Wouldn't it be nice to know that your company's marketing dollars aimed at reaching dental professionals are being well spent? Traditionally, there are three main challenges with dental industry marketing:
- Lack of advertising mediums to reach the true audience (i.e., dentists).
- Lack of advertising that delivers high-quality dentist leads consistently over time (i.e., marketing efforts produce results that are spiky, burned out quickly, not scalable, or unsustainable over the long term).
- An inability to effectively track results over time to prove ROI.
While there are a host of traditional marketing methods available in the dental industry, from tradeshows to direct mail, to print advertising to online marketing via widely read trade publications, a chasm still exists for many marketers who need to justify every dollar of their expenditures to upper management and shareholders with tangible results.
To fill this void, dental industry marketers need to embrace technology-based marketing solutions and welcome out-of-the-box thinking with new mediums, such as reaching dentists through social media advertising, content marketing campaigns, online retargeting efforts, mobile advertising, and marketing automation software, such as Pardot, Hubspot, and Marketo.
However, not every dental company has a big enough marketing department to begin to support these kinds of cutting-edge tactics, let alone a highly specialized team of tech-savvy online marketers with the expertise necessary to fully leverage the latest innovations in B2B online demand generation.
To meet this challenge, leading dental manufacturers, distributors, Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, and service providers are turning toward dental marketing agencies that offer a full-service approach to B2B online marketing with a laser focus on generating dentist leads to the dental trade. My company, Doctor Distillery (doctordistillery.com), is one of these companies that specializes in driving prospective dentist customers to their clients' websites and unique landing pages through online campaigns that are timely, targeted, and trackable.
Today, results are more trackable than ever before. They are also more expected. We cite work with one of our clients, Weave Communications, as an example. "Doctor Distillery has helped us increase our monthly flow of marketing qualified dentist leads in the past six months", says Deon Lewis, vice president of marketing for Weave Communications (getweave.com). "They've figured out how to advertise exclusively to dentists on thousands of non-dental websites."
Lewis continues, "They know how to educate dentists about our services with compelling content as they travel the Internet, consistently driving those dentists, some of whom have never even heard of us before, to request information on our website in a way we can easily measure and quantify."
Dental industry sales and marketing executives have long been in search of the holy grail when it comes to communicating with dentists about their products and services in a trackable, focused, scalable, and sustainable way. There are no magic marketing bullets. However, with new developments in B2B online marketing and solution providers focused on helping those of us in the dental trade reach our marketing goals, there have never before been as many ways for dental companies to succeed.
Naomi Cooper is CEO and cofounder of Doctor Distillery, a B2B advertising and media-buying network that targets more than 100,000 dentists in the United States and connects them with dental companies online. She is also president and founder of Minoa Marketing and serves as chief marketing consultant for Pride Institute. Dental companies seeking more information about reaching dentists and generating dentist leads online through Doctor Distillery's advertising network may contact her via email at [email protected].
