By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.
Ross mentioned the predisposition among dentists for gathering information in his recent blog. You see this a lot in the way they approach marketing. Many dentists I know tend to strike out alone, rather admirably using the sliver of spare time they get every now and then to try and research and plan what they should be doing with their social media and traditional advertising. It’s an approach that produces some interesting results.
I know of one practice that spent £2k on the outer wrap of a local newspaper and four pages inside promoting their Invisalign treatments. The only problem was the average age of readers was 55, about 20 years higher than the target market. A principal I know of bought up 50 domains for treatments in his area and he wanted to optimise each and every site and then redirect them all to his main site. This is a fairly commonly referenced tactic. The problem here was there is likely no SEO benefit of doing this and, even if there was, where would you stop? I wondered, why invest all that time, effort and money into domain hosting and managing peripheral sites? If you’re going to invest that resource, why not just make your current site really good? The upshot was money wasted on domains, with no history, that he couldn’t do much with, while his current website remained underdeveloped and poorly ranked by Google. Not ideal.
Maybe you could put those two cases down to a lack of marketing oversight. Yet I have a client with a lovely practice — it really is perfect, with an incredibly nice young team — who asked for help to create a new brand story because the current brand was a bit tired. He was on board when we presented the concepts but when we came to delivering the positioning content he became very upset. I sort of got it; he had taken that practice from a shell to create a beautiful space by investing everything he had, and now we were trying to get our hands on his pride and joy. It was as if his head knew what had to be done but it broke his heart. I have a feeling he’ll come round though.
Another client presented the same ‘non-committal’ symptom the other day. Things were going well with their press advertising campaign, which was delivering the right type of new patients, and we began planning a digital counterpart. We did a bit of work building the strategy, but when we got to talking about audience segmentation they wanted to trial the first email broadcast on a sample of 30. As with all the examples above this course of action, while it seemed to the client to be a way of reducing risk, was actually a sure-fire way of setting up the digital campaign to fail. A race to the bottom if you like. If no leads came from this absurdly tiny sample group I knew exactly what would happen: the client would write off the campaign and miss the opportunity, consigning all our efforts (and fees) to the waste bin.
Risk aversion among dentists — another thing Ross mentioned in that blog is a profound barrier to effective marketing in my experience and, perversely, it tends to produce more waste than savings. Just taking that last example, a mailshot with a much bigger sample would have cost the same and would have enabled us to run an AB split test, where you split the audience and run different messages to each segment to see which is more effective. You run the best one to the whole group or, if there isn’t a big enough group, at least you know which message is more effective for next time. It’s always a learning curve, but not if you nip it in the bud.
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