How often should you review your dental marketing strategy?
An effective marketing strategy is at the heart of every successful business. In fact, the life force of any business is marketing and sales. The two go hand in hand. If you have no plans set in motion for marketing, then in effect, you have no plans for sales either.
With this in mind, it’s worth considering…does your dental marketing plan need a check-up?
Ideally, your marketing strategy needs updating every time new trends and techniques come along. Just as you see patients regularly every 6 months to check for any changes in their dental health, you need to do the same with your marketing plan.
Keep in mind though, that there’s no set time frame to review and update your strategies as every business is different. This being the case, you may want to consider the following 6 factors which should indicate how regularly you should be updating your marketing plan. These include:
- Thinking about your industry
This is highly important because it primarily determines how often your dental marking strategy should be changed. Some industries have to make changes more often than others. Take dentistry for instance. It’s an industry that’s ever-changing as new technologies and methods come to the fore. As a result, you should be looking to update your marketing plan to reflect this.
- Changes in your dental practice
No doubt your practice will encounter a number of changes over time, as every business does. This may call for adjustments in your marketing plan. If for instance you market your practice around the strengths of your staff, but a key employee leaves, then your marketing plan would need refreshing.
- Ever-changing patient trends
If you find that your patients are not interested in a particular promotional service or product that you’ve got on offer then be adaptable. Find out what your patients are currently interested in and review and adjust your marketing plan to suit.
- Dental marketing strategy effectiveness
How effective has your dental marketing strategy been just recently? There’s no point pushing forward with a plan that’s not getting the results you’re looking for. So if you’ve noticed that you’re not getting as many new patients through your door as you’d like, then now is the time to take a second look and rethink your marketing plan.
- Introducing a new treatment
Each time your practice offers a new treatment or service it’s a great time to revisit your marketing plan as well. This is because you can then incorporate ideas in your new strategy for pushing and promoting your added service.
- After surveying your patients
If you’ve recently asked your patients how they heard about your practice, you can then use that information to measure your marketing success and see if there is any need for improvement. For example, if you notice that new patients are finding you through your marketing efforts, you know your strategy is working. On the other hand, if the majority are hearing about your practice another way, it might be time to expand your marketing approach to include this avenue.
It’s worth remembering that any marketing plan that’s out of date will lose its effectiveness. So it’s worth taking the time to comb through your plan (using the points above) to keep it current.
That’s all well and good, but, the question I guess you really want to know is which dental marketing strategies are working for practices in 2017?
Let’s take a look at the top 3 online dental marketing strategies which are bringing in new patients right now!
A Great Dental Website – The sole purpose of your website is to provide information and details about the services that your practice offer. It needs to be both professional and attractive and include good navigation tools so that your website is easy to operate and understand.
The ‘About’ page is extremely important, as it gives insight into your dental practice, who your team includes, and what your ethos is. Your service pages need to be patient-friendly while full of information on the procedures you offer. It’s also extremely important that your website is mobile-friendly because more and more people are now finding businesses via their smartphones.
Having Quality Content – The higher quality of your content is on your website, the better your chance of ranking higher on search engines, such as Google. Included in your website must be well-written informative text, articles, videos and blogs, but of course, the content has to be engaging. So make sure you have interesting text that encourages visitors to stay and find out more. Include attention-grabbing images and improve readability with good headings and short paragraphs. Also, ensure your content is error-free.
Social Media Networking – A large part of an effective dental marketing strategy in 2017 is the use of social media. Why?
Well, social likeability equals trust. When you post updates, and links to great content on your website, and engage with your patients, you can help open your door to a whole new stream of prospective patients.
That’s not all…engaging with your patients on social media helps keep your practice on their minds, increasing both retention and referrals. If you haven’t already done so, set up an account on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram with your practice details and be sure to link it to your website.
The above dental marketing ideas will hopefully help get you started on reviewing and expanding your current strategies. If you need any further help with your dental marketing strategy or need dental content for your website the Dental Writers team are highly experienced. Get in touch today on +34 605 45 73 42.
