By: Neil Sanderson

If you look around the marketing in dentistry, from the poster in a dental practice right through to the likes of Colgate and Oral B television advertising, you would think that the only people who have any dental work done on their teeth are twenty something’s!

Of course the reality is the opposite, most twenty something’s need very little work doing on their teeth other than whitening maybe, there is another issue with this group too, they don’t have the disposable income that the older generation, this is the target market that marketing in dentistry should be clearly aimed at.

I was recently commissioned by a dental practice to promote implants for them and one of the media we chose to run some adverts was the local press.

The first advert they came back to us with had a beautiful twenty something lady with a dazzling smile, such as the one to the left. This was completely the wrong image for what we were trying to achieve.

What we actually wanted and ended up with was an image like the one below, which was exactly the age group that we were trying to target with our dental marketing pieces.

Marketing in dentistry is no different to any other type of marketing you can take the scatter gun approach or you can use rifle instead.

Before you pick any images for your website or any form of marketing in dentistry think of the target market you have in mind.

So for instance if you are promoting whitening a  young female with dazzling white teeth would be very appropriate, but if you are marketing straightening, this might not be the appropriate image to use.

Team photographs are always good especially on brochures and websites, these give an image of who your target market are going to be dealing with, its also very relevant to the subject matter. However photographs of the practice building mean little or nothing to your audience, unless it is an very pretty building set in a lovely location.

Before and after images can be useful too, but make sure that these are relevant to the marketing in dentistry message you are trying to portray, and don’t make the mistake of showing too graphical images of people having implants placed, these are an immediate turn off for most.

Read more at Neil’s blog: DentalMarketingExpert.com