All marketing strategies have to be managed. I’ve proved helpful in offices where an owner tries to assign a busy helper with the marketing manager job. This simply will not lend itself to an efficient system. It’s better to assign a person who is directly influenced by new patient flow and the trustworthiness of the practice. The associate wishes to be busy and needs to hook up with new patients. She or he knows what the practice needs. Who better to control the marketing process?
Management will not mean busyness. After the strategy is developed, implementation can be performed by delegation, maybe to a team member with marketing experience. The affiliate should prepare and present a regular report to the practice owner. It should contain a review of the program and an evaluation of the practices. Quite simply, what’s the plan? What exactly are we doing, and exactly how could it be working? Do we need to change anything?
Website Design
With the importance with an online occurrence for the practice and current tendencies in SEO, the practice website needs to be dynamic. This implies having a person who can post to the blog and update photos, video tutorial links, and information. The associate is in the perfect position to do this. While the team will add, getting the associate drive the process and keep it moving forward is essential. The affiliate can meet with professional web site designers to keep the site powerful, relevant, and engaging.
Offline Integration
For our marketing attempts, I create topics for each month. Every activity, promotion, blog post, and image is included with the regular monthly theme. For example, April is oral cancer awareness month. I make sure that we’ve four blogs during April that give attention to oral cancer. We’ve one community outreach day, or a meeting that involves free oral malignancy screenings. All of our Facebook and Instagram articles feature information about healthy options, healthy mouths, oral cancer information, dental cancer prevention, plus more.
I try to produce just as much information beforehand as is feasible so that I can plan consequently and preload the calendar. So, easily know that April’s theme is oral cancer awareness, I could plan properly and order ribbons, oral cancer diagnosis packages, and pamphlets. I can also plan how to integrate the themes or templates and ideas into all of our different varieties of marketing.
Social Media
When it comes to social media, go deep, not large. Dominate your presence on one to three programs. Your home run should be on Facebook, accompanied by Instagram and YouTube. Social media is like a major backyard barbeque. Consider introducing yourself to people and making friends. Social media is not any different. Whether it’s going to work, it must be authentic and it’ll require some effort.
Many marketing companies will attempt to sell you about how they can get your practice Facebook “likes,” but what you should be trying for are friends and enthusiasts. Invest in developing associations with people by commenting on the photos and content, and building trust and associations. Also, use photographs with as much patients as easy for what Dr. Robert B. Cialdini identifies as “friendly substantiation” in his book, Impact: The Psychology of Persuasion. The greater pictures you can post with happy patients (with the consent, of course), the more folks will be persuaded to come to your practice.
Traffic Building
Marketing is approximately impressions, rather than the kind you make with polyvinyl siloxane. The theory is to get your name and brand out whenever you can. Focus on marketing and advertising opportunities that enable you to make as much impressions on your demographic as you can by means of cost per impression. For instance, Facebook advertising starts up some of the most laser-focused marketing tactics available. You could select gender, get older, interests, universities attended, terms that people search for, internet pages they follow, or where they live. Never before have we’d the ability to focus our advertising like we do now.
But this is merely a good way to build traffic. If you have a dynamic blog make sure that you dedicate some time to reading other weblogs and making remarks. For example, if you are trying to draw in young mothers, you should be reading and commenting on sites in accordance with their passions. Engage them where they may be. Also, make sure that part of your traffic building entails community outreach attempts and occasions. Make it interesting and keep your concentrate on increasing impressions to your brand. You want the most impressions for the cheapest cost.
Optimization Process
If you really want to supercharge your SEO, hand it off to pros. But that can cost you. If you want to have a far more authentic approach, optimise your web presence yourself. But keep in mind that this takes time and effort. If you want to enhance your website and website, you will have to keep your articles relevant and modified. The best ways to do this are with a blog, videos, photographs, and links.
The good news about weblogs is that they can contain videos. This implies less writing, and you could crosslink to your site as well concerning other videos. Videos need not be complicated; they can merely be about things that you already speak about with your patients. For example, I’ve done videos about cracked pearly whites, laughing gas, and just why we spray cold water on teeth. If you plan to retain someone for this, I recommend two companies: PPC dental and Optimized 360.
Conversion Analysis
Would you ever perform a root canal without taking a radiograph when you’re finished? Would you ever cement a crown without checking the margins? Then why do people place advertising and perform marketing tactics without measuring the conversions? I often ask doctors how their marketing is doing, and their response is nearly always, “Pretty good.” When I follow up with, “How do you know?” they often say, “Because my front desk tells me we’re getting a lot of calls from the ad (or campaign).”
This information is too vague for any type of scientific analysis. You’ll want to know how many people call and how many schedule appointments, and what they spend at your office. One of the best ways to analyze conversions is to tape a piece of paper to the desk so that those who answer the phones can write down how people heard about the practice and whether they scheduled an appointment. It is vital that the practice track conversion rates in order to monitor return on investment (ROI) in each marketing category. Conversion analysis determines where efforts are placed during future marketing efforts.
Planning
The planning aspect of marketing can be a great deal of fun, and it’s really important that it be done as a team. While the associate can be the administrator of the marketing program, the team offers great input both creatively and experientially. You will discover three components that you should think about when planning your marketing methodology.
First, decide on your budget. Too often doctors assign marketing a minuscule budget. After browsing hundreds of dental offices during the last five years, I’ve observed that dental practitioners spend 1% to 3% on marketing. Yet their biggest complaint is that they don’t have enough new patient movement. I’ve also pointed out that the very best 2% of oral practices devote to average at least 5% to 8% on marketing. That is a good starting place and the first component that needs to be considered when planning your marketing methodology.
The second component is your demographic. In my Dental care Economics article titled Marketing Mojo, I defined who the specific demographic should be when marketing dentistry. The bottom line is, your marketing should be geared toward women in their mid 30s to 60s, depending on what type of dentistry you’re promoting and where your practice is within its growth.
The third aspect you must consider when planning your marketing is to truly have a comprehensive marketing methodology. Which means that you do not put your entire eggs in one basket. You intend to get a name and brand in front of as many people as possible, as many times as you possibly can. Consider your marketing represented with a wagon wheel, and each spoke as some other kind of marketing. Your efforts should be equally distributed among each of the spokes so that the marketing wagon wheel rolls smoothly.
Since most affiliates at dental practices are paid predicated on a percentage of choices or creation, it only makes sense that they should be actively mixed up in procedure for promoting the practice. Affiliates tend to have a bit more time to target their attention on managing the marketing strategies with their practices, gives them an chance to be more employed in the growth of the practices.
The incentive for the affiliates is that they can be more effective and also have an chance to help expand the practice, which benefits everyone. Methods where the associates take care of the marketing programs are supercharged and everyone thrives, including the patients.