By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

Identity is a theme that always comes up when we visit new clients for a diagnostic day because people don’t tend to know who they are supposed to be. Even practice owners who have been paying a business consultant tell us that the diagnostic day is the first time they’ve been asked to think about how their brand identity speaks to the people living close enough to use their services.

This is a serious strategic matter, yet even when people have given it thought it’s been fleeting afterthought rather than considered forethought. I see how this can happen in dentistry, especially if you’ve acquired a practice that seems to be doing OK. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Maybe. But I guarantee that eventually you will notice that understanding your potential customers is the biggest open secret to building resilience into your business. (You will already know this if you have set up a squat because banks only lend to new businesses that tell them exactly who they’re going to be selling to.)

Put simply, you want a brand that oozes values that are attractive to your audience. For dental practices this is straightforward because, unless you are a regional centre of excellence or have excellent transport links, you’re looking at a catchment radius of 20 miles. When we sit down with our clients and begin to analyse their audience they always get excited because a demographics review reveals fascinating things about where they work.

We use a consumer classification system which provides information and understanding of different types of people for this analysis. We enter postcodes within your catchment and find out what lifestyle the residents are living and what life stage they’re at. There might be affluent achievers, and among them you might see further segments such as lavish lifestyles, mature money and asset rich families. The analysis allows us to segment neighbourhoods into categories in order to identify the prospects who most resemble your target customers.

This information will pique your nosey side, but it is also extremely valuable commercially. Often our clients say “we don’t get any patients like that”, and this is where the business opportunity arises. If there are patients like that in your catchment in sufficient numbers there is no reason why you cannot pitch to them. However, you can also avoid making disastrous business decisions. We know a practice owner who wanted to go big on Invisalign until we did the demographics and discovered that his catchment was largely comprised of pensioners. Pensioners don’t want Invisalign and never will.

You can change your brand and change your treatments, but you cannot change where your business is located — you have to find a way of appealing to the people where you are. This has been the strategy of effective marketing since Unilever and Proctor & Gamble: before doing anything public, do your audience research and build your message on what you find out. It’s simple and always works. Let us know if you’d like to apply this sensible marketing strategy to your dental practice. Call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.