There are a number of dental marketing challenges that dentists face with promoting their practice.

The most common issues include:

• They have little or no marketing skills, as dental schools around Australian still deliver very little in the way of business or marketing training.
• They have no overall marketing plan or strategy.
• They have been unsuccessful with their past marketing activities

Dental marketing mistakes

And what are the biggest mistakes that dental professionals are making when marketing their practice? There are a large number of common mistakes. These include:

1. They have a scattergun and inconsistent approach to marketing.
2. They also often they do not track the ROI of the marketing that they have done / are doing.
3. They do not know the average lifetime value of a patient, which makes it incredibly hard to set a marketing budget and to think about long term strategies.
4. Because of the overwhelming amount of information, advice and options relating to marketing they often procrastinate and do nothing.
5. They try and do it all themselves, and take shortcuts trying to save money, which can result in failure and frustration.
6. They fail to get the right expert advice, which can again result in a cycle of failure and disappointment. This often leaves them feeling fearful of attempting anything new.
7. Many think that there is a ‘silver bullet’ to solve their marketing issues. This leaves them open to unscrupulous sales people or disillusionment and frustration when their marketing efforts fail.
8. Many have bought from disreputable marketing providers who have sold them services and products that don’t deliver and / or they didn’t actually need.

So how do we overcome the long list of mistakes, wasted time, wasted money and hours of frustration? Carolyn has identified 9-steps in marketing a dental practice that when done correctly, ensure that the dental professionals will not only have an understanding of what they could be doing to successfully market their practice but to also enable them to plan, track and execute marketing campaigns in an effective manner.