DIY Marketing: 10 Reasons to Reconsider

Would you recommend a do-it-yourself root canal to your patients? Our guess is no. Besides being a terrible, and painful, idea, as a health professional, you’d never allow it to occur. Root canals are complex, and maybe you’d even refer your clients to an endodontist to tackle them. 

Marketing can be much the same. While, we understand DIY root canals and DIY practice marketing is not an apple-to-apple comparison, but both are painful and can end badly.

Yes, do it yourself or bargain marketing may seem like a cost-effective solution for small businesses. Yet it's not the best choice for expanding your business and surpassing your practice goals. Read on to discover the top ten challenges associated with DIY marketing for dentists and how you can overcome these obstacles:

If you’re busy marketing your business, you’re not busy taking care of patients. Marketing is a full-time job if you want it to work well. Creating and maintaining marketing assets, social media accounts, and online advertising is a significant distraction taking you away from patient care and team oversight. 

Marketing is a specialized field that requires a wide range of knowledge utilizing best practices, trends, and strategies best suited to grow a business. Dental school does not teach you how to promote your practice, and inadequate marketing efforts won’t get you the results you desire and can even harm your reputation if done poorly.  

Patient confidentiality and ethical guidelines can make dental marketing tricky. Rules may be inadvertently violated when DIY marketing comes into play, so doctors need to tread lightly or face legal and professional consequences. And who wants that on top of trying to run a successful practice? 

Consistent, well-designed marketing materials result in effective promotion of any business. But if you’re busy doing dentistry, when will you have the time or tools to create visually appealing and professional material on a consistent basis? And this is ok. You’re not a marketer. You’re a skilled dentist.   

Trying to compete with larger practices or dental chains with substantial marketing investments on a constrained DIY budget, can make it nearly impossible to grow and attract the best patients. Limited resources are closely tied to time constraints, lack of expertise, and proper branding – and all make the perfect cocktail for bad marketing.   

Like a steady drum beat, good marketing adheres to a regular cadence of interaction with its target audience. If you’re not consistent and coherent with your message across various channels, potential patients can be left feeling confused and distrustful of what they’re seeing (or not seeing.)

Marketing is a fluid industry, meaning it’s always evolving and employing new techniques based on consumer behavior. If you’re not keeping up with these changes in search engine algorithms, social media platforms, and digital advertising trends, then patients will think you’re obsolete even if you’re the best dentist in town. 

We talk about data a lot here at Amplify360 and how it helps us measure the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. Dentists focused on treating patients may not have the time or expertise to interpret what their data is telling them. Marketing in the dark will cost you time and money as chase the wrong patients using the wrong marketing channels.

We don’t have to tell you that the dental industry is super-competitive. And if you’re trying to do marketing yourself, you could be taking your practice out of the running. You need any competitive edge you can get to stand out and attract new patients. 

Dentists are already busy, and trying to juggle marketing alongside your clinical responsibilities can lead to more stress and burnout. Maintaining a work-life balance that many of our clients seek is practically non-existent if you’re taking on additional marketing tasks. You lose, your team loses, and your patients lose when you’re stretched too thin. 

Marketing your practice by yourself has its limitations. And this is why thousands of clinicians seek professional assistance. When you invest in a dental marketing partner, you’re investing in their knowledge, experience, and deep resources to develop and execute effective marketing strategies. While going at it alone is an option, you’ll most likely miss out on your practice’s unrealized production potential. If you’re curious how a dental marketing partner can help you grow your practice the right way, we’re here to help.    

Related Content Alert! 

Speaking of stretching yourself too thin, check out this post from our sister company, DentalPost, on how to overcome burnout. You can’t do it all. And you shouldn’t have to.