One of my earliest memories of marketing was helping my mother, a lifelong and now retired dental practitioner, trying to choose a logo for her new dental practice. I remember suggesting striking bold colours and eye-popping fonts, only to be rebuked by my mum for not taking seriously the need to convey trust and credibility. Whilst I’m sure my mum could have given me a bit more slack, given that I was only the tender age of 10 years old at the time, the relevance of the lesson in the importance of trust is as relevant today as it was back then. For in today’s healthcare landscape, trust is paramount.
Patients are increasingly discerning, with 70 per cent consulting online reviews and 71 per cent more likely to book an appointment if a practice has positive reviews. Furthermore, the landscape has changed, with patients struggling to find NHS services and in many cases reluctantly accepting that they will need to go private for some or all of their dental services. This factor accelerates the desire for practitioners that they feel they can trust; practices where patients can feel comfortable, safe in the knowledge that they aren’t going to be pushed down the route of treatments that they don’t need and can barely afford.
When I set up Growth Animals with my former colleague and now business partner, Jen Bayford, we were driven by a shared frustration with the world of marketing that we lived in. After a collective 30 years in the industry, we felt that marketing had a bad reputation for pedalling tactics that people too often felt were intrusive or manipulative. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Effective marketing should be a vehicle for commercial growth, positive impact and gaining patient trust.
For providers, aligning your marketing with ethical principles can help foster long-term patient relationships and sustainable growth. But how? Effective ethical marketing needs to work on two levels. First, it should sustainably grow your business over the long term, being focused on ‘white hat techniques’ that focus on building your brand and your search engine results with integrity.
An example of this is developing high quality and personable content, designed to showcase your practice as a credible, friendly and trustworthy option. This could include educational pieces of content that translate across your website, social media and email newsletters, around everyday dental related pain points your patients can relate to. Examples of this could include, how to floss effectively or tips to encourage toddlers to get into brushing their teeth, all designed to position you and your practice as experts in the field. Taking this one step further and having these pieces of content presented visibly (video) by you or members of your team, helps to add that human touch that builds empathy and trust
Contrast this to ‘black hat techniques’ which are considered manipulative, such as the stuffing of keywords into web pages to try and trick search engines, or false scarcity messaging, where practices promote ‘limited’ appointment slots even when the true availability is not actually limited. In these instances, while there can sometimes be short-term bounces in sales, the long-term effect is an erosion of credibility and trust.
The second element of building a sustainable marketing strategy is building a brand that is based on more than simply making you money. We live in an era where the triple bottom line of ‘People, Planet and Profit’ are of increasing importance to customers. Once the traditional entry points of geography and cost are satisfied, if a practice can demonstrate impact to the wider community or to the local environment, this can really make it stand out positively next to competitors. It not only helps to build trust; it can additionally drive loyalty.
One warning must be flagged however, and that is to only demonstrate credible and authentic impact. Practices that over-inflate claims in this area will be deemed as ‘greenwashers’, and risk eroding the trust and brand equity that had up until that point been built.
So, where do you go to try and find that credible and authentic narrative? I always say to start within. Look at your values as founders or practice leaders and build out from those. If you need a little help with that, there is a free Brand Personality Quiz available which can provide some quick and fun inspiration. Built in collaboration with personality type author and researcher, David Hodgson, and based on Carl Jung’s Theory of Personality, it takes just two minutes and unearths eye opening insights into your personality, what it means for you as a brand, a business, a leader and, what superpowers you might be able to apply to your brand.
One recent and fun example of how this approach has been directly applied to a business, is with a professional services client. The founder turned out to be a panda personality. It soon became apparent through conversations with her team, that those values seeped beautifully into her business and her people in the way that they operated day to day. We further backed this up through interviews with clients, who corroborated that these values were what set them apart from competitors and now their strategy leans heavily into this narrative.
So, in an age where customers expect more from their practitioners, start building trust today, by developing your sustainable strategy for growth.
For more information visit https://growthanimals.com/brand-quiz/