Dental Marketing - Tyson Steele Associates - Advanced Dental Marketing Concepts
Forty-two new patients was a record month for us! We’re kicking ass, and I’ll recommend you guys to everyone under the sun.
– Carson Kutsch, DDS
I'm excited because we've already got several new patients who found us online! Keep up the great work with our Search Engine Optimization campaign!
– Dana Shumate, DDS
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Social Media Marketing for Dentists
With more than 500 million active users, fifty percent of whom log on daily, Facebook is a rapidly growing component of effective dental marketing.
Unfortunately, too many dental practices lack any specific Facebook and social media strategy.
In light of this, we are pleased to provide our clients with a targeted way to maximize their marketing results from Facebook and other social media sites, including Yelp and Citysearch. Key to this strategy is an effective blending online and off-line techniques to drive followers to popular social media sites. This, in turn, increases a practice's overall web visibility and also the quality of positive reviews.
As always, your Facebook marketing strategy should be complimentary to your other key marketing tactics. And the tactics that work in other industries don't always translate effectively to the unique business of dentistry. As your marketing advisors, it's our role to help you find the most cost effective, efficient ways to maximize your return on social media.
So if you're wondering how you can effectively use Facebook to increase your dental practice visibility, please contact us today.
Cargo Cults and the Business of Dentistry
Some of the most remote communities on earth are located in the Vanuatu Islands in the South Pacific. Before World War II, about the only Westerners to pay any attention to this primitive area were a few missionaries bent on convincing the locals that it isn’t nice to eat the neighbors. That got some traction, but the islanders’ world didn’t really change until the Allied powers decided the islands were perfect staging areas in their war against Imperial Japan.
To enlist the willing assistance of the natives, the Americans showered them with literal tons of gifts: great stuff like steel tools, clothing, liquor, and other goods. The Americans called it all “cargo.”
Imagine how amazed those islanders were that these foreigners not only had all this incredible stuff, but they could literally call it down from the skies.
Like many other cultures, the natives believed their ancestors watched over them and influenced their lives. They also believed that eventually their dead would rise again and bring unimaginable wealth. Possessing no concept of what it takes to produce the machines and materials which the soldiers, sailors, and airmen shared -- it’s easy to see why the islanders concluded that if these men were not gods themselves, at least they were sent by the gods to make the islanders’ lives better.
Of course, the war eventually ended, the Americans went home, and no more cargo arrived. But during those short years of the war, the people of the New Hebrides (as they were then called) had grown very attached to radios, iceboxes, medicines, and candy. So they hatched a plan to bring back the cargo . . . They decided to imitate the actions and equipment of the strange visitors.
The island natives fashioned military uniforms and flags, painted the Red Cross symbol on huts, and constructed airfields complete with bamboo control towers. They created rituals in which they waved landing signals at skies empty of aircraft, talked on bamboo radios, and practiced parade drills with bamboo rifles. They even created palm leaf airplanes to set on their runways, like decoy ducks on a pond.
All this effort was done in the hope that their ancestors would send more cargo, just as they had done when the world was at war. (Amazingly, some of these practices still persist, nearly 70 years later.)
Although we may chuckle at the islanders’ ignorance and naivete, we should not smugly assume our superiority. The islanders’ cultural viewpoint caused them to think that the cargo was the result of their ancestor worship. And the fact that they saw real cargo called down from the sky only served to make that assumption seem accurate.
Today in dentistry, our unique cultural viewpoint sometimes causes us to think similarly to the islanders. Because we see that many successful dentists have advanced clinical accolades, we unconsciously assume that dental business success is the result of “clinical skill.” This causes many dentists to pursue unending clinical education courses and the adoption of new equipment for years -- even decades -- in the hope that someday “clinical skill” will bring success.
However, what if our assumption is wrong? What if “clinical skill” really isn’t the most important cause of success?
Think about it for a minute. What if success in the business of dentistry requires more than clinical skill? What if success is really the result of a balance between clinical skill and business skill? After all, dentistry is both a profession and a business.
Which leads me to this thought . . . If you’re not a voracious student of leadership, management, and communication theory but you’re buried in clinical CE, maybe it's possible you’re hanging out too much at the wrong altar. And who could blame you? From your perspective, maybe it looks like most successful dentists make it big because of their clinical focus. From your perspective, maybe if you just add some initials after your name or a fancy new piece of equipment, the cargo gods will rain down on you too.
On the other hand, have you ever considered that maybe you’re just waving a bamboo flag at an empty sky?