If you run your own dental practice, then you’ve probably considered getting a dental marketing consultant to help you bring patients through the door. However, it’s difficult to know whether they will be a good investment or not! This is hopefully what we help you decide in this article!
If you already know that you want to take on a dental marketing consultant, then we can help guide you on how to choose the right one to set your dental practice up for long-term success. However, if you are still unsure whether to hire a dental marketing consultant or you don’t understand what a dental marketing consultant brings to the table, then this article may help answer your questions.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in!
What is a dental marketing consultant?
In essence, a dental marketing consultant is someone who helps free up your time and lets you sleep easier at night, knowing your marketing activities are in good hands! When you run a dental practice, you already have a lot to think about. The last thing you need is also to take on a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role!
Your dental digital marketing consultant should be in charge of all your digital marketing activities and bring you customers at an acceptable cost per acquisition. You should always maintain a good return on investment to ensure the hire is worth it.
What does a dental marketing consultant do?
Your dental marketing consultant should be continually ensuring that your marketing strategy is optimal for bringing in new patients and is as cost-effective as possible. With their digital marketing expertise and years of experience in the dentistry field, they should be able to analyse your current marketing strategy, discover whether it’s effective or not and replace it with a more optimal, efficient strategy that produces better results.
In short, a dental marketing consultant should be an expert in targeting the right patients for your dental practice and hitting all your marketing goals within your specified budget.
These days, a dental marketing consultant will typically carry out the following tasks for your business:
- Help to attract new patients to your dental practice.
- Increase engagement with your existing visitors.
- Evaluate your existing marketing strategy and develop and implement a new, more effective strategy (if necessary).
- Improve your branding so that it reflects your business well and resonates better with potential new patients.
- Manage advertising campaigns via Google Ads, social media, email marketing etc.
- Manage your website and undertake ongoing SEO activities to rank your website.
- Create regular reports on the progress of your digital marketing campaigns.
Of course, it all depends on what skills your dental digital marketing consultant has and what digital marketing skills you are after.
How does one become a dental digital marketing consultant?
These days, people take an online course in digital marketing and call themselves an expert. However, to truly produce results, you need to have years of experience in that field and have a strong understanding of lead generation, be able to analyse data and produce a robust strategy that works. This can only happen after years of hard work and understanding the market.
A dental marketing consultant needs to have strong knowledge in the world of dentistry and understand effective marketing techniques that can help grow a dental practice sustainably in the long-term.
I became a dental marketing consultant by working as a digital marketing specialist in a Google Premiere partner agency, while also working as the part-time marketer for my father’s dental practice. After leaving the agency, I decided to strengthen my know-how in the dental industry and consequently moved in-house to work as the marketing manager at a new private dental clinic, which I helped to grow from just 3 chairs in 2017 to 6 chairs in 2020.
My goal for the future is to help dental practice owners achieve their marketing goals and get more patients through their clinic doors using the techniques and knowledge I acquired from my years of experience as a dental digital marketing consultant.
You can find out more about my journey on my About Page.
How to find a dental marketing consultant?
The first thing to do would be to do a Google search for “dental marketing consultant” or “dental marketing specialist”. Anyone who comes up in these search results on page 1 of Google is obviously doing a decent job with their own SEO or Google Ads, so it’s an indication that they know what they’re doing! If they can outrank their fellow marketing agencies or consultants, who are doing SEO for a living, surely they will be able to help you get ahead of other dentists in your city.
Create a short list of 2-5 consultants or agencies and reach out to them to find out more about how they could help you and what results they deem achievable.
Make a note of some queries/concerns you have with hiring a dental marketing consultant. Ask these same questions to each of the agencies/consultants and compare answers. The good ones will provide answers which are clear, transparent and understandable by a layperson. The unethical ones will try to take advantage of naïve business owners by making things sound more complicated than they really are.
If you need more help hiring a dental marketing consultant who specializes in Goolge Ads or SEO services, you may want to do a search for guides on this topic.
For example, feel free to search these terms on Google for help:
“Google Ads agency for dentists”
“How to choose a dental SEO company”
“How to choose a dental Google Ads agency”.
Agencies and consultants to avoid like the plague
You will likely get contacted by plenty of digital marketing agencies or consultants who will promise you the earth via e-mails or cold-calling. It’s very easy to get sucked in by their persuasive words – the fancy jargon, the impressive statistics etc. However, it’s very important to do your own research as you will be the one investing money in their service.
