Friday, August 23, 2013
When you create your marketing plan for your dental practice, you will also need to create a marketing budget. This budget should not only include successful campaigns done in the past that you continue to do today, but also make room for testing new ideas and strategies.
Remember, you should mix your traditional marketing such as print ads, with new online marketing such as banner or pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
You want a budget that is realistic and will help improve your revenue. It should be created as the framework for all of your costs within a specific timeframe of how you are going to achieve your marketing goals. It will also help so you don’t overspend throughout the year, and keep you focused on your marketing efforts.
With those goals in mind, here are six steps to creating a successful marketing budget:
Step 1: Organize Your Current Finances - When you organize your finances, you are able to see what you can or can’t take on. Knowing your current financial state is very important. You must have a clear understanding of how much your dental practice makes on a monthly basis. What revenue can you rely on consistently?
Once you know what to expect each month, subtract your expenses including office space rent, employee salaries, dental equipment, supplies, etc. You want to focus tour budget around your income after expenses, not the total revenue coming in. Once you know how much you’re able to spend you can divide this money according to your marketing goals.
Step 2: Research - Begin with the basics. Find out which campaigns worked in the past and which ones didn’t. Did you see more traffic walk through your office when you redesigned your website and started adding blogs to it monthly? Maybe a social media campaign worked best for you. Go back through last year’s marketing efforts and find out what gave you the best return on your investment (ROI).
At the same time, you want to research your competition. What are they doing, and where are they spending their marketing dollars? Do some detective work and figure out what is working for them and what isn’t. You always want to be one step ahead of your competitors.
Step 3: Brainstorm Ideas, Old and New - Next, make a list of all the marketing ideas that interest and excite you. If you aren’t passionate about what you’re doing, then it will show.
By now you should know all about your target audience and where they like to hang out. If they are on social media, then you should be too. If they are watching videos on YouTube, then you should be producing videos for them on a constant basis.
You can revisit old ideas that were never executed as well as discover new ways to reach to your market audience. From your competitive analysis in step two, you can generate new ideas based on what worked for them and try it with your practice, or spin it in a new way. Find out what the latest marketing trends are for dentists and test a few out.
Step 4: Finalize Your Ideas - After you have your list of ideas, start condensing it down into a year’s worth of realistic campaigns you can implement. Determine the amount of resources that will need to go into each effort and if you can afford them. Some ideas may be too big while smaller ones could turn into the perfect solution.
Pick out the best marketing strategies for your practice and specific target audience. If you are a small practice, start with your smaller, less expensive ideas and work your way up according to their successes. If you’re a larger office with multiple locations, go for the new, big ideas if your budget allows it. Make this budget work for you.
Step 5: Create the Budget - Now it’s time to put it all together. Once you have your finalized list of marketing strategies, you need to estimate how much each one will cost, the length of the campaign and time of year you will run it. Your market research in step two as well as past experiences should help with estimating the cost of each project. Maybe you ran a three month promotional offer for teeth whitening during the height of wedding season and saw great results. You could do the same thing again this year but with a twist - put it on your social media page as an “exclusive” offer for brides-to-be.
Step 6: Track, Track, Track - Your marketing budget is not a “set it and forget it” kind of document. You should always be tracking your marketing efforts and assessing the data when it comes in. You may find out that a certain campaign isn’t providing you with the ROI you estimated and you need to get rid of it, or replace it with something else. There is always some tweaking involved when it comes to your marketing plan.
Data can be gathered from your Google Analytics, reports from your internet marketing firm, and even your own patients. Don’t be afraid to ask them how they found you, and direct them to your website and/or social media pages for special discounts periodically. You always want them to keep coming back for more!
Keep in mind that your marketing budget can be flexible and never has to be set in stone. If you need to add some other tactics to help make your marketing more effective, then add them. But, always keep your goals in mind and focus on your big picture objectives, and success will come to you.