It makes perfect sense to us to have a marketing team working closely with accountants and business advisors. One of our senior accountants, Simon, explains how digital marketing should definitely have a place in your dental business.
Simon Vincent blogs:
I’ll admit it, before joining Hive, I had no idea what marketing was. I’d previously worked for a more “traditional” accountancy firm – one that dealt with numbers; bookkeeping, filing VAT returns, preparing accounts, telling you how much tax to pay… you get the picture. Whilst these remain essential for all businesses (‘compliance’ work), business advisory went so far as ‘put your prices up’ or ‘extend your opening hours’. Perfectly valid ways to generate more income but there’s so much more that you can do.
That’s where marketing steps in.
Something that I previously thought of as somewhat a “dark art”, almost certainly, will bring more custom to your business. I used to think that marketing involved creating a pretty website or putting some fancy adverts here and there to make me buy things I didn’t think I needed, without even realising it. I was wrong.
We have all experienced good marketing at some point in our life. Did you really need that new smartphone? Smart marketing made you think you did. I simply couldn’t understand how marketers knew that what they were doing would work. Can you tell I was sceptical?
As it turns out, digital marketing consists of a very precise set of techniques. Technology means that it can absolutely target exactly the type of customers you want and its results can be tracked. We can tell exactly what people search for, what brings them to your website and use this to attract more people.
Good digital marketing will help you:
- Identify and understand your target market
- Design relevant campaigns
- Track and report on the activity
Understanding the type of patient you are trying to attract is vital when deciding which type of marketing activity to invest in; ranging from digital to traditional media. In order to design campaigns which will be relevant and appealing to the potential new patients, you must fully understand the demographic.
Tracking your activity means that you can see the ROI (return on investment) and forecast the type of results you’ll likely get for future campaigns. For example, there are various ways that we can see how many people saw your advert and subsequently phoned your practice. We can tell how much income this generates for you and the cost of the total campaign. This isn’t the dark art I once thought it was. Gone are the days that Marketers didn’t know if a campaign would work or not.
I’m an accountant, so there’s no getting away from the numbers completely. A typical marketing budget could easily be in the region of 5 – 10% of turnover and the sky’s the limit.
If you need any advice on your marketing budget or not sure where to start, call us on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.
