Below, you will find 5 dental marketing tools that will make your job as practice marketer 
easier. Once proven effective, I have added these tools to my arsenal over the past 10 years. I hope you find them as useful as I have and are able to employ them with as much success.
1) Dental practice marketing audit: The audit serves a number of purposes starting with a way for prospects who like what they see about you to move forward and get to work with you in a low-risk situation and receive the benefit of a professional opinion. For a dental practice, this might be a no cost cosmetic evaluation. It also provides me a great deal of information up front about the health of the business so I can get right to work on advising them on the problem. For a dentist, it may be a couple of forms to send in before the physical evaluation to help the dentist better understand the history and present situation to set up the necessary treatment. See an example of ours:http://www.redstarmarketing.com/take-your-free-signature-brand-audit
Needless to say, when a prospect takes the time to fill out an evaluation they are probably pretty interested in getting the service. You can even add qualifiers to the evaluation that might turn away poor prospects and save you both time and disappointment. These can be in the form of expected cost, discomfort or time.
2) Dental patient survey: This is my favorite dental marketing tool. Survey your dream patients and let them tell you what they like about you, your practice and your services. These are best administered by a third party because often they won’t tell the owner how they really feel. They don’t need to be long, just 10 or so questions. You want to open with… “So, how did you become aware of the practice?” “What are their strengths?” “What don’t you like about the dental industry?” and the ultimate question; “Would you refer them to a family, friend or co-worker?”
You are looking for little nuggets, so dig a little deeper and ask for them to give you an example. Or ask, “Why are they great?” Interview 10 or 12 patients, look for common responses and don’t be surprised if it is something small that they value. For example, “She always sees me on time.” “I never have to wait.” or “They always remember my name, which puts me at ease.”
3.) Dental marketing eBook: You want to have a download that gives the ideal patient more information about a service or product. It could be, “5 things you absolutely must consider before whitening your teeth” or Download a free checklist of “What you need to do to properly prepare for a root canal”. Capture the name and email so you can keep your practice top of mind with additional helpful emails to nurture your patient.
4.) Dental creative brief: Dental offices occasional have need for new creative designs from a graphic artist, whether it be a new logo, business card, new website appearance or direct mail piece. To make sure you get what you want, it helps to fill out a creative brief beforehand. This way you save the artist the frustration of trying to guess and you the frustration of “that’s not what I had in mind”, and it ends up being three revisions and three proofs at double the cost. Download your free marketing brief template at: http://info.redstarmarketing.com/creative-brief
5.) Dental marketing analytics: You can’t manage it properly if you can’t measure it. This is a necessary dental marketing tool to continually improve your marketing and advertising process. It works especially well online. Analytics can tell you how well your blog was read; who shared your information through social media and how many people visited your website. It can also measure what keywords people used to find your website and what page did they visit the most. You can even take offline products like direct mail and offer a free whitepaper and measure how many people downloaded a copy from your website.
Quality dental marketing tools make your job as practice marketer a lot easier and frankly, a lot more fun because you are able to get information or improve outcomes. To start improving your dental marketing and see a copy of our dental marketing eBook, download “The 7 Steps to Dental Practice Marketing Success” at:
