There’s no sense in creating a digital marketing plan for your dental practice if you don’t plan for how you will keep things moving and successful in the long run. You could make the case that it doesn’t matter how a campaign starts as long as it’s effectively managed on an ongoing basis. Even if it got off to a rocky start, with improvements along the way, it could be a winner. In step 1, step 2, and step 3, we designed a strong launchpad for success.
Ready step four of this dental digital marketing guide to discover how you will maintain your marketing plan.
How Will You Maintain Momentum?
Fully Commit.
First, you need to have a conviction that the effort is worth it. Don’t launch a dental marketing plan just because you know that’s what your colleagues are doing. You have a goal, and you have tools in place to measure the success of your campaign. Now you need to commit to knowing what’s happening and making decisions about how to move forward.
The number one mistake that dentists make in launching a new digital marketing initiative is turning it off prematurely. Your goal will not be achieved in the first month of the campaign. If you think you may want to turn it off after a month, don’t even measure the results. Don’t launch the campaign at all if that’s the case. A one-month digital marketing campaign is a waste of your money.
Commit to making the digital dental marketing plan part of your overall business plan. You can think of it like a new hire on your team. You carefully screen applicants and hold interviews before hiring. From the time you hire the new team member, you have to train and communicate with the new employee, ideally with someone mentoring them along the way to give them the best chance of success. Then, if that employee is not a good fit, you may need to move on, but that doesn’t mean you eliminate their position from the practice! You need that dental assistant or front desk position; you just need to make a change in the personnel. In the same way, you need a digital marketing plan to keep your dental practice moving forward.
Leverage and Empower Your Team.
Dental offices rely on their dentists to generate revenue. The more the dentist devotes their time and attention to other matters, the less money the practice will bring in. Maximize your revenue and capitalize on your investment in a dental digital marketing plan by empowering your team to help you run the campaign.
We often see dentists make the mistake of trying to leverage a technologically-savvy employee for their marketing effort while not actually empowering them to manage the campaign. The lack of empowerment usually comes from not carving out time in the employee’s schedule for them to actually connect with the marketing team and analyze the results.
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You should have a point person to head up the marketing effort in the office, but it shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of any one person. Other team members need to be trained and incentivized to complete marketing tasks such as asking for reviews or taking photos for social media and website use. The dentist needs to fund the campaign and lead effectively by directing the team and checking in on their progress from time to time.
Dentists should not completely remove themselves from the digital dental marketing plan but should only check-in and provide direction. Just as a team member will fail if they don’t have time to devote to completing marketing tasks, dentists who try to either set their marketing on total auto-pilot or neglect marketing tasks that they put on their own plate are setting themselves up for failure.
Schedule marketing check-ins with your account manager at your dental marketing agency and then keep those appointments. Schedule marketing meetings with your team and make sure that they understand that marketing the dental practice will help the practice thrive and therefore benefit them indirectly with job security and directly from a financial standpoint. If one or both of those things are not true, consider some business structure changes to accommodate and incentivize growth.
Train and Role Play.
As part of your regular marketing meetings with team members (new and old), train and role play on the tasks that they perform as part of the dental digital marketing plan. These items could include:
- How to ask for a review
- How to spot a good social media photo op
- How to ask about sharing a patient’s before and after images (to gain consent)
- How to post to your social media profiles
- Who to contact regarding updates to the website or online presence
- Listening to call recordings and training on handling sales opportunities
Cycle through a list of critical actions during these meetings. Don’t train once and assume that the team will retain and implement all the information from there.
Successful Dental Digital Marketing Plans Are Active Partnerships
If you started this journey of designing a dental digital marketing plan and have read through all four steps, hopefully, you understand that your campaigns will not succeed with a ‘set it and forget it’ philosophy. Your marketing plan should be active, evolving, and growing based on your goals and data. Don’t give up. Get expert help when you need it. Pro Impressions Marketing dentists enjoy being in the know while also partnering with the best in the business. We love taking the lead with the marketing, and the dentists partner with us so that we understand how the dental office is growing and changing too.
If you’re interested in becoming a member of Pro Impressions Marketing, call (970) 672-1212 with any questions or schedule a consultation online here.
