5 ways to build your online presence

Much of the business and world now revolves around being online. Dentists not only make purchases online, but they also read reviews and look for information about dental labs that they are deciding to conduct business with. It is extremely important for Dental Labs to have a strong online presence if they are looking to remain successful.
  
One common misconception that people have is that building an online presence is difficult and that it takes a great amount of time. However, there are actually some simple things that you can do right now to begin building your online presence. In fact, here are 5 ways to build your online presence now that won't leave you waiting years for results.

Develop a Plan

The first thing that you need to know is exactly where you see yourself going. Like any major business move, it is important that you have a plan in place before you start working at building your online presence. Set up some goals that you can monitor and make sure that you record them on paper. This will allow you to be able to look back at the goals in the future in order to determine if they were in line with your plan.

Develop Content

Content is one of the most important things that any Dental Lab can offer when they are looking to build their online presence. The content that you produce should be valuable and entertaining to your consumers. The idea is to develop yourself as the voice in your industry. Avoid focusing solely on sales content. Instead, create content that your consumers will be able to take away from and apply the information to their daily lives.

Develop your Dental Labs Social Media Presence

There are plenty of social media sites available that you can become a part of. The best thing that you can do is to research where your target market is and spend time building up those sites first. Make sure that you are sharing content regularly through your social media sites as well as through your website. To help make this process easier, rely on a tool that will allow you to manage all of your sites from one location. There are sites available that you can use to create both social media updates as well as articles for your website, which will help you to save massive amounts of time.

Engage and Be Human

Consumers are looking for a business that they can relate to. It is important that you show them the face behind the company and help them to understand that you are a person too. This is difficult to do in an online setting, but you can make the process easier by engaging with your consumers directly. Comment on reviews and thank them for their feedback. Make sure that your replies and comments are always personal and that you are not giving what your consumers will feel is a generated response.

Track your Results

There is no better way to know if something is working than by tracking the results that you are receiving. Several tools are available online for this purpose and you should make sure that you are utilizing them to your advantage. Knowing what is working and what isn't will help you to tweak your plan and make it more effective for the future.

Developing a presence online is something that every dental lab should be striving to master, regardless of the size of the company. By doing so, you will find that you are able to better compete with other similar companies and that your customers are happier than ever before. To learn more about how you can improve your online presence, be sure to contact us. www.DentalLabSupport.com.

How Using Marketing Data Can Improve Customer Retention for Dental Labs

In too many dental laboratories, information exists in silos. Marketing departments seek to gather as much data as possible to convert members of your target audience into leads. Sales department repeat the process to convince leads that becoming a customer is a great idea. Then, the process starts anew in customer service.

But in reality, all of these departments can benefit from the same basic data. Especially if your goal is increased customer retention, you have to find a way to take advantage of the same data sets and maximize relevancy long after a web visitor turns into a lead. Using marketing data effectively, in fact, can significantly improve your customer retention.

The Importance of Customer Service in Dental Lab

It probably comes as no surprise to you that to succeed in business, customer service in the dental lab industry matters. Happy dentist's are brand advocates, sharing their thoughts on your brand with their peers in person and on social media. And, most crucially for the purposes of this post, customer service will improve your retention.

It's common sense: if a dentist is unhappy or has a question about your product or service, they'll seek your help. If they get that help quickly, they'll come away with a positive impression, and become more likely to buy from you again in the future. If they don't, they'll start to look elsewhere. That's why in a study by the Gallup Group, customers were nine times more likely to be engaged with a brand when they evaluated the service as "courteous, willing, and helpful."

Building a More Relevant Customer Service Effort

No customer service effort can be complete without personalization. If you a dentist calls with a question or complaint, you need to be able to pull up their information and make your answers as relevant to them as possible. Studies, in fact, show, that personalizing your customer service is the single most important variable for your audience.

Building that personalization, of course, can prove to be difficult. If your customer service department acts in an information silo, they may simply not be able to quickly and efficiently pull up customer data in order to make their response more relevant and accurate. That's why sharing marketing data across your organization is so crucial.

Providing Ample Access to Marketing Data

For most customer service operations, sales data seems to be the most obvious fit. After all, if you know which products your customers purchased and when, you can more easily answer their question and help to solve their problem.

But in reality, marketing data matters just as much. Especially if your marketing team uses Customer Relationship Management software, you want to know about past email communications and social interactions that may have preceded the initial sale. These communications can give you valuable insights into the customers mindset as well as the problem they were trying to solve by buying your product or service in the first place.

