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Practice Plan
Marketing Your Practice
For many, marketing simply means adverts. Or maybe logos as well. Occasionally, it might prompt memories of annoying phonecalls at inappropriate times of the evening. Understandably, we tend to focus on the merits of the various marketing solutions we encounter without always thinking about exactly what marketing challenges they are trying to address. In fact, the closest we get to such thoughts is that slightly uncomfortable feeling that comes with noticing a pattern in the product types in the advertising breaks during ‘I’m A Celebrity’ and realising what type of audience the advertisers anticipate for such programmes!
And when it comes to marketing dental practices, it’s all too easy to react to the offer of a “deal” on an advert in a glossy regional magazine without thinking through if that’s the right solution for your particular marketing challenges. Worse, having taken a gamble on such offers, it’s rare to find a practice that accurately tracks the impact that such solutions have had to gauge if it was money well spent.
An approach to planning
In the world of clinical dentistry, the discipline to plan treatment, considering the pros and cons of all options, and to measure clinical outcomes to the micron seems instinctive. Why then does it seem so hard to apply the same principles to the business side of dentistry, including marketing?
Now, of course, the danger is that you can lurch from one extreme to another and over analyse your circumstances so I’m certainly not advocating that you employ someone with a diploma from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. However, having more structure to the way you think through what you need to do, while not foolproof, is certainly likely to improve the cost effectiveness of whatever marketing initiatives you put in place.
So where do you start? Well it’s all about making sure you accurately define your marketing needs and to do that you need to make sure you understand the market in which you are operating. It sounds obvious but there are some significant drivers of change affecting dentistry at the moment, the implications of which need some thought.
For fully private practices, the potential changes to the NHS dental contract and the hardening attitude of PCTs to contract management are things to view with mild interest. However, for mixed practices, they could have a significant impact. For example, there are increasing reports of PCTs withdrawing child only contracts. How would a practice approach considering parents and children as “customers” rather than recipients of a free of charge service? In this context, is it truly family orientated?
Another example might be the regulatory pressures that are seemingly escalating all the time. There will be cost implications for all practices and consideration may need to be given to the impact on the price of your services – a key component of any marketing plan.
It’s also worthwhile to think about what might be impacting on your local community from, which the chances are, most of your current and future patients will be drawn. How badly has the local job market been affected by the recession and how has this impacted on the type of patients currently attracted to your practice or indeed those that you might like to attract? What are the levels of interest in cosmetic dentistry? Has that been sustained during the economic downturn or has it fallen away?
A deeper understanding of your existing patient base can also be helpful in other respects. Simple facts like the age profile of your patients can be quite revealing. If most of your patients are well into their retirement that might pose a challenge for the long-term future of the practice. Knowing the socio-economic groups into which they fall could also give you an indication of their spending power.
It’s always useful to have a good understanding of the other dental practices in the area. Some practices I know “mystery shop” the others in the area by dividing their team into pairs and devoting a morning to visiting as many as possible. One member of the pair gauges the effectiveness of the front desk and the other checks out the décor and ambience of the facilities. Of course, the occasional good idea can be recycled and, often, it’s a great morale boost! But, however you do it, getting to grips with how other practices are presenting themselves and their accessibility in terms of available appointments and price can be invaluable.
Getting this knowledgeable about what is affecting your practice and your customers can give real insight into the key challenges, opportunities and threats presented by your local market. It then follows that you need to be brutally honest in terms of the readiness of you and your team to exploit those opportunities and deal with the threats - in effect to identify your marketing strengths and weaknesses.
Measure, measure, measure
Quite often, this turns out to be a difficult exercise to carry out objectively because of a lack of management information and data on which to base an opinion, i.e. the major weakness is the lack of measurement of the key aspects of marketing activity on which to base an opinion about what is working well or not so well. Arguably, in many cases, the first action on any dental practice marketing plan should be to put in place the systems required to generate the management information you need to monitor the success of your marketing initiatives!
This doesn’t just mean capturing the source of your new patient enquiries. That is just the first step on a new patient journey and you need to be monitoring the effectiveness of each step individually. How many enquiries turned into booked appointments ? What is the fail to attend rate on new patient examinations? What was the source of enquiry that led to each held appointment? What is the rate of treatment plan acceptance? And so on.
And this shouldn’t just be a one off exercise as part of preparation for a planning exercise. This kind of measurement and production of management information should become habitual, reviewed at regular intervals so that you can fine tune your marketing tactics if needed.
