Here's a New Dental Marketing Idea: Social Media (duh)

The writer at the Dental Services Blog recently asked, "Are There Any New Dental Marketing Ideas Left?"

The blogger writes: "Finding new dental marketing ideas is a hot topic in the dental industry today. In fact, 'new dental marketing ideas' is one of the top dental searches done on the Internet. But is any idea really new?"

The writer touched on some things but he didn't go all the way. First of all, most ideas in business are not "new" -- they're an evolution of existing products or means of communicating.

For example, take Welch's 'Squeeze' jelly. For years, jelly came in a glass jar, then Welch's had the idea to put it in a plastic squeeze container. Neither product nor the concept (squeezable food products) is new; the company simply combined what was already available. Yet the idea was a huge financial win for Welch's.

The Dental Services blogger stated that you could put the Yellow Pages inside a newspaper. Take your message, he wrote, and your mission statement, and put it into a form of media that the public is now reading.

Unfortunately, the writer neglected to comment that newspapers are dying due to declining readership, so this isn't exactly a great idea.

The blogger also left out all forms of social media -- including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

And finally, the blogger touched on dental Websites. I would state that if a dentist has a site and wants to generate business from it, he or she needs to hire a professional marketing person to optimize it, write it, and manage it. Simply having a site, which many dentists do, means nothing if people can't find it in the search engines or if it's poorly designed / written.

Once the optimized and professionally design / written Website is in place, the dentist should then use all forms of social media to reach prospective patients -- in other words, use media the public is actually using.

Based on what I see dental marketing companies telling dentists on how to market their businesses using old tactics that don't work, this indeed would be a new idea.