Marketing Your “Profit Centers”

Intelligently marketing the different services a practice offers is one of the key factors in financial success.

In business parlance, a “profit center” is a part of the business targeted to generate a percentage of the overall income. For example, the food and beverage and room service departments in a hotel.

In dentistry, potential profit centers can include your hygiene department, dental implant services, cosmetic dentistry, and niche services such as oral appliance therapy for sleep apnea and TMD/headache diagnosis and treatment.

Each of your major categories of service should be marketed separately in order to obtain maximum return. The reason for this is that each appeals to a different type of “audience”. A patient interested in a smile makeover doesn’t necessarily have the same motivations as an endentulous patient suffering with dentures.

Each major service has its own imagery, hot buttons and messaging. A person reading the marketing material should feel that their particular needs and concerns are being addressed.

This doesn’t mean that you have to have separate marketing pieces. One website can have separate pages or sections dedicated to these different major services. These are usually also landing pages, pages where a person directly lands as a result of search terms he or she has entered into a search engine.

Or, as in the direct marketing magazine program we offer, there is a page or pages devoted to each of the main services the dentist wants to market.

In addition to a strong website and a powerful direct marketing piece, some of our clients opt to also have a website or direct mail piece that focuses solely on a particular service or group of services. This is especially important for services not usually considered the province of a dentist, such as headache or sleep apnea treatment, but can be done for any service, such as dental implant services or same-day teeth.

A focus website or a focus direct marketing piece tells the reader that you are an expert dedicated to providing that particular service. They can be profitable additions to a practice’s marketing under certain circumstances.

If you would like to learn more about marketing a particular dental service, please give us a call at [phone]