of ‘dental business experts’ to make her business less profitable. She told us that whenever she had asked questions she was dealt with dismissively.

The more diagnostic days we do, the more of this sort of thing we see. I’m amazed at how much poor advice is out there; inexperienced people operating in silos believing they are so knowledgeable that they have the right to dictate to their clients. That’s never right.

In this case, one of the ‘experts’ wasn’t just wrong in his approach to his client, he was wrong about the marketing stuff as well. He liked a pop up he had created on the website whereby users entered their details to claim a promotional voucher.

Putting aside my misgivings about the tactic generally, there were some specific problems being ignored here:

• lots of people were filling in the pop up form, yet no bookings were being made
• the leads were hard to make contact with
• they were often located hundreds of miles away
• the software was slowing down the website, hurting both search ranking and user experience

We also noticed that there were no instructions for web visitors who wanted to pick up the phone, a grave omission. So we advised our client to put a call to action on the homepage, something like “call our friendly team for more information”.

That’s when we realised that the supplier we were dealing with wasn’t playing the same game as us at all (the game of helping the owner increase profit by delivering more new patients and increasing revenue)

It seemed that for him, a win was simply the amount of people completing the web form, and if no enquiries turned into new patients, well, that wasn’t his problem. Here’s what he wrote:

Just to let you know I have not used this line as requested: “Please call our friendly team for more information”

One of the reasons websites often don’t work is use of the phrase, call us for more information. Patients view websites at all sorts of times of day when you may not be open to answer the phone, it may also not be convenient to phone, this is particularly true if people are commuting on public transport whilst browsing.

Relying on people to phone is a classic way of not getting a good response from the website, people just forget or don’t bother.

This is why we have the voucher system in place, to collect e-mail addresses and strike whilst the iron is hot. It also allows the website visitor to feel as though they have completed their mission of finding a dentist, this gives a psychological advantage to the website also.

He has a point about people wanting to take a step towards an appointment out of hours or when they can’t phone. But interestingly, and crucially, he offers no alternative solution to the dire conversion rate (the rate at which enquirers become new patients). It feels like he is confusing e-commerce with dentistry.

I was with another client last week who said he’d been told by his expert that his enquiries had taken a dip because “search habits have changed”. We took a look and his position had indeed deteriorated.

His site had been on a two-year decline since he’d engaged this expert. It was nothing to do with other people’s search habits, it was that the practice was consistently absent from broader search rankings. I happened to have the search information to hand and I showed it to him.

There’s no lack of enthusiasm from people like this, but what is lacking is a long-term view and integrated marketing skills. Wherever you find such ring-fenced thinking and short term planning you will also find a lack of creativity. There’s no incentive to be creative when you’re in it for the fee rather than to see your client do better.

So beware of suppliers who continually leverage their ‘expertise’ to overrule you rather than helping you understand how to improve the financial performance of your business. Be suspicious of tactics in isolation, they’ll only harm your business. Like I’ve said here before, the blend really matters. Can your expert blend different marketing elements to serve your business on a case by case basis? If you’re not sure, book a diagnostic day with us. Call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.