If you want to get more new high-quality patients per month plus maximize the potential of your existing patient’s list, no doubt your dental practice will be needing to step up your dental marketing game.

Before diving deep into the tips in choosing the right dental marketing agency for your dental practice, let’s understand the need of dental marketing in the first place.

In every business, marketing and sales are the breathing engine towards consistent client acquisition. Successful dental marketing for dentists will be possible as long as you practice effective marketing strategies that boost your positioning to your potential patients, increase your conversion, retention rate and identify how much it costs to acquire a qualified paying lead.

Dental marketing helps you to :

• Drive more qualified leads and existing patients to keep on booking an online appointment.
• Establish an online reputation to your practice and trust to your patients. 
•  Customize your message for a specific target audience 
• Measure visible results as well as the speed of campaign execution
• Save more money while making sure that each strategy has guaranteed ROI.   

Today, your patients are online and to generate new patient appointments your dental market strategies should also be focusing on where your target clients are available.  

Lastly, if you want to boost your ROI from 200-250%, getting a dental marketing professional and their team is worth a try.  

What Is a Dental Marketing Agency?

You may ask, what do dental marketing companies do? Why getting the right dental marketing agency can help you turn your practice around, and the qualities of reputable ones to look for.

Trust me, you don’t want to get involved with a dental marketing agency that is learning digital marketing and use your practice as a test subject. So to give you the basic understanding on what a dental marketing agency is, we’re here to help.

A Dental marketing agency consists of a team of digital marketers with combined years of experience in creating marketing strategies, analyzing and redesigning effective marketing plans that guarantee optimal results of booking patients within your desired budget. 

Usually a dental marketing agency will provide these deliverables:

• Marketing Evaluation and Consultation  
• Brand or Rebranding Strategy 
• Online Reputation Management 
• Trends and Technology Forecasting 
• Web Design and Development 
• Website Traffic Acquisition through SEO 
• Create high quality, brand building and optimize online content 
• Manage User’s Experience via site mobile responsiveness 
• Social Media Management and Marketing (PPC- pay-per-click advertising)
• Data analysis, monitoring and reporting 
• Operational consultation and training 

What Are the Tips for Choosing the Right Agency for My Practice?

Now you have a clear understanding of the importance of dental marketing, the meaning of dental marketing agency and the services they provide, we will now cover the tips in choosing the right agency for your dental practice.   

Choose An Agency That Specialize in Dentistry

When you have a toothache, You wouldn’t get an ophthalmologist to take care of your teeth, right? A professional who specifically has experience in dental care is more qualified to do it. 

The same goes for choosing a dental marketing agency.

Digital marketing has different branches. Assigning your campaign to the right expert will increase the chance of a successful campaign. 

The world of dentistry has a different audience, message, and verbiage. You need to make sure that you will hire an agency that knows also the dental market. 

Moreover, they should also know how people can find your practice, your website performance, the keywords that your website should be used to optimize your content online, pay per click for advertisement, and lastly, converting new leads into paying patients. 

Knowing the answers to these questions can help you understand your marketing needs and getting the right dental marketing agency that can confidently answer those questions with available data and tools on hand, all while hiring a team of specialists, not generalists.

Double Check their Experience, Credentials, and Credibility

Make sure that they have the proven years of dental marketing experience. Remember that dental marketing is a niche industry. The demand for marketing strategies will be different for food marketing and hiring an agent who has specific experience in this field is important.

A legit dental marketing agency specializing in dentistry understands the pain points of your market, can forecast trends and has the experience to propose how to scale your business. 

Ask for their testimonials, and if they can provide the case study for their past projects with their clients. A case study can be composed of a brand kit, a 3-month marketing campaign or a 6 month worth of content strategy. You can also see if they have achieved the goal and numbers from their client campaigns with similar budgets. A credible dental marketing agency can confidently connect you with some of its past clients for cross-reference.

Lastly, If you are not sure if you are looking at the right numbers, you can also check their reviews from 3rd party review services such as Google Reviews or Facebook Reviews. 

Though you cannot expect a 5-star review all the time, checking how they respond also shows how they treat their clients. A legit review will be very detail-oriented including the names of the people that they have worked with. 

Look for A Sense of Integrity

Competency and credibility is just a piece of the puzzle. Professionalism should also be taken into account when choosing a dental marketing agency. 

Test their commitment to timelines and deadlines and make sure they will always do what they say. Ask questions like “How long does it take to design and develop my website from scratch?” 

Depending on the number of clients your agency is handling right now, and how fast you can provide the website assets on time, it might take weeks or a few months. They should also be honest about the project timelines and turnover dates. 

