How to Stand OUT from the CROWD with Your Marketing - SmartBox Web Tip of the Day
Channel: SmartBox Dental
Date: 06/06/2011

http://www.smartboxwebmarketing.com  A dentist called into the office this week and he literally said, 'I've followed your stuff for a long time, I like what you're doing and I need to get a website.' This sounded great, another dentist wanting to expand his marketing and start building that string of new patients, but the next thing out of his mouth was startling, 'I just need the most basic, simplest, cheapest thing you've got.' The reason that he needed this cheap website was because he needed to meet a checklist that his dental consultant had given him, it seemed he didn't really understand the value of marketing. We talk to a lot of dentists that really just want to do dentistry; they don't want to do marketing. They went to school eight years, they've become a dentist, they've done all this continuing education and they don't want to fool with their marketing, they just want new patients to come in their door and do what they love and what they enjoy doing which is dentistry.

We spent time with this doc and chatted and talked about the different things. In the end there are a lot of companies that can build you a website for cheap, but the difference between a cheap website and an expensive website, or a more expensive website, is that one is just like a billboard in the middle of a cornfield. If all you do is just throw a site up and you don't do any optimization, you don't do any link building, you don't do any marketing to your website no one is going to find it. Just because you put a website up doesn't mean anybody's going to go to it, anybody's going to search for it or anybody's going to find it. The second thing is, when you do put a website up, does it look like everybody else in your area? A lot of these large dental marketing firms put out websites that all look identical; all the content's the same, sometimes the designs are even identical. If you've got five doctors in a city that all have the same looking website, how effective do you think that's going to be when a patient is out there searching and they find five doctors with near-clone websites. Your message is the same and they look at that and they go, 'Geez, how am I supposed to decide?' and they finally find a dentist that has a different message that speaks directly to them, that stands out from the crowd, and they choose that dentist.

The two big things are, don't just build a website, build and market your web presence and also make sure you are marketing with a different message. If your message is the same as everybody else why would they choose you? The answer is they wouldn't.