Dental Implant marketing and expensive technology..

Dental implant marketing

In dental practice marketing, utilizing your new high tech CBCT unit and making it pay for itself are a must.

There’s no doubt that for those who are truly serious (or want to be serious) about ortho or implants, cone beam CT is the new standard.  It makes diagnosis and treatment planning more certain and eliminates a lot of error in surgical based procedures.

That being said…a common refrain from the owners of these units is “I don’t use it enough.”

There are usually two issues in these practices that “don’t’ use it enough” that underlie the complaint and that invariably leads to the lack of dental implant marketing and advertising to prospective patients that you are serious about your niche in dentistry:

Issue #1:  They have no unifying story on why specific technologies are in use in the practice.  Invariably this is due to the absence of a unique reason why differentiator that sets the practice apart from competitors.  How does that CBCT unit fit into what makes the practice special?  Technologies like this need to be discussed and described in ways that patients can understand.  This means both verbally during office tours for new patients and in materials patients receive when inquiring about services or presenting to their consultations.  Any manufacturer provided brochure fails at this task!  Remember those materials designed by the manufacturer are meant to sell YOU. Another sure sign of no unique reason why attached to a selling system is diagnostic fees are invariably too low.  Any practice not capable of getting a diagnostic fee of at least $350 needs to forgo these technologies until they’ve been through a legitimate sales training course on how to correctly market themselves. It’s okay to use CBCT as a call to action to get patients in the door but from a full fee sales perspective there are legitimate reasons to still have a substantial diagnostic fee. Without unique reason why and a check-list for selling, the diagnostic fee will be artificially limited.  How is this going?

We talk about “unique reason why” in Session 1 of the new McAnally Selling System and give you tools to develop YOURS.

Issue #2:  They put the “horse before the cart” from a dental implant marketing perspective.  If you want a lot of niche cases you WILL have to step up your game in going to the public and letting them know you exist otherwise there will be less demand for the technology you just bought. In tactical terms, this means 4-6 ongoing niche marketing activities from the McAnally Hierarchy of Niche Case Marketing (As discussed in Volume 3 of the Dentist’s Unfair Advantage now going into print). It means bigger media than what most practices are familiar with.  It means having an online SEO/PPC ninja that isn’t servicing hundreds of practices in a cookie cutter fashion and who knows how to use your competitors marketing budgets against them.

By the way, this isn’t just about CBCTs.  It is also about any high cost niche procedure oriented technology.  The same two issues invariably are present with any major technology.  If you have a major piece of technology that isn’t being used as much as you would like this applies to YOU too.  Go back and re-read this and apply it to YOUR underutilized technology.