Firm has helped Carestream Dental guide dentists through practice closures to maintain profits
Elly Yates-Roberts |
Covid-19 has changed the way many businesses operate. Without in-person sales, companies that previously invested in their digital experience have been able to pivot quicker than those just starting out.
Stephen Reeder, senior manager of digital marketing at Carestream Dental, knows about these scenarios all too well – from moving to an empathetic, content-first marketing strategy, and having the right digital infrastructure in place to do so.
Carestream Dental serves dental practitioners with industry-leading digital imaging, software and practice management solutions. The industry has been hit hard by Covid-19 as local dentists closed their offices based on government recommendations. As such, Carestream Dental had to immediately pivot from a site that’s primary objective was to market and sell equipment and services, to one providing customer guidance as a trusted advisor through a new content strategy.
“With the goal of delivering value to practitioners through content, we’re providing our customers with information on how their practices can still be profitable,” says Reeder. “Through a microsite we launched in hours on Episerver, we’ve created a one-stop shop for Covid-19-related resources such as hosting webinars and virtual tradeshows, and providing advice on improving overall practice health.”
Carestream Dental’s preparation to invest in its own digital infrastructure two years ago has ensured that the team was able to adapt to a new content strategy very quickly.
“We switched from an older Sitecore solution to Episerver two years ago,” says Reeder. “Since then, we have been building up the flexibility and scalability of the platform. Thanks to this continued effort, we have been able to effectively pivot and stand up educational microsites within days instead of weeks. In fact, we may have been one of the first in our industry to get a robust microsite up and running based largely on the continued development of the Episerver platform.
“I don’t know where we would have been if Covid-19 happened two years ago, and we were still running on Sitecore. Episerver lets us use blocks to re-use information, which makes it a lot easier to create relevant content.”
Like all industries, the dentistry field will learn lessons from this crisis, such as the need to include digital methods to communicate with patients and leverage more cloud-based solutions to ensure secure 24/7 access to patient history anytime/anywhere.
“Never has digital been more important to our company,” said Reeder. “It’s the one avenue that the company immediately turned to maintain communication with our customers. Dentists around the world will learn how much they need to rely on digital for content and communication.”
This article was originally published in the Summer 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.