Today, a dentist sent me a list of questions about our services that they wanted to have answered before they signed up for a membership with us. As always, I was happy to help. All of these are perfectly fair questions that you should ask a dental marketing company before you hire them.
1. Will I have full control of the website domain registration?
Yes, unless your domain is currently in the domain registration account of your current website company, you don’t even have to move it. Our dentists typically give us the login to their own account and then we point the domain to our servers from there. We use an Amazon service called Route 53 because it’s faster and more reliable than GoDaddy’s service when it comes to directing traffic for a domain (the technical term is DNS). Having control of the DNS allows us to also easily set up professional email (ex. hello@yourdomain.com) hosting for you via Google’s G Suite service.
2. Do I have full control over the Google Analytics account, can I check the information any time I want, in addition to monthly reports you summarize?
Absolutely, and I’m glad you asked. Once we had a client who we took over and they didn’t have full control over their Analytics account. After a few months, their old company deleted the account and Google couldn’t/wouldn’t restore the data so we had to start over. Unless your current Web company controls your Google Analytics account and will not give you ownership of it, we prefer to continue using the same Google Analytics account that you currently have installed on the website. You just make us managers (not owners). This allows us to compare traffic levels year over year so that we can get an idea of whether increases and decreases are following historical trends.
3. Is there a cap on how many times I can contact you with requests for updates to my website, social media, or questions about analytics? Once that cap is reached what is the hourly cost for additional support?
4. Will I have full ownership of the website content and be able to migrate the content to any platform at a later date?
100% ownership. We build our websites in WordPress, which you can host anywhere you’d like. You own the content, the design, and a royalty-free, web-based license to the stock photography that we use in building your website.
5. What are the itemized costs for each service you are estimating? What is the cost of website hosting?
We don’t price our services in itemized costs- just packages. We do that because the cost of providing the services fluctuates and so the cost of the packages can absorb this fluctuation more easily than an a la carte approach. It also protects the dentists from trying to save money by eliminating a service that they need. The cost of website hosting for our clients is $0/month.
6. What is the guaranteed uptime from website hosting?
Having our websites up and healthy is critical to the success of our company and the success of our dentists. We don’t have a guaranteed uptime because it has never been a problem. All companies have occasional outages but we also include a failover system in our website hosting that directs users to a branded page that has your practice logo, contact information, and an email form so that people are never unable to reach you online. Of course, it’s theoretically possible that both our web server and the failover server go down at the same time, but that has never happened. If such a thing were to happen, it would mean that something upstream from our server company went down and would therefore be outside of our control.
7. Will I have full control of all digital channels?
Digital channels, to me, means the various platforms where we market your practice. To the extent that we have access and control of those, so will you. Having said that, the internet is an ever-evolving ecosystem, and things happen all the time that are outside of our control (ex. Facebook or Google changing the way they rank or display content).
If there are specific concerns that I can address, please let me know. We believe strongly in building and marketing practices in a way that builds marketing momentum for the practice in a way that you can view as equity that you own. For example, when we build a listing for a practice, we build it under an email address that uses the client’s domain name. For example, it would be hello@yourdomain.com.
This means that, because you own the domain, you will always be able to control what happens with that address. Whereas if we built your listings using one of our email accounts, there would be no way for you to guarantee that you’d have access to it in the future- not without a lot of headaches anyway. We don’t believe that’s a fair way to do business. It’s not how we would want to be treated.
8. Do I have a guarantee that I can leave at any time?
If you’re asking for a contract that states that there is no contract, no.
The credit card form that we use is our only contract for our services, and it states:
I authorize Pro Impressions Marketing Inc to charge my credit card for current and
future payments for Internet Marketing work that is mutually agreed upon by
Pro Impressions and myself.
If you ever want to leave, we request a 30-day notice since there is a lot of work involved in stopping and transferring services and a lot of our services such as blogging are done in advance before they go live. If you would like, you can also refer to the Terms, Conditions, and Policies on our website.
Want to know more about whether or not we are the right marketing company for you? Take our compatibility quiz!
