Do you have poison in your dental marketing?
Make sure that your Digital Service providers understand the marketing pitfalls in Dental Advertising to ensure that the content may not prove counterproductive for the brand. At my backend workshop in any given fortnight, we review Dental advertising and websites to map trends for our Dental clients. This time we discovered some marketing poison that is assuming ugly proportions. Here is the story:
Many Digital Marketing Service providers do not alert their Dental clients about the self-inflicted sabotage their advertising may potentially lead to on the basis of advertising images. So what’s the poison? Those yucky photos of Dental clinical procedures are a double-barrel emotional turn-off for prospective patients.
You’ll never hear about this from prospective patients because, they are the folks that never become patients! The close-up illustration of implants, have made patients forgo or delay treatment. Also images that the patient sees as negative content will not be shared via social media except in a negative context.
We can’t even show you the worst of them. But in a quick tour of bad Dental advertising and websites, a would-be patient easily finds pictures, illustrations, and videos of common procedures.
Do patients want to see the drill, screws and dental implant hardware in their mouth? It turns out that some doctors or the inexperienced web builder who needed to fill a picture space on the website didn’t consider the patient’s perspective first. Also Doctors tend to resonate with clinical images because that’s what they do.
In the mind’s eye of the clinician, it’s ordinary textbook stuff, no more alarming than a picture of cake batter in a cookbook recipe. But the surgeon’s perspective and value system is completely different from the patient’s. Dental procedures, even relatively simple ones, include an element of fear for most patients. Avoid clinical images that, in the patient’s mind, engender anxiety. Judge your Dental Advertising first by the emotional perspective of the patient. A photo or illustration that could be a turn-off to a patient is very avoidable, it may hurt your practice.
Patients are buying results, they are not buying a procedure. Appropriate illustrations for Dental advertising or website use include “before” and “after” images. To be clear, the visual elements of Dental advertising can be powerful. Photos, illustrations, videos, animated GIFs and others communicate quickly and effectively. But our point is, the images that a patient regards as negative, yucky, in non-dental parlance, are counterproductive to your marketing goals.
