Dentists should not have to hop from one dental marketing company to another. They should be able to stay with the same marketing company for years, knowing that they are always getting the best service. Pro Impressions Marketing specializes in dental marketing that generates more ideal patient leads.

We are succeeding as we move toward our mission to help dentists due to a handful of strategies that help our dentists and dental organizations grow their businesses.

the dental marketing team of Pro Impressions enjoys a lunch together

We Focus On Who We Are

If a competitor reads this article, they may scoff at our goal of serving 100 dentists. That’s perfectly fine. They may be running a very successful business that already serves more than 100 dentists. I’m happy for them, but we’ve learned that we are at our best when we focus on what makes us who we are.

When prospective clients come to us, the biggest complaint we hear is that they aren’t getting the service that they want from their current provider. Sometimes they say, “It was great when we first signed up but then it just went south.” They complain about unanswered phone calls or emails and long time frames for getting the simplest update made to their website. What it boils down to is customer service.

When we focus on the retention of our clients through quality service, we win. At the time of this writing, we serve fewer than 50 dental offices and we’ve been in business for 10 years. If you do the math, that would suggest that we’re not going to make our goal of 100 dentists. However, throughout those 10 years, we have honed our systems to enable us to bring on more clients with predictable results in the coming years. It’s going to be fantastic, but the sky is not the limit. Customer satisfaction is the limit.

We are building out processes for sales and marketing of our own business and will achieve our goal. We will grow, but our number one reason for losing clients will not change. It’s not a lack of results—when we lose a client it’s almost always because they sell their practice and retire. We’re very happy to be part of that transition and, when possible, welcome the new dentist as our newest member.

We Focus on Effective Communication

At Pro Impressions, we use effective communication to build and maintain working relationships within the company and with our clients. This does not simply mean that we’re exceptionally good at checking our email. In fact, we make it a point not to get stuck in our inboxes (Thank you, Slack.com).

At Pro Impressions:

  • We are systematic about our communication.
  • We schedule communication.
  • We are succinct, yet detailed in our communication.
  • We prioritize verbal, if not face-to-face communication.
  • We make a point to leave a “paper trail”.
  • We ask intelligent questions.

And perhaps most importantly, we do not shy away from conflict, always careful to speak the truth with love. That’s the way we want to be treated, so we make it a point to treat each other that way, and that includes our clients.

In day-to-day life, that means being honest when we drop the ball. We’re not perfect, but we find that our clients appreciate the transparency we offer them. Our clients stick with us through hard times like 2020 because we work with them as a team, and we deliver on our promises. That takes integrity and guts, but it also requires effective communication.

For example, once while running a Google Ads campaign for a client, we discovered a massive decline in leads. The spending on the campaign did not go down, however, and the dentist’s organic rankings were unchanged. We scoured through the marketing and discovered that somewhere along the way, the geotargeting on the campaign had been removed entirely. We were very embarrassed.

The client was far from being a micromanager and trusted us to the point of once saying, “Look, Jonathan, I trust you. If you tell me to do something, I’m going to do it.” It was painful to have to admit this blunder to the client, but we did and we reimbursed him for the ad budget and management spending for the period when the setting was incorrect. It was a failure of our management after all.

Internally, our account managers communicated that there was a problem in the lead and traffic data without using threats or a defensive attitude. Our specialists responded with a ‘message received’ and an understanding of the situation’s seriousness. They followed up with accountability and an explanation of the resolution of the issue. Management made the call to do the right thing and take financial responsibility for the problem. Our account management team passed along the accountability and transparency with professionalism.

We clearly communicated to the client what had gone wrong, how the results were impacted, and what our plan was to make things right. The client wasn’t exactly pleased with the situation but was very pleased with how we handled it.

We Are Dental Experts AND Marketing Experts

We are dental experts who provide the best marketing services in the dental industry. We have had countless opportunities to branch out into other areas over the years, but we’ve said ‘no’ to almost all of them. When we tried branching out from dentistry because of a “passion project” for an orphanage in Uganda or because the client was in an adjacent industry, we almost always regretted it in the long run.

Being dental marketing experts provides us with some tremendous efficiencies and builds the quality of our service and the product that we generate. Dentists don’t have to worry that we won’t understand their priorities. They can tell that we understand their business because we ask the right questions.

Even within dentistry, we have a niche focus on fee-for-service dental practices and are sleep and TMJ, marketing experts. Just as dentists need quality dental marketing, our world needs quality dental care, and that’s part of what makes us passionate about being dental nerds who also happen to be marketing experts.

We can’t achieve our mission of helping 100 of the best dentists deliver the best dental care unless we offer the best marketing services in dentistry. To that end, we have prioritized training in Business Made Simple University. We continue to invest in server and development technology that makes our websites the fastest in the dental industry. We also continue to build on our team’s skills, hiring new talent and investing in training and certifications that make us the best of the best.

We Focus on Staying Profitable

Can we talk about money? It’s sort of frowned upon in polite company, but since effective communication is really important to our success, let’s just put it out there: we’re not cheap, and we like to make money. We are successful as a business because we understand some aspects of profitability that many other marketing companies do not seem to understand:

  • If your dentist isn’t making good money from your marketing efforts, then they won’t stay with you year after year.
  • If you don’t charge enough to provide the best marketing services available, you will not provide the best marketing services. You, the marketing company, can’t afford to operate that way.
  • Dentists always want the best marketing services available even when they don’t seem to want to pay for them.

If the above statements don’t resonate with you, and you’re a dentist in search of a new marketing company, take our Are We Right For You? Quiz. It could save you some time. Our focus on staying profitable through the years kept us afloat as the world recovered from the great recession, the 2020 pandemic, and will continue to see us through other bumps in the road. It has helped us take care of our employees and kept us focused on what we do best rather than chasing other dreams that would suck up operating capital despite being oh-so shiny.

We will never be the biggest marketing company in dentistry, but we will continue to be the best, and we owe it to these key characteristics and strategies.