9 Steps To Create an Effective Dental Marketing Plan
Have you graduated from dental school recently and want to start a new clinic?, or Are you working with an expert and decided to launch a new clinic? Marketing would play a vital role in growing your business in both cases.
Different dental clinics follow a wide range of marketing strategies. It could be social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, PPC, etc. Hence, it might be cumbersome for you to choose the best marketing strategy for your clinic. You might have questions about where to begin.
Your primary goal is to attract more patients to your dental practice. However, you don’t have any guide to help you move ahead. You might be uncertain about any of the marketing strategies. The best way to deal with this is to create a dental marketing plan. You might have a question, how to create a dental marketing plan?
Here, we will share a step-by-step process to create a dental marketing plan that works and brings more patients to your clinic.
Before that, we will look at some basics of dental marketing.
So, let’s start:
What is a Dental Marketing Plan?
A dental marketing plan starts with knowing the potential audience, the suitable channels to engage with them, and systematic insights to make a suitable strategy. Dental businesses make an effective marketing plan to reach out to the audience and increase brand awareness. The end goal of this plan is to get patients that make a call or book an appointment.
Now, we will look at some popular dental marketing plans among businesses.
Types of Dental Marketing Plans
You can check out different marketing plans and choose a suitable one for your dental practice. So, let’s get started.
Quarterly/Annual Marketing Plan: It consists of strategies or campaigns you can consider for a particular time.
Paid Marketing Plan: It focuses on PPC marketing, social media paid campaigns, native ads, and more. In simple words, anything that involves paying to implement a strategy.
Social Media Marketing Plan: It involves various strategies and promotions that you conduct on social media.
Content Marketing Plan: It includes a range of tactics, strategies, and campaigns that you implement via content to promote your dental clinic.
New Product or Launch Marketing: It consists of a systematic roadmap of strategies and techniques that you can use to promote a product.
9 Step Process to Create Dental Office Marketing Plan
1. Conduct a Situational Analysis
The situational analysis is necessary for you to get a bird’s eye view of the position of your dental clinic and what type of competition you are facing.
It also helps you to understand how effective your current marketing practice is.
In this analysis, you have to list the services you offer against that of your competitors to figure out what makes yours better and distinct.
You should also take a closer look at your existing marketing strategy and figure out those shortcomings due to which you are not getting the desired result.
2. Define a Specific Goal
Once you have completed the situational analysis, you should outline your marketing goals which are achievable and measurable.
By defining a goal first, you can easily create an effective marketing plan and allocate the necessary time & resources to achieve the goal.
When you set specific goals for your marketing plan, you must follow the SMART(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, & Time-Bound) approach.
You should set specific targets to achieve for page traffic and conversions. When you use real numbers to measure the success of your marketing strategy, you can accurately figure out how successful your marketing plan is in attaining the goals you have set. You can also modify your dental office marketing plan whenever needed.
3. Identify Your Target Audience
Once you have specified the goals you need to achieve in your marketing strategy, the next step is to identify your target audience.
Your target audience will depend on your specialty and brand. For example, if you are a pediatric dentist, your target audience would be the mothers who make the ultimate decision while choosing the dentist for a child. Similarly, if you specialized in high-priced cosmetic services, your target customers would be those who have a higher income threshold.
Thus, you see that there are multiple niches in your profession & if you want to attract more than one niche, you have to design individual marketing campaigns to target each of these niches.
Customer personas are a crucial part of your dental marketing plan as it allows you to attract your potential customers by designing a highly targeted marketing campaign. Once you identify your target audience, you can figure out their objectives. What are their pain points, and how can your dental clinic resolve them?
4. Research Your Competition
After identifying your target customers, the next step in creating a highly effective dental office marketing plan is to research your competitors.
For the same, you should look at the best dental websites worldwide. Carefully analyze what they are offering to their patients in terms of services, pricing, and branding? Once you have identified these, then the next step is to decide what things you can offer differently and how you can become more competitive?
You should carefully look at their marketing campaign. It generally includes PPC and social media marketing.
Carefully look at what are those crucial elements that are working for them? What things get them a large number of social shares? You should not follow their strategy blindly, but make it your own by elevating it.
Some of the points that you should focus on when you are doing competitor analysis include the following:
- Their marketing and sales strategy
- Their management and marketing team
- The social media strategy they are following
- What is their annual growth rate?
- Check their market capitalization and financials
- What type of client personas do they serve?
- Look at their search engine optimization strategy.
- Check their content marketing strategy or any other campaign strategy they use.