That's why providing your customer service team with access to your CRM is a crucial step in customer service (and ultimately retention) success. But of course, you still have to find a platform that actually gathers the right information, and helps you effectively share that information across your organization.

Using the Right Platform For Customer Retention Success

That's where LabCell  - Dental Lab CRM comes into play. Our software is designed specifically to be accessible by members across your organization, and also gathers the data you need to succeed in retaining existing customers. 

To learn more about our LabCell CRM, and how it can help you retain your existing customers, contact us at 1.888.715.9099 or visit us at DentalLabSupport.com.

Dental Lab Lead Nurturing

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Lead nurturing is an important part of any inbound marketing campaign. After generating leads through the strategic use of content marketing and custom designed landing pages, you want to be sure that your leads actually turn into customers by providing them with regular messages that increasingly nudge them toward a sale. 

But of course, as is the case in any digital marketing initiatives, it's important to follow industry standards in order to be successful.  Here are 3 best practices that aid your lead nurturing efforts, with the help of CRM Software.

1) Segment and Target

A blank nurturing strategy can be dangerous. Put simply, sending the same emails to every one of your leads risks annoying them with content that is not relevant to their individual needs. Instead, consider segmenting your leads into different groups, and targeting individual messages specifically to these groups.

Segmenting, of course, begins with a custom landing page that asks your audience for more than just their name or email address. While you need to keep your sign up forms relatively short, asking one or two distinguishing questions helps separate your contacts into distinct segments. And once you set up that landing page, an effective CRM can do the rest. Now, you can set up targeted nurturing campaigns with emails directed only at the portions of your audience for which they are most relevant, ensuring a smooth experience for your leads and better chances of turning into customers.

2) Support your campaign with Content

You should also consider expanding your lead nurturing strategy beyond mere email marketing. While emails remain the lifeblood of any 'drip' campaign, what if you use them to promote content that is relevant to leads in a specific stage in the sales funnel?

Of course, this strategy can take some effort, as you will have to build content that relates to audiences who already know about you. But once you have this type of content, you can enrich your nurturing efforts by providing actual, valuable content rather than just a prompt to become your customer. It turns your emails into true nurturing efforts, rather than mere promotional messaging.

3) Time Strategy 

Finally, you should pay serious attention to when you send out your emails. Individual studies vary on the optimal amount of emails you should send your audience per month, but most experts generally recommend a median between once and twice per week.

Finding the right balance in your email send frequency is crucial: if you don't send nurturing emails often enough, your contacts will forget about you or go with a competitor instead. But do it too often, and you will land in too many spam folders and unsubscribe lists to be effective.

If you're looking which exact send frequency can work for you, your CRM can help. In fact, you can ran reports on your open, click-through and unsubscribe percentages, which in turn helps you understand how your send frequency impacts these success metrics. Thankfully, most CRMs allow you to easily make changes to your automation workflows that ensure you get the most out of your email nurturing efforts.

Nurturing your leads to becoming customers can be incredibly valuable, especially considering its low cost and the high degree of automation available through customer relationship management software today. But even with this software, you want to be sure that you follow the above best practices.

By segmenting your leads and targeting your messages, supporting your emails with content, and implementing the right send frequency, your lead nurturing efforts will make a significant impact in generating new customers. And if you're looking for a CRM that can help you throughout the process, contact us!  visit DentalLabSupport.com for more information or contact us by telephone 1-888-715-9099.

3 Ways Dental Labs can Better Communicate with Dentists

In order for dental labs and dentists to keep patients satisfied, they need to keep dental patients’ needs at the forefront of everything they do. So how can dental labs work with dentists to keep dental patients happy? Make communication easy, honest and enjoyable.

1) Offer Multiple Lines of Open Communication

Dental labs must not only open up multiple lines of communication - phone, email, website, social media, text - but must listen to what is being said. While this seems obvious, how many times have you had a dental case shipment sent back-and-forth because the dental materials didn’t match the dentist’s specifications? Listen to what the dentist needs, and map out what your dental technicians must do in order to meet those needs.

2) Be Honest

Similar to #1 above, dental laboratories must be honest with their dentists about which services they provide and within what time frame. A simple "yes, we can do that" or "it's going to take one day longer than expected because of XYZ” goes a long way towards reassuring your client, and more importantly, enabling dentists to fulfill their promise to their dental patients.

