As a business owner, your mind is on recovering from 2020’s challenges and determining the post-pandemic gameplan for your practice. Clearly, marketing will essential to your recovery.
Budget
Not coming as too big of a surprise, one of the biggest obstacles you’ll want to tackle is your marketing budget. To do this, you’ll need to understand what you spent in 2020, what your return on investment was, and how you want to move forward.
For example, did your retargeting program work? If not, take the time to understand why not and how you can improve it. It’s important to understand where you want to go and how you can get there before you begin to strategize.
Web and Email Content
Take a look at the content you created over the past year for your website and emails to help shape your upcoming editorial calendar. Make a list of the top 10 performing pieces of content and brainstorm more ideas off of those to understand what made them successful.
For example, was it well designed, well written, and timely? Did you target a specific audience that was very receptive? Take the time to make a spreadsheet with your content to track headlines, word count, social media shares, target audience, and more to ensure you can replicate the process in the future.
Allowing yourself to see where you’ve done well and where you can improve your content is essential. On the flip side, take the time to see what content didn’t perform well and why.
Don’t be afraid to revisit your content to keep it up to date as well. Once you’ve written a piece of content, it can get stale pretty quickly. That content is yours to own, so get some use out of it. Revisit your content and update it where and when possible and then reshare it! You can also take this opportunity to tweak the target audience or headline to get a higher response rate.
Social Media
You also should revisit your social media content to understanding what worked over the past year. Take a look at the analytics that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram (among others) provide to understand what content your followers interact with most.
Make a plan around more of that content and brainstorm ways to improve the content that didn’t work well. You may also want to take stock of who you’re following and who follows you. Keep close to your industry and unfollow anyone who doesn’t fit the mold of what you’re trying to create. Also, don’t forget to also research new important voices in your area and follow them.
Understanding Trends in Dentistry
It’s not possible to always control what is happening in the dental industry. It’s also important to stay up to date on trends in dentistry—and their economic impact. You’ll want to be aware of any changes to stay ahead of the game.
Watch Your Competitors
This may be a given, but double check your competitors’ marketing content, websites, and social media channels. What seems to be hitting the right notes for them, and can you replicate in an interesting and different way?
Refocus on Your Brand
Reintroduce yourself to your brand. It’s easy to forget some of the details that truly make your dental practice stand out. Grow your marketing efforts around your brand and find new ways to communicate your practice’s mission and vision.
Have Clear Objectives
Yearly objectives are the goals of your marketing efforts, and they should be measurable and tied to a specific timeframe. Once you’ve identified your goals, create a strategy to meet them, whether it’s raising brand awareness, getting more referrals, or more return appointments. Then identify the tactics you need to employ to achieve them, such as more digital advertising, billboard use, or an increased social media presence.
Focus on Impactful Projects
Look at your upcoming calendar for events and activities that really have an impact and focus on them. If you spread yourself, your budget, and your time too thin, all of these amazing things in the works getting planned won’t be as impactful.
Start a Dental Membership Program
Approximately 180 million Americans lack dental insurance, which opens up a door for new opportunities for your practice. Dental practices that have a membership program can potentially sign up hundreds to thousands of patients who pay monthly or yearly fees to get access to benefits to your office. This results in tens of thousands of dollars each month of additional revenue for your practice. Check out this free ebook and video course that educates your practice on how to start and grow a membership program.
Share Your Marketing Plan
If you plan and create and dedicate a lot of time planning the most perfect marketing plan, but haven’t shared it with your organization, then what’s the point? If you’re trying to spread the word about your social media updates, the best way to do that is involve your colleagues, who can then like and share your content to their followers. It’s also important to have support in how you want to brand and share your practice. If your team feels involved and excited, they’ll want to support it.
Get the Support You Need
No matter who you are or how good you are, you alone can’t plan and brainstorm every good idea. Get a small team together to help create focused processes and protocols for moving the marketing plan forward.
Take the time to understand where you are currently, what you did to get there, and how to improve. You don’t have to follow the same plan, and you don’t have to have a huge budget to make an impact.
However, understanding where your budget needs are and the type of content that works is important before moving forward. Use your current content to propel your practice’s image and vision forward, and spend marketing dollars where needed to make it happen. Revisit content to update and reuse, and you’re saving money already!
Mr. Comstock is the founder of BoomCloud, a successful software company that allows dental offices to quickly create, organize, track, and automate their in-house membership program. Visit BoomCloud for more information or contact Jordon and his team at (800) 260-9285 or email info@boomcloudapps.com.
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