Marketing in an Economic Slow-Down

Most dental practices pull back on their marketing spending when economic times get tough. This is a mistake. Especially where web marketing is concerned, practices will fair hard economic times better if they stay strong in their marketing. They will see more new patients come in the door.

Sure, they'll have to work harder for the patients that they get than when the economy was flush with dollars for elective medical procedures like cosmetic dentistry, but the point is that the patients will come - IF you continue to market for them.

Web marketing is the most cost effective marketing medium out there. Imagine trying to launch a TV campaign for $20,000. There are monthly costs to doing SEO, but they pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that you might spend on TV air time. The web is also cheaper than radio and direct mail. The beauty is that Internet marketing is also more effective because, unlike TV, radio, direct mail, and other forms of interruption advertising, the internet is targeting people that have already signaled that they are interested in dentistry by searching for dental phrases on Google and the other search engines.

There is an added penalty for pulling back on web marketing. Websites have intertia on the search engines. The more you put into your web marketing, the more that your website will build momentum and will be more likely to show up for searches in the future. When you pull back on your web marketing, you lose momentum and can even begin building negative momentum that is hard to recover from. If the search engines begin ranking your website as a has been, it is difficult to turn that impression around and show them that you're a source of high-quality, new information. This means that if you pull back on your web marketing now, when the economic market turns around and dentistry is hot again, you will suffer a lag time in getting your web marketing back up to speed.

In these times of economic slow-down, swim upstream and surpass your competitors that use the economy as an excuse not to market. Take this opportunity to be aggressive in your web marketing.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Jonathan's Web Marketing Blog
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