Are you a solo dental practice owner, and what has that got to do with marketing?

Read on; It might be familiar.

Insurance companies continue to make your life as difficult as possible. They squeeze your reimbursement through different means and methods. If we believe the stats the ADA offers, approximately 90% of dental practices already accept some dental plans, and at least six out of ten patients already have dental plans. That trend will continue, and the percentages will increase. Reimbursement for your procedures will be tight, to say the least, and likely to be reduced further through EPO and PPO plans.

The facts are simple yet daunting for many solo practice owners.?The asset value of their practice is on the decline. Why? There are a lot fewer qualified buyers around. Why? New dentists' student loans are slowly but surely increasing. The new generation of dentists is more interested in their quality of life and is reluctant to make sacrifices to obtain ownership of a dental practice.

The cost of operating and staffing a practice becomes ever more costly too. Less than 10% of newly graduated dentists are interested in buying an existing solo practice.

Today's new dentists have more of a community mindset and less of a commercial perspective.?Owning a solo dental practice that can be sold to become a substantial part of a dentist's retirement fund is no longer the ticket to financial retirement freedom. If you can't transfer your asset, you are left with a liability.

Dentists are highly intelligent and very analytical people.?That being said, I am surprised that so many dentists don't foresee that they can lose thousands of dollars at best and, worse, end up with a practice they can't sell because their dental business has become non-competitive. Financial Institutions look very closely at the performance of a practice before they agree to provide finance to a potential buyer. They particularly look at the marketing results over the last 3 or 4 years. Dentists regularly leave it too late to sell because they want or need to keep working, often beyond the point of no return. But that is another story.

I speak to dentists regularly and what many tell me is that they believe they have great marketing or do not need or want to invest in their marketing. Really?

What I am about to say may be brushed aside as scaremongering, and some might even get offended. I am willing and able to provide proof and irrefutable evidence for every statement I make.

Thousands of dental practices have a terrible digital image and footprint in the marketplace.?They have websites that are not fit for purpose. The content of their websites is inferior. They put themselves in the center and forget that it is the patients they should focus on. Telling patients how good a dentist you are is far less effective than you might think. Of course, dentists must share their experience and professional expertise with patients on their websites. But there is a fine line between doing it effectively and being off-putting to patients. Patients take it for granted that dentists are usually good at what they do. You will not differentiate yourself from the competition that way because they do and say precisely the same on their websites. There are other things potential new patients are far more interested in.

Those are just a few of the issues. Few dentists are willing to acknowledge those shortcomings?and take action to address the problems. The facts are that 95% of dental practices rank for keywords that bring no website traffic. They believe their marketing world is perfect because they are on page 1 of Google. That perception cannot be further from the truth. Page 1 rankings are only meaningful if they get traffic. Too many dental practices have vanity rankings that have no commercial value.

Email us if you want better marketing results and to lower your new patient acquisition cost. I am 100% confident that we can improve your results by quite a margin, no matter what they are at present.

Thank you for your time.

Wishing you success

Max Vullhorst-Lorch

CEO/Founder "The Dental Marketing Institute"

Client Testimonial

"We have worked with different marketing agencies over the years. We have not met anyone who could rival the level of marketing and SEO expertise Max and his team have brought to my dental practices for the last ten years. They have increased our results year after year." - Shankar Iyer DDS,MDS,FDSRCPS (Glasgow)