What Is Marketing and Why Do It?

Sounds obvious doesn’t it? But it is not understood by many dental practice owners. When one markets a product or service you are making it known to your target audience that the product or service is available.

You are not just making it known though! You have to make it known in a way that appeals to them in some way. To appeal to them means that there is something that you say or show that resonates with something in their minds that they consider satisfies a need they have and/or consider valuable; it has to resonate enough with them that they want to call you for an appointment.

In marketing and advertising it is not enough to appeal to one or two people – you have to know that it will appeal to a large percentage of the people you will be paying to reach through the medium or media you choose.

This is where skill, experience, training, and professionalism in the various disciplines of marketing come into play.

To be able to create appeal and have a lot of people calling for appointments one needs to know a) how to get the data that would appeal and b) how to use that data in crafting messages that would appeal. Also one would need to c) know which medium, or media, would be the most cost-effective to use in reaching the right people.

I’ll be covering some of that in the next article by going over what makes for good marketing of a service or product. By “good” I mean effective in getting far more return than the investment made!