Not sure if your marketing strategies would be able to hold their ground next year? All the marketing gurus got you all confused on the right strategies of successful marketing? Well, know that you are not alone! As dental practice owners, we are trying to juggle one too many roles at the same time! We don’t just have to offer an excellent service, we also need to have the right skills and knowledge to run a business and market it too.
Regardless of whether you hire services of a professional to market your business or do it yourself, you need to get your basics right for the coming so as to make it most effective. Following are some pointers to keep in mind when creating your marketing strategy for the coming year:
Map Out Your Goals
This is extremely essential in order to aptly target your marketing strategies. What are your goals for the coming future? Are you trying to scale your business? Add another chair? Hire an additional DA? Increase the number of patients coming in? Get more referrals?
Marketing isn’t a dart board where you just throw a dart in the right direction and hope for a bull’s eye but take whatever it hits! You are spending way too much to let chance handle your marketing strategy. Having a targeted marketing goals help you achieve more productive and lucrative results.
Learn the Fundamentals of Marketing
Many a time, practice owners just look up a marketing firm online, get in touch with them and tell them to ‘fix your marketing strategy.’ Of course a professional will do a great job of representing your business, but it will require your assistance too. A marketer can only do so much! He may be able to fix up your website and get the traffic to it. But if a visitor is not able to find the right support and assistance through those portals then that is an opportunity missed.
Hence, learning the fundamentals of marketing is essential for the success of a marketing strategy. You need to be responsive to queries and engagement of your potential patients via emails, website and social media portals. At the end of the day, it does come down to providing quality service!
Keep a Check on the Key Marketing Metrics
Marketing strategies may change year after year, but the need to continuously keep a track of them remains the same. You will need to keep a check on key marketing metrics for each type of marketing that you do. This includes your SEO, your organic traffic, social media engagement etc. Don’t just focus on visits to your website or likes or followers on your social media pages, look for conversion rates, engagement and readership for your blog etc.
Objectives and Key Results
OKRs have become increasingly popular. They are extremely helpful in setting up goals and meeting those milestones. The main idea behind this strategy is to set up an objective with a time frame for completion. Then set a number of key results that are required to meet those objectives. For instance, if your objective is to get 20 more referrals, then your key results would be X many number of satisfied patients, increased engagement with current patient base through emails, better customer support for patients walking in the door etc.
Fix Your Website
Does that mean investing in a graphic designer and change the color scheme of your website? Not really! What it means is to make your calls to action more accessible and visible. A website visitor spends a minute on a website on average; and if he can’t find the next step to get in touch with you within that time frame, he is likely to start looking elsewhere! So rather than investing on videos your potential customers are likely to pass on, invest in better user interface and goal-oriented website.
The Power of Organic Content
Contrary to popular predictions, internet advertising has not garnered any increase in popularity in the past. And for the year 2020 too, organic content will lead the game! People don’t want to be told what to buy, they want to have the freedom of choice based on the information that is provided for them. Hence, focus on that blog, podcast, email marketing techniques etc. You want to add value to your potential patient’s time rather than investing in direct marketing techniques they aren’t really buying into!
Be Social on Social Media
Social media today plays multiple roles, but for businesses it has become a marketing hub. There is no denying the power of social media marketing, but it is only effective when done right! You cannot just post an add and expect new patients walking in the door the next day. In order for it to be effective you need to engage more, by being more social. Use it as a platform to connect with your followers, offer suggestions and solutions and heed to their queries and concerns. Let them know that you are the authority for any dental concerns that they may have. Apply rather than imply!
Work With Your Marketing Team
Not to say you should be heading your marketing strategies yourself! Of course it’d help to have a team of experienced and knowledgeable marketers by your side. But they’ll only be able to help meet your goals when you’d work with them. You need to explain your long term and short objectives to them. Let them know what you are trying to achieve with a specific marketing strategy.
Ask them what you can do to generate those results effectively. Perhaps a faster response rate or more engagement or some bonuses or discounts that could further strengthen the marketing strategy in question.
Marketers are not magicians! They cannot just shake their coats and let it rain patients. They need guidance and support from you and your team.
The Final Word!
If there is one key takeaway for marketing tactics for the coming year, it is to focus on organic traffic, engage more with your potential patients and focus on the outcomes and results of your marketing strategies by keeping track of key metrics.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:
1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
4. Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
