Today, there are countless opportunities to increase your spend and commitment to marketing, with an unparalleled amount of data available to delve into. Most people don’t make the most of this, and it can sometimes feel hard to know where to start. When you’re in the middle of busy periods or concentrating on the day-to-day activity of your business, marketing often takes a back seat.
If marketing disappears down the list of priorities or you don’t have the time to dedicate resource to it, there are easy actions that will take this side of your business off ‘autopilot’, allowing you to make the most of your time and investment. In this article, we’ll be looking at some steps you can implement straight away to ensure you’re maintaining business improvement and removing barriers to new leads.
1. Operate a consistent review schedule
As has already been established, the data available from marketing campaigns and tools can be mind-boggling, and most businesses can be forgiven for not having the time to trawl through it with a fine-tooth comb. That being said, one of the first things to be done when taking your marketing off autopilot is to make a conscious effort to review the data that means the most to you. That doesn’t mean you need to go through it all, but it does mean establishing a consistent schedule and ensuring you’re not delaying making changes if the data demonstrates the need to.
Your marketing approach needs to be reviewed on at least a monthly, rather than an annual, basis. Marketing agencies can do a lot of the heavy lifting here in the way the information is presented, but taking ownership, communicating, reviewing data and feeding back is a two-way process and it makes sense to collaborate on this to ensure you have the ability and confidence to make the decisions that matter.
2. Share and communicate with the team
Nobody knows your business quite like those working within it, and sharing marketing insights and knowledge with your team is one of the first steps to taking a collective responsibility. Not only does it split the burden, but it’s likely many of those involved will have great insight; for example, response to advertising, the channels that are working well, new ideas, and so on, so sharing marketing insights can be a productive process. It also helps if wider team members are well informed when it comes to your efforts and marketing activities and initiatives – so they are equally aware of targets and can respond in the right way to enquiries.
It’s worth bearing in mind that although including the team is a good idea, it can sometimes help to recruit ‘captains’ or ‘ambassadors’ to help drive this forward and report back, therefore giving a better understanding of how your marketing initiatives are impacting the team and new patient enquiries. They should be able to report back on new patient contact attempts, appointments booked and attended, and treatment starts (to name a few) by channel.
3. Test, learn and adopt
Running a marketing campaign on autopilot means that you’re often not learning, testing and trying different approaches as quickly as you could be. Once you have a routine of reviewing your marketing data more consistently and thoroughly, as well as then sharing this with your team, you’ll be in a better position to test new tactics and learn from them.
Are you able to demonstrate that a particular marketing tactic works better than any other tactics that could be on the table? Are there holes or blockers in your new patient journey or contact strategy? The only way to do this is through thorough testing, and it’s only then that you’ll know for sure if you’re heading in the right direction.
Not all changes need to be drastic, either. It could be simply changing the imagery or hierarchy of text in an advert, and measuring its success by A/B testing it against your original idea. One practice found that changing the order of items in the web menu and fee guide – specifically, moving high-value treatments to be more prominent and adding internal links and changing the fee guide hierarchy – led to an increase in enquiries and site conversion.
4. Understand how to maximise your data
If you commit to taking your marketing off autopilot and making positive changes to drive growth, it’s important you get to know which bits of data mean the most to you. Again, this can be established as a team, as front of house staff, for instance, may see or hear things on a daily basis that you don’t. It may be that you want to drive more leads through a certain channel like social media or search marketing, or that you want to improve the new patient experience and therefore retention once a lead has walked through the door. All of this can be guided by looking at the right kind of data in collaboration with your dental marketing agency or business consultant.
Don’t be afraid to keep asking questions: Where do enquiries come through? How many leads are lost online? How many calls do we miss? What barriers are people experiencing when it comes to contacting your practice or agreeing to treatment? Use your data in the right way – it can answer many of these questions when analysed and considered properly.
5. Small changes can make a big difference
Our last point is that although a lot of this can seem quite overwhelming, it’s worth remembering that small changes (such as the example earlier of changing the fee guide hierarchy) can make a real positive difference.
Again, linking this back to point one, if you are reviewing your data and marketing strategy more regularly you’ll be able to continue tweaking, shifting and altering your tactics subtly in a more responsive way related to your overall strategy and growth targets. By testing these small changes and tweaks, you can see with more clarity what works and what doesn’t.
Final thoughts
At Hive, we’re interested in helping you make changes that work for you. Perhaps we can help recommend best practice, or collaborate with your business manager or treatment coordinator to help take your marketing off autopilot. Some of these points we’ve mentioned are fairly easy to implement and we’re confident that you’ll make better business and marketing decisions if you commit to reviewing data constantly rather than periodically before making appropriate changes based on your learning. Ask our team to get a better idea of how we might be able to help.
