We’ll keep saying it until the rest of the industry picks up the trend. 2023 is going to be the Year of the Dental Marketer.
Offices are finally staffing up as the COVID talent crunch abates. But patients, still nervous about inflation, are putting off routine care.
In other words, something has got to give. To stay in the black, practice owners either need to cut expenses or increase revenue.
True, we’re not exactly unbiased, but we’re big proponents of the second choice. In the immortal words of Henry Ford, cutting your marketing to save money is like smashing your watch to save time.
But we also want to be clear that just spending money on marketing — any old marketing at all — isn’t good enough. To put your practice in a position to navigate the coming year, what you really need to do is invest in predictable, data-driven marketing.
Predictable marketing is all about knowing the relationship between input and output. If you put in $10,000, how many new patients will you see in return — and what kind of ROI will those patients generate?
Predictable marketing can tell you that with a high degree of confidence. More traditional marketing can’t.
To put it another way, if you’re simply thinking about investing in a new website, launching a social media campaign, or focusing more on reputation management, then best case scenario, you’re at least six months to a year away from seeing results. This is because you’re trying a hacked-together, almost DIY approach rather than spending on an optimized marketing pipeline that can generate new patients with almost scientific precision.
The former doesn’t make much sense in a tough economic climate. But option B — serious data-driven marketing — can help you level up your practice even in the face of economic headwinds by giving you enough new patients at a suitable ROI to keep your whole team and infrastructure intact even in the face of the reduced demand you may be seeing from existing patients.
If this sounds self-serving coming from a dental marketing company, well, it is. But consider this. When COVID struck, most of dental shut down and practices lost a massive amount of revenue over the first half of 2020.
But from what we’ve seen, those who invested in marketing bounced back in a major way during Q3 and Q4 — to the point where many made up their losses entirely. Those who cut marketing, though… some of them still haven’t recovered today.
As we navigate what’s hopefully the waning of inflation, we see a world where Q3 and Q4 of 2023 offer a similar kind of gold rush opportunity. Will practices be in a position to make the most of it?
We feel confident saying that those who invest in predictable marketing will be much better poised to strike the motherlode.
What Kind of New Patient ROI Could You Get for $5K?
Want to understand what predictable marketing can do for your practice? Book a free marketing evaluation with SMC National to see concrete ROI numbers on every dollar you invest in new patient growth.
