By Luc Wade, Marketing Director of Hive Business.
We all make mistakes, they’re what make us human, and when we reflect and try to learn from them that’s how we get better.
In marketing even the big guys mess up. Can you remember when Coke changed its recipe in the 80s? It wanted to regain market share from Pepsi but customers saw Coke as an icon of American tradition, not something that changes. New Coke bombed.
Then there was the time British Airways swapped the Union Jack on its tailfins for squiggly designs by international artists in a £60m rebrand. Margaret Thatcher captured public sentiment when she said, “We fly the British flag, not these awful things.” Back came the Union Jack.
These sorts of gaffes can happen when running a dental practice or a group of practices. And they will happen whenever a marketing director ploughs on with a nice idea in a vacuum and, crucially, doesn’t find out how their customers feel.
Neglecting to study your customer at the outset is the one mistake you can’t afford to make. All marketing is about the customer journey and the way to accurately think about your customer journey is to understand first hand the customers you wish to serve.
We study dental practices before we supply customised marketing programs to make sure we have this information. What we sometimes find is that a practice has neglected the most profitable treatment it could be doing in its catchment, so this preliminary analysis can actually lead to an adjustment of the entire business proposition.
We helped a large general NHS practice that wanted to build up its private list and noticed that all its competitors, in a very affluent area with large homes, were specialist practices. Where was the gap? Affordable private dental care. How did the marketing adapt to the audience? Using radio and press to reach the over-60s.
The nature of the successful dental practice, just like the nature of the successful fizzy drink and the successful airline brand, is down to the people it serves.
Once you know your customer you work backwards from there: you can build a realistic channel mix, communications strategy and customer journey, then define your budget. Not a single one of these will be any use to your business if they are done in isolation even if, like BA, you throw £60m at it.
What comes next (the really fun part) is marketing tactics. Now you can roll up your sleeves to test various mediums. Here’s how the standard operating procedure goes: test, measure, roll out, retest or roll back.
When I worked at National Geographic we had a multi-million pound marketing budget and even though it felt like we were placing large bets we had the confidence to try different things because we had followed the marketing process. Which is all marketing really is.
The only caveat was our tactics had to fit our strategy (derived from our target market selection) and we had to test and measure them before rolling them out in scale. So actually there was no risk of rolling out a full scale flop like Coke and BA.
Whether your budget is £3m or £3k, wait till the test and measure phase to make your mistakes — but get your customer selection right first time.
If you would like to discuss your dental marketing options with us please call us on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.
