Contents
What is marketing?
Why does a dental practice need to worry about marketing?
Assessing your current state
Objectives
Identify your ideal customer
Identifying your primary audiences
Market trends
The marketing mix
Unique selling points
Branding
Strategy
Monitoring performance
Objectives
Objectives, aims or goals are the reason for taking a course of action. You might decide that you want to generate 20 new patient inquiries per month, grow your private patient bookings by 20% within 12 months, or improve patient retention by 15%. Your team may also wish to set their own targets.
Write down your objective then keep referring to it as you develop your plan; is your plan going to help you get there? Can you measure your objective to know that your plan worked? What timeframe have you decided on?
Think about the SMART principles:
- Specific: State exactly what will need to be done
- Measurable: Be clear what success will look like in terms of numbers
- Achievable: Be realistic, base goals around available resources
- Realistic: Know the objective is practical and that steps can be taken to do it
- Timely: state when it will be achieved by.
Example objective:
We want our existing loyal patients to tell others how their experiences have been comfortable and incentivise new bookings with a refer-a-friend scheme over six months.