3) Follow Up

The relationship doesn’t end once the shipment has been sent. Dental laboratories must have their dental team follow up with each dentist to verify that not only the dental case was received on time, but that it met the needs of both the dentist and the dental patient. Follow up with your dentists by asking “How did the material fit?” and “Was the patient happy?” 

Treat your work relationship like a personal relationship and you’ll see success in your dental lab. Open up lines of communication, listen to what’s being said, be honest about your abilities, and follow up in order to nurture your relationship with existing dentists. After all, dentistry is deeply personal work - so act like it!

4 Major Problems in the Dental Laboratory Industry

Dental laboratory owners have been feeling the ripple effects of the dental lab crisis over the last several years as dental lab schools have slowly but surely shut their doors one by one. While not all dental lab schools have closed down, the smaller availability reflects the population’s interest in pursuing dental lab technology as a career.

Dental lab owners have approached this problem of fewer dental lab schools in different ways. Some dental laboratory owners remained optimistic about the changing tides while other lab owners despaired and prepared for the worst by more carefully selecting their dental lab tech team. 

Regardless of whether you’re a dental lab owner who fought tooth and nail against the struggle or simply allowed your dental laboratory to adapt to the changing conditions, the fact of the matter is that fewer and fewer people choose to pursue dental lab technology year over year, and this has caused 4 major problems in the dental laboratory industry:

1. USA dental technician certification is increasingly becoming unavailable
2. Dental technician certification is either not required or unimportant to dental techs
3. Offshore dental laboratories continue to expand, causing unequal competition with American dental laboratories
4. Relationships between American dental technicians and dentists is seriously lacking 

As a result, currently large-sized dental labs have continued to increase while many medium- and small-sized labs - other than the boutique dental labs - have shut down.

What most dental lab owners don’t realize, however, is the one-two punch to the dental industry: lack of dental lab schools and lack of practical experience in dental education. 

Three or four years of dental school is not enough to prepare new dentists for real world dentistry because new grads severely lack real-life practice, and instead these dentists completely depend upon their dental technicians’ knowledge of technical aspects of all dental procedures. 

All four major problems within the dental lab industry combined with the dental education crisis are a double whammy: new dentists don’t yet have the right practical training, and there are less dental lab technicians available for them to rely on.

Now, how can we in the dental lab industry address and correct these issues? Check back next week for our blog post where we cover simple solutions to the 1st major problem in the dental laboratory industry!

By: David H. Khalili. CEO

Dental Lab Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn... managing different online profiles is overwhelming enough on its own before factoring in how to market your dental lab on social media. And if your Dental Lab isn't on social media, it's not going to be easy for dentists to find your dental laboratory.

Dental Lab Support is the Solution

Dental Lab Support is a marketing and consulting agency strictly for dental laboratories. We understand your unique problems and questions: 

• "How can I provide more value to dentists?"
• "How can I convince my current dentists to make me their sole dental lab provider?"
• "How can I change the question from "how do I find dentists" to "how can I help dentists find my dental lab?""

Dental Lab Owners Don't Have the Time or Tools

Dental Lab social media marketing becomes even more difficult because you simply don't have time to do it all between running your dental lab business, supervising dental lab techs, and verifying that dental cases were delivered on time. Allow Dental Lab Support to step in and manage your dental lab social media marketing efforts for you.

What's Included in Dental Lab Support's Social Media Marketing Services?

What do dental labs get when they sign on for our dental lab social media marketing program?
7 essential features and benefits you won't get with a run-of-the-mill marketing agency:

1) Social Media Account Creation

Dental Lab Support will create, keep track of and update all of your social media profiles. Everything is centralized for efficient, one-click updates. 

Plus, you maintain ownership of all accounts, including usernames and passwords. We make it easy for you to add, edit, share and delete content.

2) Social Media Profile Optimization

Don't know what an "impressum" is or how to write a self-description that dentists will find and be drawn to? That's OK, you don't need to because with Dental Lab Support's dental lab social media marketing program, we create 100% complete social media profiles that capture the spirit of your dental laboratory.

In addition to branding your dental laboratory online, we optimize all your social media profiles with keywords that are specific to your services and location. Not sure whether dentists are searching for "dental lab new york" or "new york dental lab"? We do, and we optimize your dental lab's social media profile to reflect the keywords your target dentists are using.

3) Timely Management
All of your dental lab's social media profiles will be checked 5+ times during the day. This consistent social media monitoring will enable us to read and reply to user comments, questions and activity throughout the day so that you don't miss out on any inbound opportunities. You will never wonder whether or not you reached out to a new lead on time or if they've moved on to your competitor because we check your social media profiles too frequently for that to happen.

