Dental Practice Marketing -How’s this year’s plan going?
Annually when we review dental practice marketing, we advise all our member practices well advance of the New Year to revisit the previous year’s efforts critically. Do more of what worked, test one or two new activities, and kill off what was proven by the numbers to no longer be effective.
If you don’t work like this (having an annual promotional calendar), I can guarantee that you waste time and resources during the year. By this time of the year, things will feel out of control and you’re already almost through the first major business period of the year Jan-Memorial Day!
If you’re interested in how something like this works, here’s a few things to get your going in future dental practice marketing strategies:
How many (total number) of patients came from external promotional activities and by specific venue?
How many (total number) came from internal activities by specific activity?
What as the ROI based on activity or venue?
Do you have a complete list of what you did last year?
What on the listed worked well (by ROI) and what was dog poo? The best bet is too simply kill off the poorly performing activities and pour the resources (time and money) into what’s working or into a limited number of new things so that you aren’t too scattered. To help you get started in the right direction, check out my #1 top selling book on Amazon.
What month seems historically “slow?” [Once objectively confirmed, you can choose to attack that with promotion or choose to vacation during it.]
Were there any other notable patterns when looking at what happened on a month by month basis?
Last time we did this in a live meeting format, we saw every practice “scooping” and disposing of the stinky stuff. AND…for at least two practices, it freed up $20K+ to funnel towards more beneficial promotional activities. A year later, as a result one of these, practices reported more than $300K from switching out where they spent the $20K. For several others, the exercise identified a lack of understanding on the geographic reality they contend with for finding elective cases and where patients were coming from based on ad venue locations.
As there are only so many items related to ongoing promotion that can be managed in a solo practice before hiring a full time dental practice marketing coordinator/doer, this kind of exercise can even result in a workable plan that keeps the practice focused on what’s important without resulting in a new hire.
Long lists of half-done promotional activities usually results in zip while a tight concise list of 2-4 major activities externally and internally creates a much different end result in dental practice marketing.
If you don’t look at your year like this, I encourage you to do so as it will reduce the randomness of work flow, stress of operation…..You can learn more by going to my website here.
