Creating \"Lift\" With Your Internal Dental Marketing

Marketing to your current patients is not a new dental marketing idea. There are, and continue to be many different strategies and programs that allow you to increase your referrals and retention.

One of the concepts you won't hear very much is the concept of "lift" as it applies to your internal dental marketing. When it comes to marketing for new patients, the best place to start is inside your practice.

Lift is a term that is often you in the aerospace industry. The term applies in much the same way in your dental practice.

As an analogy, let's take the example of an airplane wing. The airplane wing without movement creates no lift, and will not cause the airplane to fly.

In this same way, your patient (the wing) will not create this lift for your practice (the airplane), unless given information (movement) to allow them to talk about your practice everyday. This information is important.

Many dental marketing consultants out there will tell you the easiest way to get referrals is to ask. But nobody likes to sit face to face with a patient and ask them to send their friends.

With the concept of lift, a dentist only needs to convey to the patient a way to spread the word about the practice, and let the patients everyday conversations take care of the rest. When a patient has new information that pertains directly to the patient as a person, they now have the ammunition to talk to their friends, and mention you.

Lift is not telling your patients to talk about your practice, it is giving them a way to talk about your practice. You are helping them refer their friends to you without actually asking.

Let me give an example: If you spread news about your practice to your patients, something like your wife is having a baby. This news will create some conversational pieces about your practice that a patient can use in everyday life.

Now, when that patient is talking to their friend who happens to be pregnant, they can say "Oh, that's funny, my dentist's wife is pregnant."

This is a simple example, but the more information you can give about yourself that will tie into everyday conversations, the better. Your patients will now be able to convey the benefits of your practice more times, and you in return create more buzz and get more referrals.

How you create this lift is by sharing with people news about yourself and your staff. A normal patient cannot relate to you as a dentist, but can relate to you as a person.

Here are a few simple things that you can discuss that will help to create lift:

- You, or a staff member buying a new car
- You or your staff getting a new dog
- You, your staff, or a relative getting married or being pregnant
- Telling stories from your latest vacation

You don't have to do anything crazy, or even newsworthy. Just portray yourself to your patients as a person. If you went to Chicago for a dental conference, don't tell them much about the conference, but tell them about Chicago being a beautiful place, or the deep dish pizza you ate.

Remember, the concept of lift is not to tell patients to talk about your practice, the concept is telling patients how to talk about your practice.

About the Author

James Erickson is the President of EMC Dental Marketing which gives Dentists a resource for turn-key dental marketing programs and dental practice marketing education including new patient attraction, and internal marketing systems. Visit www.EMCdental.com and get a free practice
building kit sent directly to your home or office.<

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Relationship Marketing Must Be Sincere To Succeed

Many sappy cliches are associated with relationship such as "appreciation wins over self promotion" and "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care". Well, my advice is not to get involved in the relationship marketing aspect of marketing if you are not prepared to be sincere about it. You want people to like and trust you, yes, but then you must be absolutely sure that you can be liked and trusted. There is a simple way to get people to like and trust you and that is to show appreciation genuine appreciation. When you say thank you, you had better mean it. If you don't mean it, rather don't say anything at all.

You might think I am being melodramatic or too extreme when I say you should be sincere but it is a known fact that one of the two top facts that people stop using the services and products of a business are as follows: in the first place they feel their business was taken for granted. In other words, the sincerity had gone out of the business relationship. Let's face it, everyone says "thank you" to their clients on the conclusion of a transaction. It's when the evidence of gratitude is not present, i.e. the sincerity that things fall apart.

The second reason people stop doing business with other people is that they forget about them! After trying one's utmost to win a new customer once we have them we tend to neglect them. It's human nature. Yet it takes so little to write a personal card to someone reflecting sincere sentiments. Ask anyone when last they received a card from someone they did business with (not a birthday, holiday or special occasion) and it wasn't a business card or branded logo? The chances are no one ever has.

Relationship marketing means staying in touch with the people that you've done business with and showing sincere appreciation and gratitude on a daily basis. This does not mean sending out self-promoting mailings, email and newsletters. People don't care how great one or other product or service is. They only want to know how it can benefit them personally. What is more, they don't want their patronage taken for granted. If you are looking for relationship marketing techniques here are some and remember to be sincere. Otherwise it's better not to implement them at all.

1. Every day you should send out one unexpected card to a prospect or an existing customer. Remember you need to be sincere and it must be a real tangible card that goes by mail or courier, not an ecard. It must show genuine appreciation or gratitude. Forget about logos and business cards and don't even talk business. A thinking-of-you type card does just fine. Do this daily and see the results.

2. When you communicate with your clients ask yourself what you would do with the piece of mail, email, newsletter, if you received it. If you would appreciate it and keep it to show to others, then go ahead and send it. If you would throw it away then don't bother sending it. You should keep your sincerity detector working overtime. Really care about your customers and their businesses and you will have friends and customers for life.

About the Author

James Copper is a writer for http://www.marketinglinx.com

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How To Improve Your Google Page Rank

It is indispensable to have a high Google page ranking (PR) for you website. This is because in order to get traffic to your site it has to be attractive to the search engines. A high PR is an indication that it is. When you consider that that the most successful internet marketers achieve only 3% of conversion to sales from those who visit their websites, then the importance of a respectable PR ranking and the attendant traffic becomes very important. By the way, the less successful internet marketers get only 1% conversions and those who get less usually give up on their internet marketing efforts.

Having established the importance of a good PR so that you have a good chance of exposure and therefore a greater possibility of sales, you or the webmaster handling your website must optimize it for the search engines. This can be regarded as the main goal of the website owner and the webmaster. To get onto the first page of Google's search results for your keyword or keyword phrase it what it's all about. At worst your site should be appearing on the second or third page. If it appears on any subsequent page you can pretty much accept that your website is invisible to the search engines.

It is therefore imperative to work hard to improve your Google PR. Put another way, you must not upset the Google search engines. Everything you do should massage them into accepting your website and rate it higher. It is not enough to work hard making your website interesting and informative. You have to make use of the best practice search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to allow you to feature high in Google.com.

There are many techniques for getting your website onto Google's #1 page but there is no single best technique. You will have to take a multi-pronged approach. Bear that in mind when you read the techniques enumerated below. Use two, three or even more of these methods and you will achieve success in time.

Behind every successful website rated high on Google lies plenty of keyword research and keyword targeting. You should keyword density analyzers to sure that your content has just sufficient keywords and phrases, not too much. A 1-5% keyword density is about right. Experiment carefully and see what effect various densities have. Be careful of keyword stuffing. Google hates that and will blacklist your site.

Great content is critical to the success of your site for Google. Never forget this. Google uses "bots" or scripts that crawl through the websites seeing what is there. Original content is best. They also base your ranking on your traffic. Also work on getting links pointing to your website. Google PageRank is based on how popular your site is too and the number of inward back links is a definite indication. Remember that the more credible the site that linked you up the better. Credible websites have wait for it higher Google PRs. Another way to get more links in order to improve your Google PR is to post your link in blogs and forums.

These are the SEO techniques used by webmasters to build the PR rankings of the sites they manage. They also submit articles to article databases which have the website link attached to them. Anyone may use these articles as long as they include your URL at the bottom. Over time these articles propagate and earn you valuable back links. These are the tried and tested white hat SEO methods that build Google PR.

About the Author

James Copper is a writer for bigstrategies.co.uk

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