How To Conduct A Competitive Analysis For Your Dental Practice?

The number of dental practices is increasing, and you are probably worried about the competitors when picking a location. Thereby, conducting a competitive analysis gives a bigger picture inside and out. Most importantly, it can provide dental practices an edge in the marketplace. 

Describing Competitive Analysis 

A competitive analysis is a way to gain insight and review who your competitors are and how this wealth of information gets used to optimize your course of action to make the most of your dollars. The key to success is understanding the competitor’s marketing plans, website, social presence, and how they promote their products and services. 

Plus, competitor analysis helps you understand changing customer needs and areas of opportunity in the business. Before we get started with how to conduct a competitor’s exploration for your dental practice, let’s look at a few benefits of the same: 

• It is through competition that the dental practice creates its unique selling proposition  (USP). 
• By learning about the competitors, you understand the current market trends. 
• Improvement can only occur if you have effective strategies with the existing customer base. 
• Dental practices should tap the untapped markets before the competitors enter and create the benchmark. 
• In the dental industry, where patients have infinite choices leveraging the mistakes and gaps in competitor strategies can maximize your services. 

How to conduct the competitive analysis? 

Step 1: Maximum use of the digital competitor analysis tools 

The new online tools, such as Practice Management Software, Google Alerts, Moz, Semrush,  Ahrefs, etc., can help the dental office to analyze emerging service trends. It is also helpful to compare the KPIs of your competitors to know where your clinic stands in the market. All these free tools heightened focus on the information from the competitors and get continual updates on the things that interest you. 

Step 2: Identify the competitors 

This step prepares you to pick between 5-8 competing practices that offer similar services and products. In this way, you can understand the direct and indirect competitors, meaning your exact alternative and dental practice that offers something similar but cannot replace you. You and your direct competitors are fidgeting for a similar audience and are a threat. You and your indirect competitor have a common tiny segment but not the biggest threat. 

Step 3: Competitors’ areas of marketing 

Study your competitor’s types of marketing you want to evaluate, such as SEO, email marketing,  content, and social media, to understand their engagement level and online presence. SEO strategy can help you with more online visibility and ends up with more patients in your dental chair. Top SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) means you drive more traffic in your area to other offices. 

Similarly, marketing via email is a critical component in understanding the online presence of competing dentists. Keep tabs on what type of emails the competitors send to patients to understand the discounts and other compelling tactics to pull traffic away from your office. Study your competitor’s website and compare your content to determine the actionable advice and headlines you are missing. 

Step 4: How your dental practice growth pushes away the competitors 

Once you have all the data, now is the time to organize the information and bring new and refreshing ideas that should get repurposed in the marketing strategy. With the comparison, you can define the story the competitor is telling, what value they bring to their customer base, do they have a voice and mission. To answer all these questions, you can focus on your marketing strategy and build customer personas. 

Step 5: SWOT analysis 

To get an understanding, conduct a swot analysis for your dental practice. Identify your office’s strength- any features that boost your industry standing and make you valuable. As you evaluate the practice’s strengths, now analyze the weak points- what needs fixing, are their dissatisfied patients,  outdated equipment, and areas your practice struggles with than your competitors. 

Once you have scrapped enough data, use dental engagement strategies to brainstorm and expand your practice with novel marketing strategies. Finally, evaluate the unaddressed weaknesses that arise in the field of dental practice, like supply chain delays, patient expectations about oral healthcare service, regulatory changes, and new dental tech. 

Being ready for what you do not expect is a part of the dental business, and following the above processes can empower you with impactful insights and help to expand your strategy to include a  larger region.