"Successful dental practice marketing is a lot like a good root canal," say Ninh Nguyen, Ph.D., president of ND Communications, a San Jose based dental practice marketing firm. "Unless you’re sedated, you know you’re going to experience some discomfort every time you write that check to cover your marketing expenses every month."Not unlike
dental patient who puts off a visit until pain finally exceeds that which he associates with dental work, dentists all too often try to build their practices using off-the-shelf dental practice marketing solutions that over long run don’t provide desired result. "Affiliate programs, business-to-business relationships, yellow page advertising, weekly throwaway ads, newspaper inserts, hit and miss mailers, and large investments in websites aren’t any more effective than at-home-dental-repair kits you see in your local drug store," Ninh says. "They may be less painful to administer but they don’t produce desired results."
According to this dental practice marketing expert and business professor, Ninh states that all of aforementioned marketing methods have one common problem. "While they may generate a few new clients, number provided isn’t enough to build a successful practice," he says.
While Ninh acknowledges that full and half page yellow page display ads produce a predictable number of inquires each month, number of new clients a practitioner generates from those calls doesn’t normally justify expense. "Our research shows that long term yellow page display advertising programs for most are, at best, break even propositions," he says. "If you’re spending $5,000 on a full-page ad in yellow pages and get 5 new patients a month, then your cost of getting that patient is $1,000. This is just not an effective method of advertising."
Ninh attributes this to one major factor. "Like internet search results, value of an ad decreases as consumer has to turn more than a page or two to see it. If you don’t have a full page ad in first place, and if name of your practice doesn’t start with ‘AAA’, and if you are not paying an exorbitant premium for first placement, odds are consumer isn’t going even going to see advertising you spend thousands of dollars on every month," he says. "The same holds true for ads placed in throwaways like Pennysaver, newspaper inserts, and websites."
Affiliate programs and business-to-business relationships, according to Ninh, don’t work any better. "Anyone who has been in a service related industry will tell you that a referral business is hard to come by. This is largely due to fact that businesses are not in business of promoting services of anyone but themselves, and dentists really aren’t in a position to reciprocate or ‘pay anyone for referrals’ on a meaningful basis," he says.