Take a step back for a moment and think about this logically; would you call hundreds or thousands of people each month to sell them your dental services? Or would you prefer people in your city to naturally gravitate towards selecting your practice, because you have established yourself as a competent dentist with raving reviews?
How to choose the right dental marketing consultant
Finding a marketer that is willing to work with dentists isn’t all that difficult. However, finding someone who has proven dental industry know-how to help your dental practice grow and flourish over time is not so easy.
Be aware of the fact that most marketing consultants out there will not be the right fit for you or have what it takes to make your dental practice stand out from the competition.
It’s very important that you hire someone who specialises in dentistry, as marketing should not be a “one size fits all” approach. And if you want to get patients in who stay and pay, then you need someone who understands the nuances of your industry.
What makes a good dental marketing consultant?
The short answer? Results!
A good dental marketing consultant will produce a positive ROI and be willing to show proof of the work that they’ve done. Although, these results do not come overnight, so please try to set realistic expectations and do not expect to see your dental practice full after month 1. However, your dental marketing consultant should be able to show some form of positive results in your digital marketing strategy each month.
A good digital dental marketing consultant will genuinely understand the business of dentistry and appreciate the lifetime value of a dental patient. They will possess qualifications in digital marketing and have experience in both Google Ads and SEO, and are able to back this up with case studies.
Your dental digital marketing consultant should be able to do an audit of your current marketing strategy and cut any digital marketing activities that are not producing a positive ROI. Thereby, reducing your wasted marketing spend and increasing your digital marketing budget to spend on activities that produce tangible results.
Why should you hire a dental marketing consultant?
As a dentist, your priority should always be your patients. Yes, you want your business to succeed, and as a result, you need patients through the door. But if you’re focused on this part of the business too much, your level of care will slip, and you won’t be able to retain these patients you’ve worked so hard to acquire!
Therefore, you should hire a dental marketing consultant to help boost the visibility of your dental practice in your local area, attract new patients and grow your dental practice for you. All whilst you’re providing the quality service that your current patients love!
Things to do before hiring a dental marketing consultant
Before you dive into hiring a dental marketing consultant, there are a few things you can do first to prepare. You definitely want to get the right dental digital marketing consultant for the job, so it’s a good idea to understand your own marketing goals and what you want to achieve first. That way, you can ask each candidate some questions and be able to evaluate their answers much more appropriately.
Determine what marketing help you need
Dental digital marketing consultants can work across a huge range of skills and you may not need all of them for your business. If you want to attract more patients to your clinic, you’re probably going to want someone who is a specialist in dental SEO or Google Ads for dental practices.
However, if you’re looking to build your presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram orYouTube, then you want to work with a proven social media expert. If you are looking to create strategic business partnerships in your local area or come up with a creative for billboard advertising, then you will most likely have to go with a local branding expert instead of a digital marketing expert. By ensuring the dental marketing candidates specifically have experience in the service you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find a quality consultant that suits your needs.
Define your goals
What does success look like to you?
- Do you want to increase the number of chairs in your clinic by the end of the year?
- Do you want to increase your average number of new patients by 30%, 50% or even 100%?
- Do you want more brand awareness and people to know about your clinic?
- Do you want to build up your social following?
- Do you want to get to that precious number 1 spot on Google?
Whatever you aspire towards, you first need to have clear picture of it in your head so you can communicate these goals with your dental marketing consultant, and they can devise the best plan to make these goals achievable.
Set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
Once you’ve defined your goals, set mini milestones and KPIs for your dental marketing consultant to hit. When you are trying to choose the right dental marketing consultant for your clinic, you can let them know about these KPIs and ask them how they would go about trying to achieve them.
What results are possible when using a dental digital marketing consultant?
The sky is the limit when digital marketing is done properly.
When I took over the digital marketing for my father’s dental practice, I helped to grow new patient volumes quite dramatically.
From the years 1991-2016, the average of new patients each year was 450.
Once I took over in 2017, the numbers were:
- 2017: 550 new patients
- 2018: 650 new patients
- 2019: 1100+ new patients
How to hire a dental marketing consultant
If you value your time, it’s a no-brainer to hire a dental marketing consultant. Just make sure that you do your research on the agency/individual and choose the one that makes the most sense to you and your business.
Check their credentials and case studies and don’t be afraid to ask for references.
If you would like to work with myself, Florian Tomko, then simply head over to the contact page by pressing the red “Get started” button and fill in the contact form.