When I was studying for my undergraduate degree, my marketing classes were focused around the 4 P’s - Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. It was all about putting the right product in the right place, at the right price, at the right time. While some of that methodology is still very relevant today, there are new tactics and methodologies to help you build your business, find and convert customers, and raise your bottom-line, it's called Inbound Marketing.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, the Internet has fundamentally changed the way we search and discover new brands and products. Because of this, many traditional outbound marketing tactics like direct mail pieces and advertisements aren’t as effective as they once were. Companies are now forced to move their marketing efforts to a more digital inbound approach to attract customers and the Dental Industry is no exception.
What is Inbound Marketing?
One of the most effective ways of generating business online, Inbound Marketing focuses on attracting the right people to your website by creating quality and educational content. According to HubSpot (an Inbound Marketing software company) by publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your ideal customers, not interruptive.
At a high level, the inbound marketing methodology focuses around four main marketing actions:
- Attract – attracting visitors to your website through blogging, keywords/SEO and social media
- Convert – converting visitors on your website through forms, calls-to-actions and landing pages
- Close – converting your leads into customers by nurturing them through email and workflows.
- Delight – Continuing to delight customers through surveys, smart content and social monitoring.
By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your ideal customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.
Inbound Marketing and Dental Professionals?
As Dental Professionals, you can no longer ignore the importance of creating an online presence and the overall roll it plays in your marketing efforts. Does this mean you need to reinvent and transform your current marketing efforts and throw out the old and in with the new? No it doesn't, but do take a step back and evaluate. What does your dental office or dental labs online presence look like? Are you attracting the right people, are you growing and delighting your customers? Inbound Marketing and its methodology gives dental professionals opportunities to grow; and it provides the ability for the small dental office and lab to better compete with large practices and corporate labs in the online space.
Just like the dental industry's transition to digital dentistry has happened over time and continues to evolve, so is marketing's transition from a traditional outbound approach to an inbound approach.
Photo Credit: C7group LLC via Compfight cc
Leave a comment