4) Guaranteed Content

Dental Lab Support will create and post content for all your dental lab social media marketing profiles, Monday through Friday, rain or shine. Our dental laboratory social media marketing services include the creation of a content calendar, so you'll never check in on any profile to find a graveyard of activity. 

We reliably post content about your dental laboratory (services, team, recent activity) and about the dental industry (upcoming technology, procedures, events) to keep your dentists engaged on all of your dental lab's social media profiles, from Facebook and Twitter to Google+ and Tumblr.

5) Social Media Networking

Don't miss this important opportunity to network online! You attended a Lab Day 2015 event, didn't you? Show up for more "Lab Day"s online by finding dentists' conversations, listening in, and participating in the online discussion. 

Too many dental laboratories don't take advantage of social media networking. Simply having social media profiles and posting content isn't enough; the real results come from listening to and engaging with others. That's why Dental Lab Support's dental lab social media marketing services includes social media networking: because we know where real results come from.

6) Social Media Leads

Find and connect with dentists using your dental lab's dedicated social media profiles. Show dentists that your dental lab understands the unique needs of their dental office by paying attention to what dentists post on their Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts and have a genuine conversation with them to build real interest in your dental laboratory.

Dental Lab Support recognizes that dental lab owners are already bombarded with an ever-growing list of tasks and to-dos. Let us do the legwork by finding & converting the social media leads for you.

7) Website Traffic

It's simple math: the more places where you've listed your website, the more opportunity there is for dentists to find your website. With an increase in social media profiles, there is likewise an increase in the number of places online where you've placed a backlink to your website and ultimately where dentists can find your dental laboratory. Consequently, dental labs can increase traffic to their websites through creating - and consistently posting to - social media profiles on YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, etc where their websites are listed.

Free Consultation

Still have questions or concerns about exactly what's included with your dental lab's social media marketing package? Contact us today for a free 30 minute consultation to discuss your dental lab's specific needs, goals, and plan for success: 888-715-9099 / info@dentallabsupport.com

5 Ways to Close More Sales

No matter how great your dental lab marketing strategy is, if you cannot close your leads, your efforts will be for nothing. Ultimately, if the goal is to acquire dentists, only a great closing strategy can help you grow your dental lab.

But how do you get there? How can you make sure that when your sales team makes the call, they have a high chance of converting a dentist on the fence into a reliable long-term customer? A number of complex strategies can help you get there. But ultimately, even simple tips like the five below can help your dental lab effectively close more sales.

1) Embrace a Focus of Helpfulness

When it's time for the closing, the time for selling is over. At this point, you have already made your arguments, and provided your evidence, for why your product or service is a good choice. Now, you need to make sure that your customer actually agrees with you.

To accomplish that goal, change your focus from selling to helpfulness. Embrace customer questions, and try to answer them as honestly as possible. The more understood they feel, and the more confident they are in your efforts to help them reach their goals, the more likely they'll be to close. 

2) Understand (But Don't Cling to) Price

Competing on price alone is the death knell for almost any dental lab. As soon as a cheaper product comes along, you'll be out of the running. But at the same time, that doesn't mean you should ignore the issue of price when looking to close a deal.

For your audience, price is an important consideration. To become your customer, the dentist has to believe that what they pay will get them at least equal value in return. Present the price honestly, and connect it directly with the value that your customers will get in return.

3) Listen to Your Prospect

One lost sale is the opportunity to improve the next one. Not every sales pitch will close successfully, but it's what you do next that determines future successes.

Listen to your audience, and evaluate why they might say no. They could have reasons that are out of your control (such as bad timing or a need that went away since the time they become a lead). But more often than not, they'll tell you what went wrong, which allows you to fix it in the future. The more you listen, the more improvements you can make.

4) Apply the Scarcity Principle

Being honest, and focusing on being helpful to your customers, does not mean you can't apply some psychological tricks to close more sales. Among them is the scarcity principle: if your audience believes that supply for your product or offer is limited, they'll become more likely to buy it.

As mentioned above, the close is not the time for selling. But subtly, you can apply similar pressure during your pitch. Mention limited supply, or the ideal timing of getting your product right now. The more credibly you can sell that scarcity, the more likely you'll be to close more sales.

5) Come Armed with Information

Finally, don't underestimate the simple importance of information in closing more sales. The more your sales team knows about potential prospects, the better. That, in turn, necessitates a software platform specifically designed to gather prospect information and improve your sales effort.

For more info please visit us at DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099