It’s important to make the best first impression you can when marketing your dermatology practice so you can attract the highest-quality leads who are more inclined to become your patients. But Digital marketing is often challenging for dermatology practices with little to no experience in social media, PPC ads, organic SEO, and other critical aspects of successful online marketing. Hiring an agency to help you grow your brand’s presence online can increase your reach to people within your target audience…but pick wrong and the consequences could be devastating. That’s why selecting a digital marketing partner to work with should be done carefully.
Here’s our top 10 list of dermatology marketing frustrations that can come as a result of hiring an agency to do marketing on your behalf. And we’ll look at a potential solution that can help you attract more high-quality clients without handing over all control to an agency.
10 Dermatology Marketing Frustrations For Medical Practices
1. Billing Isn’t Transparent
A reputable digital marketing agency should be prepared to provide you with detailed data on how they’re allocating your budget, including campaign strategy breakdowns, ad and content spend summaries, etc. You should be allowed access to all of your data and information, as well as the results of any campaigns that your advertising agency is doing. It’s also their responsibility to inform you of why certain decisions are being made and to explain to you why if you don’t understand.
If a marketing agency doesn’t communicate with you regularly, it becomes impossible to know what actions they are taking on your behalf or what outcomes you’re getting. It becomes a significant issue for dermatology practices when their advertising agencies do not provide them with clear information to support their outcomes and the responses to those outcomes.
2. It’s Difficult to Reach Your Account Manager
One of the most common dermatology marketing frustrations is working with an agency that is difficult to reach. It’s difficult to market your dermatology practice effectively if you reach out to your Account Manager and it takes 3 to 4 days to get a response…or you don’t even get one. Some digital marketing agencies have a reputation for being sluggish to reply to their clients, and this can be detrimental for a business owner relying on their expertise to execute your online marketing activities.
Your dermatology practice needs a digital marketing partner that considers your organization a priority, regardless of its size. Look for candidates that show it cares about their clients and take pride in providing quality customer support.
3. The Costs Keep Going Up
Without transparent pricing, many digital marketing agency customers find that their costs begin to rise over time. The agency may have sold them an extra service or an additional advertising package, but failed to provide reports or anything else to show for the additional charge.
While inflation is, unfortunately, a consideration to make, if your costs are going up astronomically in a short period or your dermatology marketing agency can’t provide you with a clear, itemized bill, this is a red flag that your practice may be being taken advantage of.
4. They Don’t Understand Your Industry & Niche
Working with a digital marketing agency that has extensive experience in your niche is ideal and tends to produce the best end results. A team of professionals who are familiar with what your practice does, who your ideal customers are and how you can reach them, and the regulations of your industry is an invaluable resource to have.
While many marketing agencies can get around the learning curve, you don’t want to entrust your valuable brand to an agency that doesn’t have a good foundational basis of HIPAA or understand how to position value-added content to your target audience.
Remember that even if you hire a dermatology marketing firm, you absolutely still have the ability to provide input, make critiques, request campaign adjustments, and even manage your own dermatology practice marketing.
5. They Use a Cookie-Cutter Approach
It’s doubtful that your dermatology practice will be the only client your marketing agency serves. Be wary of using the same marketing tactics or template strategies that the agency has used for other clients, even if the agency says their plug-and-play templates are a recipe for success. Each dermatology practice has a different target audience, different procedures, and different medical professionals that operate within it. Marketing strategies should be tailored to match the specific needs of your dermatology practice, and they should continue to be tailored based on the performance of those campaigns with your core audience.
6. They Don’t Consider Your Feedback, Not Really
Many digital marketing agencies genuinely care about their clients and strive to provide outstanding service. Nevertheless, there will always be those agencies that refuse to accept input from their clients, since their clients don’t have the same understanding of marketing.
Naturally, you want to work with a marketing firm that has the experience you need, but you also want to work with an agency that is open to listening to your suggestions or criticism about the work they’re completing for you.
You’re the expert on your industry and your business. It’s important to collaborate with a marketing agency that will listen to your input and include your suggestions where applicable. Ideally, working with a dermatology marketing agency is a collaborative endeavor in which you all work together to achieve your goals.
7. The Marketing Strategies Are Antiquated
Some digital marketing firms have been in existence for quite some time. They undoubtedly have a significant amount of experience, but has the organization kept track of how the world of marketing and advertising has evolved over time?
Dermatology marketing agencies should be up to date on the most successful current strategies and tools and should be utilizing new technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to continue to improve the accuracy of their campaigns.
Ask your marketing agency how they’ve stayed on top of the rapid changes to search engine optimization, social media advertising, etc., and what they’re continuing to do ongoing to make changes as needed in the future. If your agency can’t give you a good answer to this question, or doesn’t seem too interested in using new technology in their campaigns, this could be a concern.
8. Campaigns Are Not Data-Driven
A quality digital marketing agency for dermatology practices and other types of medical professionals will make decisions about their clients’ ad campaigns based on analytical data about the campaign’s performance, among other key metrics.
Instead of using a cookie-cutter approach to apply the same marketing formula to multiple different clients, a good digital marketing agency will run reports and pull a plethora of data about your website, traffic, target users, and more in order to make sound and informed decisions about where to take your marketing next. Ignoring all these data points to simply do the same type of marketing and advertising as every other dermatology practice is undoubtedly a fast track to failure.
9. You Have Little Control Over Your Growth
While your practice doesn’t have the time or knowledge to be responsible for every aspect of your online marketing, you likely do want to be able to make the final decision as to what gets published and what doesn’t. As previously mentioned, it’s your practice and you are ultimately the one accountable for its success or failure. If you’re working with an agency that allows you little to no control over the final products or where and how they are published, this may be a red flag.
A reputable digital marketing agency will provide you with all of the data you need to make informed choices about which campaigns to continue investing in and which campaigns to pull because they’re not performing well. A good agency will take the time to get to know you and your company, your goals and overall mission, and what you want to see come from your digital marketing campaigns. Your marketing agency should be willing to listen and take your feedback into account when creating ad strategies to meet your needs.
10. They Don’t Provide Accurate Reporting
The most important thing your dermatology marketing agency should provide you is monthly analytics reports that show you in no uncertain terms how your campaigns are performing.
These reports tell you how much traffic you’ve gained or lost since the last month, how many new keywords you are ranking for or if you’ve lost keywords, which pages have gone up or down in ranking, which social media posts performed the best or got the most engagement and more. The reports should be available to you and your agency should be able to go over them with you to help you better understand what the reports mean and how the data is being applied to your ongoing marketing strategies.
The Surefire Way to Make Your Marketing Dollars Count
Not all dermatology marketing agencies are suspect. Many firms do an excellent job of catering to the individual needs of their customers, but finding them isn’t always easy.
Surefire Local is what we like to call the agency antidote. Surefire Local is a seamless combination of both software and services that eliminates many of the dermatology marketing frustrations we’ve covered thus far.
With our all-in-one advertising platform, you can have complete control over your marketing campaigns with a single, user-friendly dashboard and access to instant reporting. Book your demo today.
