In this guest post, Grow Practice Grow CEO Sean Hamel shows how authentic dental marketing can be as easy as firing up a video on your cell phone.
Content marketing, especially video content, continues to dominate the digital landscape. As dental practices continue to generate more and more content, the public is becoming aware of what’s authentic and what isn’t.
As a dentist, you have to remember that roughly 60% of the population is scared of you. This is a huge obstacle to face, one that can’t be solved with discounted fees and give-a-ways.
It’s time to eliminate the same stock photography and the same continual promotion of “quality” and/or “pain-free” experiences in your marketing collateral.
It’s time to connect, establish trust, and build a tribe of loyal followers that will push your dental practice to a new level of profitability and growth.
This all starts with authentic video marketing, one of the best marketing strategies for any dental practice.
Dental Branding vs. Authentic Dental Marketing
While the ability to generate and share content is easier than ever, your message will still fall on deaf ears without brand authenticity.
First of all, what is your brand?
Put simply, your brand is how you make someone feel.
It’s what people say about you and your practice when you are not in the same room.
It’s the experience of being your patient.
Branding is one aspect of dental practice marketing that is so often overlooked, yet has the ability to generate a staggering amount of ROI.
Think of it this way: Branding takes time. Authentic dental marketing takes money.
So how do you build brand authenticity?
Put simply, conveying authenticity is conveying honesty and trustworthiness.
Build your brand around your story.
Your story is what makes you uniquely you. It makes your practice your practice. It’s what makes you different from every other dentist out there.
5 Keys for Building Your Authentic Brand
1. Be Genuine, Honest, and Transparent
First things first, you have to be genuine.
Your audience will pick up on “fake” quickly.
This is about who you are, what makes you tick, why you became a doctor, and the legacy you hope to leave behind. Identify and promote your core values.
Don’t create content that is just noise. Really invest and communicate.
Provide value and the revenue will come.
2. Get Your Team on Board
All aboard!
The patient experience lives and dies with your team.
They have to know what the practice is, what it stands for, what it’s striving to be, and how you see the team “getting there.”
Communicate and own your brand.
Protect it.
Make sure your team has bought in to your vision.
3. Develop Your Brand Story
Identify what you want to convey, and promise it to your patient base.
Why did you join dentistry?
What do you want your patients to know about you?
How do you want your patients to feel?
What do you want people to say about you when you are not around?
4. Differentiators
What makes you different?
We are not talking about massage chairs or the fact that you just got CEREC. These are great features to highlight; however, they are not defining you as a practice.
What is it about you that makes you the best choice of all the other practices out there?
This is your differentiator.
5. Be Consistent
Many dental practices get really excited about their latest marketing venture: they embrace the solution fully for a few weeks, but then things slowly creep back to normal.
Not this time.
You are developing your brand, and you are committing to delivering that message into the future.
This means committing to content creation, social media, patient engagement, and the best patient experience possible.
And it means committing every single day.
Establishing Authenticity
It is important that you establish your dental practice and yourself as authentic, trustworthy, likable, relatable, and unique.
Let me tell you, a patient’s decision does not come down to clinical skill. Most patients have no idea if you’re a good clinician or not.
What matters is that they like, know, and trust you. And that a friend or family does, too.
Your website and social media accounts must convey quality, safety, cleanliness, and attention to detail.
Print materials and your office signage must support that message, too.
Your video marketing needs to be quality and valuable to your audience.
Your team has to deliver on the patient experience.
In a recent survey from Social Media Today, roughly 86% of pollsters stated that authenticity was important in the brands they choose to purchase from.
Millennials jumped up to 90%!
People are watching. People are making a purchase decision based on what you’re posting. And people respond to video. Now go get them!
Building Trust Through Videos
The really exciting part of incorporating video into your marketing mix is that you do not have to spend thousands of dollars on video production crews.
Nor do you need to buy or rent expensive, complex equipment.
All you need to market your practice and ramp up your audience engagement are a cell phone or tablet. Most of our cell phones are equipped with quality cameras and even shoot in 4K. Start shooting now!
Some great videos to build trust with your audience include:
- Customer Testimonials
- FAQs
- Meet the Doctor and/or Meet Your Hygienist
- Holiday and Birthday Celebrations
- Pre and Post-Op Instructions
- New Patient Welcome
- Reactivation “We Miss You”
Video content brings static, boring websites and text to life! It creates interaction and connection. The sky really is the limit!
You can shoot video about anything you want.
Do you love to golf?
Do you play an instrument, paint, or shoot photography in your spare time?
Highlight that!
Talk about it. Let your patient base connect with you through common interests and values.
Once that connection is there, they will stay with you, accept treatment from you, and refer people to you.
Video Marketing Build Connections
Building connections with your community will bolster your referral network.
Patients trust the experiences of other patients. Build that trust by speaking directly and openly to the world.
Here are even more compelling reasons to consider adding video to your marketing mix immediately:
- 90% of consumers admit video directly informs purchase decisions
- 95% of consumers retain communicated information through video, while only 10 percent retain information from reading
- Companies utilizing video content experience a 41% increase in traffic through web searches compared to others who don’t include video in their content strategies
- Video offers the best return on investment, as 52% of marketing experts agree
There you have it! A crash course on building an authentic brand while harnessing the power of video marketing.
All you need is your cell phone and you’re on your way to more engagement, more connection, and a thriving dental practice.
Sean Hamel is the CEO of Grow Practice Grow, and recently launched a revolutionary new dental product called DentalVU. DentalVU takes the difficulty and expense out of quality video content by providing ideas, scripts and content generation, unlimited video editing, and storage through the BigVU App. Learn more here!
Learn more about how RevenueWell improves case acceptance and creates more close-knit relationships between dentists and their patients.
