This dentist marketing strategy is VERY important...although it will likely not seem like a marketing strategy to you.

It’s a foundational understanding about what marketing is.

If you don’t test your marketing...you should plan on spending and losing A LOT of money!

You need to realize that every time you market yourself/your dental practice, remember, you are simply testing a specific marketing initiative to see how well it produces. The results of your test will tell you several things:

1. the number of responses

2. the number of sales/patients (from responses)

3. the quality of the leads/sales/patients

4. whether you should roll-it-out and "go big" with the same marketing strategy

5. how well received the marketing piece/event/initiative was

6. how much traffic it drove to your website

7. how many requests for more information you received

8. how many calls with questions (and the types of questions they are asking)

Marketing is not an emotional event (although many of you react to it as such) and you should not allow yourself to become emotionally attached to the outcome. It’s a test. However, there are certainly more predictably successful marketing initiatives that you can launch that will always produce good results...you just won’t know what kind of results until you launch.

Split testing is where you create similar or completely different ads (for example) and send them each to different databases, segments (or areas) of the population, or even split the ads up when sending to your patient base, etc. The purpose is to see which ad produces a greater response (in numbers, quality leads/sales/patients, etc) and which one you should use moving forward.

Once you have this data, you should use that marketing initiative/strategy over and over again until it stops working. I once sent the same email to the same list for six consecutive months, on the same day at the same time every week, because it produced the same exact response. When I received 20-25% fewer leads, I changed the e-mail and started over. For some reason people think they have to change their ad every day/week/month in a particular newspaper, in a direct email campaign, etc. My advice is, use it until it stops working, That’s smart marketing!