Ah, the competition. That nagging reality that you must face as a dentist and how you apply a dental content strategy to solve it.
But does the dental-practice-on-every-corner really matter to YOUR production? And what about corporate dentistry practices and their lower overhead due to their buying power?
Those and a number of competitor related questions can keep you awake at night.
Competition is overemphasized and here’s why a dental content strategy matters
Let’s start with marketing strategy. It’s a knee jerk reaction to diss the competition.
- To point out their flaws.
- How they’re different than you.
- How they operate. Etc.
The problem, if that applies, is that your focus is in the wrong place relative to your competitors.
What if you’ve met the competition…and it isn’t them?
Stick with me…
What if you’ve met the competition…and it’s YOU?!
The more you focus on “them” out there…the less you’re focused on your dental patients and your influence on them.
Again, it’s natural to lay awake thinking about the newest dental center opening up a few miles away or blocks away. You’ve seen their mailers, their fancy promotion spotlighting their state-of-the-art new technology, and their new patient promotions.
But think about something for a moment. They aren’t going away and your focus on them isn’t going to change that.
What can change is your decision to embrace the competition and use it to your advantage.
What if the competition could actually help build your dental practice as you improve your dental content strategy?
Start with transparency.
The art of being transparent has huge benefits to your practice growth. Transparency should not be equated with weakness or giving-away-the-farm so to speak.
In fact, when you’re transparent – authentically so – your patients and growing base of site visitors will begin to trust you.
And that’s the first thing that transparency does…
Being transparent builds trust.
Once trust is established you can speak openly, honestly, and even glowingly (is that a word?) about your competition.
Why?
Because you’ve lightened up and stopped being concerned about your competitors impact on you. Instead, you’re recognizing that you can use their position to your advantage.
Transparency enables you to speak the truth about what anyone could find out on their own about your competition.
Remove the mystery and you’ll stop concerning yourself with every ad, promotion, and competitor move.
What does transparency look like?
Good question.
Think of it like being yourself.
- Know your skills, expertise, and influence.
- Focus on the unique value you deliver to your patients via your services, your team, your practice brand, your history…and your dental marketing content.
- Be comfortable in-your-skin. In essence, be so in tune with your grasp of your patient’s and the dental seeking public’s unique questions that you’re doing them a disservice if you don’t answer them with relevant content.
Think like a teacher
“But I’m a dentist,” you say. That fact doesn’t change your role as an influencer.
You must think like a teacher…not only a dental practice owner.
Level up your role as a dental professional. And I’m not talking a CE based, colleague driven dentist.
I’m talking about your ability to influence your patient’s “buying decision” via intuitive, organic content.
By intuitive I mean the kind of dental content that isn’t focused on your latest, greatest, state of the art-ness (like your competition). Rather content that’s focused on their burning questions about a dental procedure, related costs, fears, emotions…basically anything your patients or the dental seeking public is asking about.
You differentiate yourself from your competition (and stop worrying about them) when you focus on content that solves the problems and answers the questions the dental seeking public (including your patients) are seeking and asking.
- Ramp up your listening strategies. Tune into every available source of questions, problems, and goals that your patients and site visitors provide.
- Create content that addresses the questions, problems, and desires of your patients and the dental seeking public.
- Monitor and share your fresh content. This lifts you to a place of influence and expertise rather than merely a promo-of-the-month service provider (something your competition is probably focused on).
Your ability to listen and leverage information on behalf of your patients and potential patients will differentiate you from every other dental practice you fear as competition.
Practice dentistry out of abundance instead of scarcity
Make this your new reality (when you’re not obsessing over your competitors):
There’s more than enough dentistry to go around.
Focus on your influence rather than how to out-promo your competition down the street. Doing this enables you to always be in a position of strength.
Why?
No one else is doing this…and they’re not likely to start. The reasons vary but it’s always easier to follow the crowd.
In this instance the crowd of dental competitors are quite content (successful or not) to throw marketing dollars at patient attraction like everyone has always done it.
The sales mindset is difficult to shake.
And the patient focused content driven strategy is perceived too risky or ineffective for most.
Stay the course and you’ll never be lacking for patients. Because every patient or potential patient will reflexively search online for answers and solutions.
When they do…you have the advantage when your website is a solutions platform rather than a digital brochure.
The competition isn’t likely to go away. Why lose sleep over it and try to game your way past them?
Instead, accept them, befriend them…but mostly stop worrying about them. There are more important things to do…like answering your patients questions and solving their problems.
