Dental Marketing Company or a Dental Marketing Freelancer – Which One Should I Hire?

There’s a never ending debate whether you should hire a dental marketing company or a freelancer for your dental patient marketing.

There’s pros and cons for each of them and there isn’t a “golden rule” after which you should choose. For some dental practices it’s better to choose a dental marketing agency while other dentists or practice owners work best with freelancers or dental marketing consultants.

In this article you’ll find the pros and cons for each option so that you can see what’s best for you.

Dental marketing company

Dental marketing agencies usually have people who are experts in a particular field. And sometimes they are actually a bunch of great freelancers who joined their forces in a team.

Dental marketing agencies can vary from a group of three people or a full-fledged of marketing company who handles hundreds of marketing projects at the same time.

Pros

First of all, a dental marketing agency, compared to a freelancer, offers you the full stack of services.

For example, let’s say you want online dental marketing services, street banners and you also want to try a television spot.

When hiring a freelancer, you’ll probably have to waste time finding someone separate for TV, separate for street banners and someone separate to create the design part and so on.

When you hire a dental marketing company, they usually either have the full range of services or they have the proper connections and find you what you need so that you don’t waste time anymore.

Basically, a company can take care of everything for you.

Second, they bring their expertise from other domains too. They can apply the marketing strategies they successfully used in other industries to help you get more patients in a much more efficient and creative way.

Sometimes, freelancers tend to specialise only in a certain niche and they start doing the same things over and over again, missing out some opportunities out there.

Third, they tend to be more professional. Of course, this is not always the case. But usually they don’t miss deadlines, they send all kinds of reports each month with your practice marketing progress, they use professional marketing tools and so on.

Plus, you’ll feel more safe with a company you know you can find it in a certain location than with a freelancer that today might work from Moscow and tomorrow from Thailand and could basically disappear overnight.

Cons

First, price is usually higher for an agency. They have higher expenses – offices, salaries and so on – than a freelancer.

Second, in some cases, agencies can get too many projects at one time (to cover their higher expenses) and they tend to lack the creativity and in some cases also neglect you as a client.  If that’s the case, you should take measures right from the start.

Third, you can’t get things done right away. For instance, if you want a change to your website in a day, you might not get it since they work on many other projects. This happens especially if you aren’t a “big fish”.

Dental marketing freelancer

Freelancers offer a lot of advantages, but they also have some cons.

In essence, they can offer you most of the skills an agency can, but they are limited in certain aspects. Here’s what I mean:

Pros

First, they are usually much cheaper. They don’t have such high expenses. They don’t have offices and so on. Of course, if you hire a dental freelance marketer with 15 years of experience, he or she might be even more expensive than a whole company. This is because after so many years of working in the field, they already have clients waiting in line for their services.

Second, they have greater skills, especially if they specialise in dental marketing. In the case of an agency, they tend to do the same things over and over again so that they can get the work done quickly so that they can get more clients to cover costs. Freelancers sometimes like to get wild with their ideas, to test things out and improve their services. This can be very helpful if you want to get new ways to get new patients or promote your dental pratice.

Third, they offer you more flexibility. If you want to run some ads by tomorrow or do a small change on the website, they can do it faster because they usually don’t get as many clients as an agency. Of course, this isn’t a general rule.

Cons

First, there are a lot more unprofessional freelancers than unprofessional dental marketing companies. This can mean a lot of things, from not respecting deadlines to not answering to emails.

Second, a freelancer might not have all the skills you need. For dental marketing services for example, a freelancer will probably be unable to do everything from design to Facebook Ads to creating a website and so on. So, you’ll probably need to waste time to hire dedicated people for those jobs.