By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business

Dentists, on the whole, tend to be very happy to invest in new technology and training. They are also usually fairly open to the idea of introducing new treatments and, if you think back to your average dental practice 10 years ago, you’ll realise that they receive noticeably more love these days: gone are the ragged pile of ancient OK magazines, cracked leather seats and flaking paint in the waiting room. Patients are feeling the difference, which is good, but it makes what I’m about to say even more curious: dentists still don’t want to invest in marketing.

The reason this is so strange is it means all these other investments in training staff, sprucing up the practice and improving facilities and treatment range are happening in a vacuum; no one, other than regular patients who happen to notice, are finding out about them – even with the most optimistic hopes that “word will spread” there is, unfortunately, simply no magic process by which this will actually happen unless you tell people.

I get that most dentists are uncomfortable with sales and they may want to outsource the whole marketing thing, but the problem is there are parts of marketing that you can’t outsource. Take, for example, the kind of brand you want to represent. Sure, you can get any old Joe to create a name and a logo for you and you can overhaul your website and put a big sign outside, but what happens if this brand doesn’t represent values that you actually believe in?

When principals avoid getting involved with brand building, which includes imparting the vision and strategy of the business to their team, they are jeopardising the health of their business not just on some surface, aesthetic level, but on a nuts and bolts level: if you don’t really value your own brand you’re more likely to let it get tired, let your website stagnate, miss opportunities to find new lucrative channels to market; in other words, more likely to let the rot set in. Your new patient leads will gradually dry up.

Yes, much of the grunt work involved in marketing can be outsourced, but only if there’s a brief, and the brief can’t be a one-time only thing: it has to come up in every monthly meeting. I think part of the problem is many dentists don’t value the role of marketing, and as people who have trained as skilled clinicians perhaps this isn’t surprising: it can seem like an activity that lacks integrity in comparison. But marketing can only ever lack integrity if you let it; once you are emotionally and intellectually invested in your brand values it will shine through, and when this happens it’s really obvious: all your communications across various platforms will seem like the same voice. That’s in contrast to the other, disjointed way of doing things where you might invest in, say, a really good newspaper ad that drives traffic to your site where it then mysteriously disappears because the neglected site doesn’t work properly or god forbid, can’t be found in the search results. When you take marketing seriously you make scenarios like this impossible.

But I haven’t even mentioned the money thing, and out of all the investments you can make, marketing is by far the best performer. It’s not unusual to get a 300% or 400% return, and one of our clients saw 1,300% ROI on his digital marketing budget within 30 days. We’re helping him sell dental implant treatments worth around £20k, so obviously, there are huge returns but, crucially, he has been part of the decision-making process; he buys into it and that, to a large extent, explains the amazing ROI. He’s committed, which means he’s able to deliver a high-quality marketing experience for his leads: rather than just get a call, they are invited to the practice to learn more, given refreshments and treated like the extremely valuable clients they are (known as a soft sell). As I mentioned, you can’t do this if you don’t believe in what you’re doing, and so if you don’t believe in your marketing something is wrong and needs fixing.

If you’d like to talk about how to make your marketing mindset shift, get in touch for a chat on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.