Dental Marketing Will Never Be The Same …

Traditional dental marketing is dead.  It died in 2009. Yellow pages were listed in Wired magazine’s article, “100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About”.  Traditional marketing budgets for direct mail, newspapers, magazines, and television are being moved into online interactive segments, such as search, email and social media marketing (source: Forrester, March/April 2009).

While many tactics may never work again, several traditional marketing techniques will continue to live strong—those being word of mouth, relationship, and referral marketing.

In addition, the common elements that have made all marketing efforts succeed will never change.  Those common elements are planning, implementation, consistency, and tracking.

Marketing is not usually guaranteed, easy, or predictable.  There have always been new opportunities to explore … Remember when you first invested in a website and wondered if anyone would ever see it?

Whether you plan to explore social media marketing opportunities or not, it will still be important to be flexible, consistent, and to track your efforts.  The future will not change these core marketing principles. You will still need to test techniques and evaluate whether they are working—keep doing what is working and change what is not … Be consistent, be patient, and never stop.

Marketing opportunities will continue to evolve.  With new opportunities will be new challenges; however the key to success will be to keep marketing. Doing nothing has eliminated businesses in the past and it will continue to do so in the future.

This article was written as the fourth of my five 2010 dental marketing predictions for my friends at DentalPlanet.  What do you think? What are your marketing plans for 2010?