Modern dental practice can benefit from the Internet and virtual advertising information clients about services provided and attracting customers with price proposition. The e-business strategies available for dental practice are customer relationship management, document management system, e-advertising and promotion. A special attention can be paid to virtual communities and virtual interaction between professionals. Understanding the likelihood of achieving change is central to mass- customized marketing. If the dental practice can predict behavior, it is starting to reduce the uncertainty in trading environment, and this will lead to a competitive advantage. If dental practice can reduce uncertainty it will reduce its costs by being able to concentrate on those aspects of the marketing mix which will lead to the greatest change in customers’ behavior. This kind of analysis can only be carried out on customer-level data. One can take this further by combining customer information from different sources. A more certain way of obtaining the same predictive evidence would be by collaborating with local estate agents and sending out mail-shots to all newly arrived homeowners within a store’s catchment area (Bearden et al 2004).
The Internet advertising in this way will undoubtedly increase the number of visits that the site achieves. Instead of being buried in a list, the site will be displayed prominently at the top with whatever words or graphics the dental practice chooses to show. However, there are three disadvantages to this. In the first place, it costs, probably on the basis of a mix of fixed fee and ‘click-thrus’ (that is the number of people who click on the advertisement to visit the site). Second, people may use a different search engine, or even a ‘meta-search’ engine, which is capable of exploring more than one search engine at a time. These will strip out the dental practice advertisement and show their own instead, thereby reducing advertisement’s effectiveness. Third, some users deliberately ignore these advertisements, preferring to rely on the content of the sites they visit to dictate what links they follow. The third major way to developing the approach the site is to persuade other sites to carry links to the site. There are many, many cases of reciprocal linking on the Internet, and this is clearly an effective way of passing on information about the availability of complementary sites. The answer — and this practice is growing rapidly — is to incentives other sites to carry (IS 312 e-Business Project, 2008).
To achieve recognition successfully requires that the dental practice adopts a comprehensive strategy for the Internet. Simply creating a website, however much or little money the dental practice spends on it, does not mean that people will visit it. Without an approach that exploits the singular opportunities of the Internet to increase footfall, creating a website aimed at increasing sales is a strategy that is doomed to failure. Once the dental practice has succeeded in getting customers to visit the website, it still has to get them to buy something (Electronic business: 2008). This is the area in which the Internet, with its interactivity and versatility, starts to win over traditional sales methods. The virtual nature of the Internet means that the dental practice can use different methods for achieving sales — methods that cannot be applied effectively in a physical environment. Ironically most websites fail to take advantage of these methods. The Internet has been constructed by computer experts, not by marketeers, but its future, whether the computer geeks like it or not, is going to depend on the speed with which an effective model emerges that allows commercial organizations to sell their goods and services. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and unless the marketeers can find a way of making it pay, then the Internet is doomed to grind to a halt. There are four areas which, the company particularly needs to consider: price; Interactivity; volume of information (Hollensen, 2007).
The key factor that differentiates the Internet from other forms of marketing is its interactivity: consumers are not passive recipients of a broadcast marketing message — they can interact with it. At its simplest, consumers can choose which areas of the message to explore. Sites can be laid out so that consumers can be led down a particular set of pathways depending on their particular interests. Sites can, however, also be developed to provide different information to different consumers. ‘Cookies’ — small pieces of information that are placed on computer giving details of the parts of the Internet that the dental practice has explored — can be picked up and used to generate the site content that is displayed. Imagine a music retailer who provides free samples of different bands (Reynolds 2004). By analyzing and recording which bands the dental practice has listened to, the company can display advertisements that reflect areas of interest the next time the company visits its site. Used in this way, the Internet can begin to resemble the marketeer’s dream of one-to-one relationship marketing, where individual content is generated for individual customers depending on the information that is carried about each person’s individual preferences. A good example of the use of the Internet in this way is to keep rapidly changing catalogues on-line. This enables, for the first time, the opportunity to bring grocery shopping out of the grocery store, supermarket and superstore. By uploading the daily catalogue of goods and prices that are available, stores can now enable consumers to buy their goods without having to go round the store to collect them. In an environment in which time is precious, the advantage to the consumer is undeniable.
Works Cited
- Bearden, W. O., Ingram, Th. N., LaForge, L.W. 2004, Marketing, Prentice Hall. IS 312 e-Business Project. 2008.
- Electronic business: A business model can make the difference. 2008
- Hollensen, S. 2007, Global Marketing: A Decision-Oriented Approach. Financial Times/ Prentice Hall; 4 edition.
- Reynolds, J. The Complete E-Commerce Book: Design, Build and Maintain a Successful Web-Based Business.. CMP Books; 2 edition, 2004.