Can You Succeed in Marketing Your Dental Practice When You’re Surrounded by Other Dentists?

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Can You Succeed in Marketing Your Dental Practice
When Youre Surrounded by Other Dentists?
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• The short answer is of course you can. But you
  will need to be a very patient person.
• A dental practice in an area where the
  dentist/population ratio is less than 11,650 is
  below the national average. This means its going
  to take longer to penetrate that market than it
  would if the ratio was above the national
  average.

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• It also means its going to take more marketing
  money and require much more patience on your part.

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• A classic mistake that we see is that a dentist
  will want to open a practice or relocate a
  practice to an area where he or she wants to
  live. Thats perfectly reasonable. But its also
  full of pitfalls.

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• If that area is saturated with dentists, then
  its going to be an uphill climb in order to gain
  enough market share to make a good living.

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• We routinely recommend that if youre young and
  just starting out, begin where theres less
  competition. Work on dominating that local market
  through the marketing mediums of the internet,
  properly done and properly targeted dental direct
  mail and, once you have a patient base, internal
  marketing.

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• This strategy will allow you to grow your
  practice without having to spend (or borrow) a
  large amount of money on marketing your dental
  practice in order to overcome the severe
  disadvantage of having a competitor on every
  corner.

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• Build a nice practice in a community that needs
  a dentist. Is that community where you will want
  to live for the rest of your life? Probably not.
  But if you can get started, build the practice
  without going into horrendous debt. You will be
  able to eventually move to where youd really
  like to live and practice.

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• And if youve been prudent, you will have
  learned a lot about how to run a practice and you
  will likely have the funds to mount a great
  campaign for marketing your dental practice in
  the new and much more competitive area.

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• So yes, you can succeed in a saturated market.
  But only if you adjust your expectations.

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• Expect that your marketing budget will be much
  larger than youd like it to be and will require
  you to spend more than youd like. Expect that
  whatever marketing you do will have poor results
  for a long time. Abandon any idea that all you
  need to do is run a few radio spots or send out a
  couple thousand postcards.

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• Expect to have to make adjustments to your
  marketing content until you find something that
  produces a decent result.
• And finally, expect all of this to be a long
  haul.
• Thats where the patience comes in.