If you have opened your dental practice (or have been practicing for a while) in a major city like New York, Dallas of Miami, then you may be wondering just how exactly are you supposed to compete with large operations with multimillion dollar marketing budgets.
Well, do not despair, because even though there are difficulties related to marketing in major cities, there are also many advantages that are not available to dental practices marketing in small towns. In this article, we will outline how you can develop a strategy to maximize the profitability of your office even in a complicated environment.
More people = More competition
The obvious drawback that comes with marketing in a big city is that there is much more competition for the same potential patient pool. This is somewhat offset by the fact that there are more patients to go after, but generally the following will be true of larger cities:
- Higher cost per click (CPCs) for all types of paid advertising, meaning that it is more difficult to run profitable campaigns. In some extreme cases, the competitive dynamics can be such that it is nearly impossible to run profitable campaigns.
- Limited geographic reach for local results. – In a small town or in small cities that are not very competitive, it is possible to rank all across the city for dental keywords in the local map pack, but in large cities this is generally not possible due to the level of competition. Expect to have difficulty ranking outside of a 2 miles radius around your office, and outside of a 5 miles radius expect it to be near impossible unless you have a very strong organic presence.
- Very difficult to rank organically for top terms such as “Dentist in Phoenix” or similar high volume top of mind keywords.
Understand your true local market
The most important thing to understand is that in big cities the market is really made up of many smaller markets. If you are in the outskirts of a city, you are not really competing with the all in one dental office in the downtown central business district.
This has implications on branding, keyword selection and targeting. For example, a client of ours decided to brand themselves as North Garland Dental and Orthodontics to emphasize their micro market, even though Garland is part of the massive Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. It is also useful to think of typical consumer and patient behaviors. In general the following holds true for most dental patients:
- Most will not drive further than 5 miles for a dentist, particularly if it is not an office that they know.
- If they are experiencing a dental emergency, then often they will be willing to drive 10 miles or more.
- Most downtown residents will not drive to the outskirts for dental services, while residents of the outskirts are more likely to come downtown for treatment.
Pick your niche
What almost certainly won’t work is trying to boil the ocean looking to rank for all dental services all across your metropolitan area. You need to pick what will be the focal points of your practice – will it be dental emergencies? Dental implants? Pediatric dentistry? Or perhaps you will target the local Spanish speaking population? Any of these are valid strategies that can work effectively, but you just have to commit to one as the strategy will not only have implications as to how you conduct your marketing but they will also have an impact on the way you structure your office operations.
Conclusion
Being located in a major city has many advantages that, if leveraged correctly, can turn your practice into a lean mean cash generating machine with guaranteed new patient flow for continued growth.