An advertisement is a single event – you run an ad, you see if it works then you run it again or another one instead.
Marketing is a consistent and constant process that includes every interaction your business makes with the world. Nordstrom’s fantastic customer service (a marketing strategy); Virgin makes flying fun (a marketing strategy); Mercedes Benz is luxury (a marketing strategy).
Marketing influences how you and your business are perceived in your community. Marketing is the story that never ends while advertisements are soon forgotten. Who remembers the last BMW ad you saw in a popular magazine? Or the Google advertisement from Super Bowl XLIV? I would guess that very few of us can recall these commercials, but most of us can certainly say that Google makes finding information easy and BMW is the ultimate driving machine.
As a dentist, your marketing strategy should be centered around caring. You’ll need some tools to show and convince people that you care, but honesty and a genuine desire to put your patients first must remain consistent regardless of the medium you’re using to communicate with your clients.
Here are ten tools you can use to market your practice.