Lastly, do they ask for a referral from your network within a 5 km distance from your clinic? If they do, do they layout any type of confidentiality contract to address any biases? 

As an agency, they might be handling other competitors to run their operations just like any other business, however, it wouldn’t hurt to consider the parameters and their work ethics to make sure they can bring the utmost integrity of their services to you and others. 

Check if they are One-Stop-Agency

Investing in a group of marketing professionals that have different specialties is working smarter than relying on one person to do all the dental marketing.

At the same, there are tons of dental marketing companies who claim to be experts from pay-per-click, web building and design, SEO, graphic designers, Social Media Management, or account management for your clinic. 

Remember that digital marketing has different branches. Assigning someone per their specialty by the agency is smarter because each key member is focusing on one sector complementing their strengths and expertise.

Check whether or not they have in-house experts or they outsource. If they are outsourcing work, ask them the reasons, and how they make sure that the quality is the same as what they uphold for their digital campaigns.

While outsourcing minimal or administrative tasks is fine, if the agency claims that they are the leading agency for SEO, it will be good news if they have an in-house 24/7 staff who is assigned for this department, not just an outsource. Most importantly, the owner should also have first hand experience regarding SEO; otherwise most of the time it might be a fortune cookie sweet talk to just strike a deal with you.

You can also try asking to meet each member who is responsible for each marketing project before signing anything. Ask to meet who is responsible for the web development, the social media manager, or the digital marketing leader in the agency. 

Check if they Show ROI Transparency

Since we talked about the case studies, let’s dive deep into the bottom line; your return on investment.

Many dental marketing companies can offer different marketing services, but you need to find a dental marketing agency that is transparent with the ROI (return of investment). 

Honesty is a highly respected value in every business. This is why you need to consider asking for the estimated cost of the investment plus how much is the potential cost per client acquisition and take notes. If the deadline occurs and if they don’t get the results, ask for the contingency plan. 

Ask if they have the real-time analytics and tools to schedule campaigns, and analyze results.

If so, can they be flexible enough to adjust the proposed marketing campaigns per report to improve your ROI, and if they can report an analysis about your patient’s purchasing behaviour and explain why there are more or few booked appointments this month.

Again, great things take time and usually on every marketing effort, so keep in mind that it takes 6 months to see the results of both the conversions and return of investment. 

However, a great dental marketing agency can pinpoint specific names from the booked appointment list derived from their actual marketing campaign. Now that’s a guaranteed ROI. 

Are they communicating genuinely?

Some of you might have hired an agency already. If so, how often do they report to you? 

Do they attend meetings on time? Do they coordinate with you promptly if there are any project delays or technical issues? Do they have a project manager who always checks your clinic’s concerns? Or do they ghost you for days when you try to ask for project updates? 

Their coordination also mirrors their work ethic. 

A reputable agency can explain and report the data to you in an easy-to-understand layout to match the level of your language in a way that you will still understand even if it’s technical. 

To check for their communication skills, start by checking their website.

Can you understand who they are and what they offer? When you book a discovery call with them, do they listen and ask more about your problems, your long-term goals, rather than talking and concluding what their solutions are? Do they offer training for your team aside from their online marketing services?  

A great dental marketing agency knows that there’s no one size fits all type of marketing for all clinics so they tend to listen more to their clients to assess the problem rather than showing off how much they know.  

Is there any Pricing and Packaging flexibility?

When you’re scouting for an agency to partner with, ask for a starter kit to begin with, and compare them to their “premium package”. Ask for the features added and what makes it different or better from the previous ones. You can also ask if it is on retainer, and what is the inclusive package for it. Be as honest as possible with your budget limits.

A reputable dental marketing agency will understand your clinics’ needs and adjust their packages that can show you bigger results within your budget. If they offer a basic package and give you a “surprise” fee for upgrades, this could mean 2 things: One, they really don’t know how to assess what works for your short and long term goal, and second, they showcase vague offers and budget for each service, so you would not see the whole picture of what needs to be done for your marketing and bill you with the additional charges. 

This is the last thing you want to get involved with, So trust your gut feeling and better run when the price and packaging are not clear or suddenly change.

Final Thoughts:

We have covered the importance of dental marketing to your practice and the actual meaning and benefits of a digital marketing agency. We also covered the tips in choosing the right dental marketing agency before you sign any contract. It all comes down to their credibility, experience, integrity, transparency, communication skills, and their prices and packaging are clear and flexible according to your needs. 

Though you can follow these tips when choosing an agency, It wouldn’t hurt to ask for a free consultation call with a reputable dental marketing agency to put you on the right track towards your dental practice marketing journey.