Target market
Another weakness can often be a lack of clarity about the vision for the practice and its target market. It’s no longer sufficient to attempt to be all things to all people and, to provide focus to your marketing, you need to be clear about who you want to serve. The exercise of understanding your existing patient base described earlier is a useful starting point but it does not necessarily follow that you should try to attract more of the same. That may be appropriate but, with the greater knowledge acquired through the information you have gathered, challenge your historical way of thinking to ensure there is not a niche in your area that is going under served.
Determining to whom you are trying to appeal then allows you to present the benefits of the service in the most appropriate manner to potential or existing patients. This is partly about improving patient awareness of what can be done for them in a technique and procedure sense. It is also about conveying the manner in which the services will be provided. Formal or informal, overtly clinical or more relaxed setting, exclusive or inclusive, there are different ways of handling different patients and it is often these softer criteria through which patients make their choices.
Branding
In the wider business world, such characteristics are communicated through the brand, a concept relatively undeveloped in dentistry but one that is not new. Even when the only information a dentist tells you is that they have a practice in Harley or Wimpole Street, certain traits of such practices and their patients come to mind. And now, such ideas have found their way out of central London and many practices are seeing the benefits of creating a strong brand personality and visual identity that acts as a shorthand for the type of practice they are.
Not only can a brand be used to attract the type of patients they are targeting for their chosen business model but it also puts off the people they are not targeting, saving all concerned time and inconvenience. This in itself is an important acknowledgement as a practice becomes a business – that it is wholly appropriate not to be all things to all people.
As most people are aware, underpinning successful brands is an almost anal sense of consistency. This applies to the customer service that is provided by the entire team where one weak link can undermine all that for which you are striving. As Jim Collins describes in his classic business book From Good to Great, truly successful business leaders get “the right people on the bus” as they create their teams and head off in the pursuit of their goals. In small teams, this arguably has heightened significance as a wrong attitude can quickly infect those well motivated around them.
That sense of consistency also applies to those things more often associated with brands, such as logos, business name and all the marketing collateral that goes with it from welcome packs to referral cards to signage to adverts to websites. For many years, such attention to detail was not really worth the effort. However, for some time now, we have been evolving into a market that places increasing importance on a strong visual identity that sums up what you want to stand for in the eyes of your patients.
The potential of your existing patient base
It can be easy to be fooled into thinking that marketing is all about attracting new patients to the practice but it may be that the problem you need to solve lies within your practice and the relationship you have with your existing patients. As Chris Barrow often quotes “all the money you need for the rest of your career is in the pockets of your existing patients and the people they can introduce you to”. So before too much money and energy is spent on expensive promotional campaigns to secure new patients, make sure you are not missing any potential with your existing patient base.
For example, while patients rarely seem to consider going anywhere other than their trusted dentist for their examinations and treatment required to maintain their health, some seem happy to shop around for cosmetic dentistry. Many practitioners can relate tales of regular patients arriving for their six monthly examination sporting new cosmetic work that could have been provided at the practice but wasn’t. This must say something about the effectiveness with which the practice is communicating the availability of these services but also something about the practice’s understanding of the needs of such patients.
Growth through advocacy
A better understanding of your patient needs can only lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and, if like most practices you grow primarily by recommendation, you need your existing patients to be so happy with the care you have provided that they will happily spread the word to others. Indeed, according to Fred Reichheld, the esteemed business strategist, the willingness of customers to recommend you correlates more significantly with their loyalty than their degree of satisfaction. So much so, in fact, that Reichheld believes you can simply reduce customer satisfaction surveys down to what he terms “the ultimate question” which simply asks for a score out of ten in terms of likelihood to recommend.
Monitoring answers to this question not only allows you to keep track of how well you are doing in terms of securing patient loyalty, but a positive response makes your team feel more comfortable encouraging patients to actually refer friends and relatives. Creating an army of advocates from your existing patient base must surely be not only the most cost effective way of growing your practice but also the most satisfying.
So marketing is a lot more than just a clever logo and a flash advert. It requires thought, planning, measurement and the ability to see things through the eyes of your patients. If done well and embedded as a habit throughout the practice team, it will make assuring the success of your business that little bit easier.
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Practice Plan Ltd, Kempthorne House, Park Avenue, Oswestry, Shropshire, SY11 1AY Tel: +44 (0) 1691 684135 Email: info@practiceplan.co.uk Online: www.practiceplan.co.uk |
