By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business

You might think the increasing surfeit of cheap online marketing tools like blogs, analytics, ad retargeting and video can only be good news. Sure, these tools have given small fish like dentists, for decades priced out of serious marketing channels, a shot at shouting nearly as loud as big fish.

But make sure you know what you’re shouting about and why. If not, your communications are liable to get as confusing as a Friday night out in Cardiff. Say, for example, you decide to start a regular blog on your website. Nice. You are deploying a marketing tactic. But for what purpose? If you’re not really sure, you might undermine your brand integrity and, therefore, your business.

It’s disheartening when people lose faith in the power of marketing simply because they haven’t looked at the bits that come before tactics. Building a marketing strategy is really important, and first of all you need to know what your business objective is. Seriously, have a think about what you want your business to achieve before doing anything.

I’ll go into depth about how to do market research and build a marketing plan another time but the key point, once you have an objective, is to never allow yourself to be talked into doing marketing activities in isolation.  They will more often than not be off-strategy. I’ve met so many dentists who actually have a marketing plan but then forget all about it when offered snazzy new marketing channels. Say your local David Lloyd gym offers to feature an advert for your practice on their gym screens for £50 a month, and they’ll even produce it for you. I reckon nine out ten dentists would fall for this type of thing because it’s cheap and seems worthwhile, but will it actually work? Not in isolation, if ever (busy gym rats with headphones in are unlikely to hear or pay attention to the content).

So what do properly integrated tactics look like? Let’s say you have a practice in South Yorkshire and you decide your objective is to increase practice revenue by 30% in 12 months. Your strategy might be to rapidly grow facial aesthetics to become the dominant provider in South Yorkshire. A tactic to do that might be to own all facial aesthetics search marketing, namely to be within the top three rankings for all facial aesthetics search results linked to South Yorkshire. Another tactic might be to reach the people who are not already searching for information on facial aesthetics treatments in South Yorkshire. To do that you could run an ad campaign in the Doncaster Free Press to explain to people what these treatments are and drive them to your facial aesthetics landing page. Thirdly, you could run a Facebook campaign (that hopefully goes viral) featuring testimonial videos from some of your happiest facial aesthetics patients.

Life has never been more complex for marketing your dental practice; it’s easy to get carried away with the latest social media plug-in and keep doing things in isolation, but even tactical success will be meaningless unless it feeds into a wider strategy. Let’s say the Facebook campaign doesn’t go viral, in fact, it doesn’t even get 1,000 views. Fine. What’s a better use of your testimonial video content for the next tactic? You have 12 months to deliver the objective after all. The strategy won’t change, but your tactics will adapt to what’s happening on the ground. Suck up all the information from your tactical activities — that’s how you learn and improve your tactical efficacy. But tactical efficacy won’t get you anywhere worth going on its own.

A lot of the companies that supply services to dentists aren’t really marketers with a strategic approach, they’re just providing a delineated service (eg providing you with a new website, SEO or an ad retargeting campaign). I’m not saying you shouldn’t use them. You can, but make sure you have a business objective for your marketing plan first, and a strategy. It’s really very easy to dip your toes in the water with online marketing tools, but it’s ill-advised. Don’t muddy the water before you dive in.

Luc

If you would like to discuss your marketing strategy with us please call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.