Latest Blog Post

We have been reviewing our marketing strategy, policy and budget for 2016/17.

We once again decided to look at all the possible avenues for our practice to market the services and business we provide. For our practice this involves communicating with our referring dental practitioners but also potentially communicating direct to the public to expand our reach and to gain more ‘direct referrals’

This is a complete minefield!!

For the avoidance of doubt, we have been at this now for eight years. We have investigated almost every possible channel you can imagine but at every point now, return to ROI (return on investment). We have measured very carefully search engine optimization, pay per click, print media advertising, direct mailing, external signage and various other targeted campaigns. We have developed strategies in the practice to measure things very carefully, particularly using targeted phone numbers and separate landing pages to see exactly how much traffic we get but more importantly, how much uptake we get from the campaigns we provide.

I can tell you that marketing directly, as measured by us, is generally a disappointing exercise and probably far more important to us is the brand awareness that we now have, even after a short period of time of approximately two and a half years as The Campbell Clinic.

So this raises the question: “Should we spend our money on pay per click or brand awareness?”

Building a brand in the eyes of the public or the referring general practitioner is a tricky concept because it becomes an ego project and something easy to get wrapped up in. This involves all of your branded stationery, your signage, your uniforms, the way you appear on any social media or website, TV adverts, radio adverts and magazine adverts but accepting that what you’re trying to become is the ‘go to destination’ for the services you provide. The ROI on this is extremely difficult, it basically equals marketing spend V increase in turnover = success (not necessarily something which is easy to stomach as it so vague. The theory goes if your turnover is increasing and your marketing spend increases and your turnover continues to increase then your brand awareness is working. Your problem then is if your turnover flattens whether you should continue to increase your marketing spend to further increase your turnover.

Our practice is based on brand awareness and self referrals. It has twenty years if reputation history based around my clinical activities in the region and a growing awareness amongst our colleagues and our existing patient base. For us that is the future of marketing of our practice. Regardless of what any website guy will tell you, we’ve targeted pay per click very carefully and it only attracts people who are interested in cost. It commoditises your product and for us does not bring the type of patient we enjoy treating over the long term. It’s a bottomless pit without any successful ROI.

Incidentally we also measure very carefully the uptake of patients who attend for consultations from pay per click or similar activities and word of mouth activities and the different is enormous (word of mouth was much, much higher)

Blog Post Number: 910