When you carefully research your competitors, you can analyze their strengths and weaknesses from all sides. By knowing this, you have an opportunity to implement a reliable marketing strategy and grab a higher number of patients than your competitors.
5. Create a Unique Value Proposition
The unique value proposition is crucial for the success of any company. It offers something of value to the patient. The unique value proposition of your dental practice should be such that it attracts potential customers to take your service. Therefore, you must offer something of great value to your potential customers. Ultimately, it would give your practice a big boost.
Here are some of the points you should look at when you try to create a unique value proposition for your dental practice.
- It should offer solutions to the pain points of your client.
- You must provide specific advantages of your service that are measurable.
- Explain how your service is better than that offered by your competitors.
Your unique value proposition should not only be on your homepage, but your potential customers should also see it on all the touchpoints on the web. Lastly, remember that your unique value proposition would be a crucial element in your dental marketing plan.
6. Develop Your Budget
The next important step in your dental office marketing plan is to fix your marketing budget. To do this, you have to carefully analyze all the crucial financial aspects required in the project during execution and delivery.
Advertisement is expensive, and you have to make provisions for hidden costs also. You have to fix the maximum amount you are ready to pay for your dental clinic marketing campaign. It is essential to decide this as it would give you an idea about how much you can advertise on various paid marketing channels.
You should carefully find the patient acquisition expense and then compare it with the profit you get from an average patient that comes to your dental clinic.
7. Determine Your Strategies
Once you have fixed your marketing budget and crucial metrics related to your marketing plan, the next step is to plan your dental marketing strategy. To implement your dental marketing plan, you have to reduce the plan to smaller and easier to manage tasks. Here, you can create a flowchart that lays out your marketing strategy to reach various objectives.
You can also create a project roadmap that should include a basic timeline for various goals. It will help you to visualize your marketing strategy.
You have to decide essential marketing channels that help you in brand promotion. You can acquire PPC ads (they are very costly but provide you quick results that you can easily measure) or focus on Search Engine Optimization.
You can also leverage social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to reach out to your target audience. You can further communicate the message that you intend to give them more effectively.
8. Execute Your Dental Marketing Plan
After you have strategized your dental marketing plan, the next step is to run the campaign as you have planned. To do this, you must know how to use CTAs effectively. You can also choose a professional company that would provide you with a team of experts, such as individual marketers, PPC specialists, copywriters, and SEO experts under one roof.
Experts who have domain knowledge of their niche can execute your dental marketing plan successfully. Also, they can get you the desired results.
9. Track, Optimize, and Repeat!
After you have completed your dental marketing plan, you must also list down how you monitor the progress of your marketing plan or measure its success. To do this, you have to standardize the way you report results. Your performance monitoring measure should explain the following:
- What are the things that you wish to measure?
- In what way will you keep track of the results?
- The frequency with which you will track your results and analyze them.
You can also integrate more guidelines to keep track of your marketing strategy. You should continuously keep track of the marketing campaign by analyzing the primary metrics for which you can use Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, and Google Ads Manager. It will give you an idea regarding who is engaging with your content and what kind of leads the campaign can generate.
In short, it would give you a good idea of what is working in your advertisement campaign so that you can invest in better results. Also, you should try to adjust those parts of the advertisement campaign that are not working or reevaluate them to make them more effective.
Conclusion
The best way to attract new patients and outperform your competitors is to invest in a well-researched and effective dental marketing plan.
An effective dental marketing plan will give you the foundation to develop a long-term plan through which you can make the requisite change to maximize your success. You need to be consistent and follow a plan that has helped you achieve success.
If you still face any issues in making a dental marketing plan, don’t hesitate to contact us.
WebyKing is a dental web design & marketing company. We have delivered some of the best dental websites to clients worldwide. Moreover, we have created a suitable marketing plan for various businesses and executed it well to get the desired results. Hence, we have been recognized as one of the Top Dental Website Design Companies.
Lastly, we will understand your dental business design and provide you with a suitable solution to grow your dental practice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the best dental marketing ideas you can consider to get more patients to your dental practice.
- Create a fully optimized and responsive website
- Search engine optimization
- Sponsor local events
- Get positive reviews from your patients
- Directory listing
- Press release.
- Pay-per-click advertisement
- Get patient referrals
- Social media marketing
- Offer new patient discounts
- Ad retargeting
- Be as flexible as possible with your payment plan
- Offer teledentistry
- Radio advertisement
To stay connected with your target audience, you must keep your marketing tools updated. Some of the essential marketing tools that are used effectively in promoting dentistry services include the following:
- Chatbots.
- Map ads
- Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)
- Appointment reminders
- Email marketing
