Dental Marketing Step 1 – Ideal customer

Dentists, understand your ideal customers

As a dental clinic, when considering your dental marketing strategy we must understand that more often than not you are going to be interested in your immediate local area, because face it, very few individuals will travel 20 km to a general dentist that they have no previous history with. This isn’t an assumption, it is based on numerous campaigns and market research that has been carried out by us and others in the dental industry.

The only way to reach further than you immediate area and surrounding 5-10km radius is by ‘specialising’ in a field of dentistry. Now we must be careful when using the word ‘specialise’ due to AHPRA and ADA guidelines but within the skope of this article, I will use it. Patients will travel 15km+ to get to a clinic that they trust and specialises in a particular aspect of dentistry that they require. So we must firstly ask ourselves, who is our target market?

To begin building a marketing strategy for your dental clinic we need to identify some key elements. We need to identify the ideal customer and attach personas to them. Only once these ideal customer’s and their personas are identified, can we create the specific campaign strategies,the web-design and build, app design/build and marketing campaign development etc. Developing a strong understanding of your ideal customer will allow us to reduce wastage, of time and campaign funds as well as generate better results sooner.

Some of the defining traits that need to be identified to create the ideal customers persona are as follows;

• Demographic – gender, age, income
• Psychographics – Type of personality, preferences
• Behaviour – What are they doing at the moment? Sports? Hobbies?
• Geographic – Where do they live or holiday or work that is of interest to you?

Find the locations or mediums that your clients spend time in, i.e. websites they visit, topics they may be researching, watching videos and sharing pics on social media.

Why would the customer need you? Where do they start searching? What issues do they have in life that you can solve or get ahead of before becoming a problem. Finally as a result of your solutions how they will benefit and how will their quality of life improve?

We had a client come to us who was a small clinic in a somewhat regional area of Victoria. There brief was simple, create growth and expand into more clinics in regional areas. We identified that their point of difference was that they offered Sedation dentistry. The types of people who would require sedation dentistry was more often than not, those with dental phobias and are axious about dental treatment. So the website was built in such a way that it didn’t trigger any dental phobias and we pushed to make the dominant in their immediate area as a general dentist and pushed 15-20km targeting sedation/sleep dentistry. Lo and behold the bookings came, within 3 months, 30 new monthly bookings were measured on a small budget and it only increased from their. By understanding who our ideal customer was, we effectively targeted them.   

Once we have a grasp of who it exactly it is that we want to target and appeal to we then need to look at the one thing that can stop us from completely wasting and exceeding our budget, going off in a direction that ends bearing no fruit or possibly even alienates us from our target market. What is this tool? I hear you say.