How to Craft a Marketing Year Plan for Your Dental Practice
Did your dental practice grow the way you wanted it to in 2019? While “growth” is certainly relative, there’s a good chance you had at least one marketing goal you planned and nurtured throughout the year. How effectively you planned ahead for the year may have impacted the overall success of your marketing campaigns. Considering dental practices experience seasonal shifts in foot traffic, making a one year plan for your marketing can help you increase your business during slower periods and can help you sustain growth throughout the year.
If you found your marketing plan left a little something to be desired last year, get ahead of the game for 2020. This year, you may want to assess the effectiveness of your dental practice marketing and create a more effective one-year marketing plan.
Step 1: Consider What Did and Didn’t Work in 2019
Before you create your one-year marketing plan for 2020, take some time to evaluate the end result of the marketing goals you set down in 2019. Additionally, do a full evaluation of which strategies worked and which ones didn’t. That way, you can go into your planning for the new year with a more informed understanding of what approach to take.
Before you do anything else, determine whether your marketing campaigns had a positive or negative return on investment (ROI).
Note that even if a campaign had a negative ROI, it may have also produced some positive results. This is why a full analysis of your marketing campaigns is important. After all, you may discover that the campaign’s negative ROI was because it wasn’t run at an optimal time, or because you overspent the budget, or even because of a bad link that you didn’t catch until the campaign was halfway through resulted in lost conversion potential.
Once you have your ROI numbers for each campaign, consider the following:
The marketing channel(s) you used (paid search, email, social media, etc.)
The language used in your marketing materials
Your targeted audience(s)
When you ran each campaign (time, date, season)
The campaign’s conversion rate
Other small details about your campaigns that could be relevant
All of this information will be invaluable as you design your dental practice marketing plan for the year. If you plan to rerun successful campaigns from the previous year, for example, you may want to mimic everything that led to that campaign’s success, right down to the time of year you ran the campaign.
Keep in mind, of course, that even if you run a campaign exactly the same way, you may not produce similar results; there could be external factors that influenced the success of the campaign that went unmeasured or were unmeasurable.
Step 2: Create Your Big Goals
Goal setting is important for any type of planning, but especially for marketing. Prior to creating your year plan, consider what you want to achieve with your dental practice marketing.
Do you want to increase the number of customers coming through the door? Do you want to increase the volume of customers who take advantage of your higher-value services? Whatever your big goals are, include them in your goal setting plan.
Your marketing goals could include:
Achieving a better ROI with your marketing
Increasing your active patient count
Increasing awareness of new or lesser-used services
Establishing your business as a leader in your region
Increasing your business’s visible presence on search engines and social media
Make sure not to confuse goals with strategies. Goals are what you’re hoping to see as an outcome of your marketing campaigns. Strategies, however, are the actions you take to achieve those goals.
Not sure which big marketing goals to focus on in 2020? Contact Madison Ave Media for a complimentary consultation.
Step 3: Define Your Goal Objectives
It’s nice to have goals but to effectively achieve them your dental practice will need to define some measurable objectives for each goal.
For example, your dental practice may be shifting toward using 3-D printing techniques to capture a mold of your patients’ teeth, while still offering more traditional molding options. Increasing the number of customers using the newer 3-D printing technology may be one of your big goals for 2020.
You’ll want to design a few objectives that will help deliver a targeted campaign, which could include increasing the number of patients opting for the 3-D printing procedure by 25%. You may also have the amount of money you plan to spend as a key objective. Those objectives would be measurable, and you can craft strategies to help achieve those objectives.
Now apply that same technique to your other big goals. It’s perfectly acceptable to have similar objectives for different goals. The goal is to make sure they’re always measurable.
Step 4: Identify Specific Strategies for Your Objectives
Once you have your goal objectives set down, plan out the strategies you’ll use to achieve your goals.
Note that strategies are actionable, and should include everything from the marketing channels you plan to use, to the exact dates and times you plan to run your campaign.
There are several key strategies you could include, such as:
The marketing channels you plan to use
The date and time you plan to launch your campaign
Your campaign design, including the wording and imagery
Let’s say you want to increase your active patient count during the second quarter of the year. That’s a fairly robust goal that could require you to use multiple different marketing channels.
A good marketing channel to consider for such a campaign might be email marketing and drip campaigns. With this option, you can target past customers and send them automated reminders to come in for regular check-ups or procedures. You can even schedule your emails and newsletters to go out at dates far in advance, which gives you the time to make any adjustments to the marketing materials prior to release.
Email marketing campaigns are also a great way to connect with your patients. Send them birthday wishes; deliver monthly newsletters with business highlights; offer special promotions for newsletter subscribers; update your patients with new products or services that are changing.
The important factor with objectives, again, is to make sure they’re measurable. So if you send newsletters, see what type of newsletters receive the best open rates. Any objective that is measurable adds valuable data to your marketing campaign.
Step 5. Plan to Measure Campaign Success Early and Regularly
You shouldn’t wait until the end of the year to measure the success of your marketing campaigns. In fact, as long as you’ve created measurable objectives and are tracking your marketing campaign metrics as they develop, you may be able to measure the effectiveness of many of your campaigns as soon as they end. You can even monitor some campaigns throughout the process and update those campaigns as they progress.
Not happy with how a campaign is going? Change it! Don’t hesitate to make adjustments to a campaign that needs it. Whether you need to edit the wording of a Facebook ad or change the targeted audience, tweaking a campaign partway through could result in a more successful outcome.
Additionally, make sure you’re keeping an eye on your campaigns on a regular basis. What “regular” means will depend on the type of campaign you’re running. Whether you do weekly, monthly, or quarterly check-ins, make sure you keep yourself accountable by adding the check-ins to your calendar. Reminders on your mobile device with push notifications are also helpful.
Get Started on Your Marketing Year Plan
Now is as good a time as any to start putting getting your marketing year plan ideas down in writing. If you need help planning and executing the marketing year plan for your dental practice, contact Madison Ave Media for a complimentary consultation.