1. Identify Your Niche, Target Market, Goals, and Budget

The first step you should take before you can create a marketing plan is to identify your position in the market. What products and services are you proving and who is your ideal buyer? Does your business fill an actual need in the market?

Secondly, you should also define your marketing goals. Do you want to get more clients or improve your brand awareness and image? Your end goal will determine the marketing tactics that you use. Finally, you should also be clear about what your marketing budget is. Your budget will limit and guide the marketing strategies that you can use.

2. Choose The Right Marketing Channels

The next step in creating a marketing plan for a startup is to choose the right channels to promote your company. Below are the 5 main channels that can be used in your startup strategy

Website

No modern business can thrive without a website. Modern consumers do their research online before deciding whether to buy items from a certain brand. A website is also available at all hours which allows you to communicate with clients from all over the world at any time. In case you don’t feel ready to create a full-scale website, make a landing page instead.

This is a single website page that would briefly describe your products or services and their prices. You could then collect your audience’s email addresses and other demographic information to send them targeted emails selling your services.

When creating a website, make sure to choose a domain name that matches your brand. This could be your actual business name or the name of the product or service that you are selling. You should also use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies to increase traffic to your website. Placing ads on social media as well as Google Ads could also increase traffic to your site. The more traffic you get, the higher your sales potential.

Email

The second important channel you can use is email marketing. Through your website, social media pages, or landing pages you can collect email addresses from your target audience. You can then send regular emails to your subscribers to share updates about business, products, and services.

Social Media

Social media is one of the cheapest yet most effective forms of marketing in the world today. There are billions of social media users and it is easy to engage them with frequent messages about your business. If your posts are good, your followers will share them with their followers which will increase the number of your followers.

Content Marketing

Another popular channel when marketing for startups is content marketing. This is the creation of useful content for your target markets such as blogs, videos, podcasts, and infographics. The content should be educational or entertaining for your clients. If it focuses on selling your products, no one will read it. Over time, you will have a dedicated group of followers that love and trust your content and you can then convert them into buying customers by selling them services that are suited to their needs.

Offline Promotions

Online marketing is preferred by startups due to its cost-effectiveness. But you also must do some offline marketing to grow your business. For example. You should have business cards in your wallet or bag that you can hand out to people that may be interested in your business. You can also attend networking events that will be attended by your target market.

You must also brand your physical office properly with signs so that people walking past may be aware of your business. You can also encourage your current clientele to recommend your business to their friends and acquaintances. Word of mouth is an effective yet underrated marketing channel.

3. Measure and Correct Your Marketing Campaigns

The final step in creating a marketing plan for a startup business is to test the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You have a limited amount of money and time to market your business, so all your efforts need to be effective. Start by defining what key performance indicators you will use to measure the success of your business. These could include increasing your website traffic or increasing your sales. In case your KPIs aren’t getting better after a marketing campaign then you will know that your marketing isn’t working.

Finally, take the time to learn who your audience is, what their needs are, and what messages they best respond to. One of the best tools you can use for this is /B testing. Whenever you create a campaign such as a social media ad or email newsletter, you could create a similar advert but change one aspect such as the headline, image, or content and then see which campaign works best with your target audience. The more tests you do the closer you will get to the optimal type of messaging you should use in your campaigns.

Key Takeaway When Creating A Marketing Plan For A Startup

Marketing is a key strategy to ensure the success of your startup. An effective marketing plan requires that you identify your marketing goals, budget, and target audience. Secondly, you need to choose the right marketing channels to send your message to your target audience. Finally, you must test and measure the results of your campaign to ensure that they are achieving your goals. Read my blog for more marketing tips on how you can grow your startup business.

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How to Grow Your Dental Practice

Read the following tips on how to grow your dental practice and improve your patients’ experience.

1. Identify What Makes Your Practice Special

First of all, how do you market a dental practice? You cannot start if you do not know what makes your practice unique, because that is your first tool when you try to attract new patients. To turn your dental practice into the best oral health care provider locally, it is necessary to identify, market, and protect those competitive advantages that make your practice unique and capable of attracting and retaining a large volume of patients.

If now you wonder “how can I grow my dental practice using what makes it special?”, you should know that consistency plays an essential role. Promoting your dental practice’s attributes constantly through advertising campaigns and patient interactions will help your dental business grow. Focus on what sets your practice apart from the competition. Obtain your patients’ attention through customized social media content, brochures, and dental newsletters. Therefore, how much should a dental practice spend on marketing? Each dental practice has to estimate its own marketing budget depending on the location and marketing channels they use, among other factors.

2. Discover Your Office Culture

The truth is your office culture already exists; you only need to discover it. Your values, systems, behaviors, leadership style, the way the staff communicates with each other and your patients, and even your office décor, are all part of your dental office culture. Your particular style is the image of your dental practice, and it has the power to enhance your engagement with patients and keep them coming back.

In the case you wonder “how can I grow my dental practice through my dental office culture?”, you should gather with your staff first and discuss your dental office’s daily operations and long-term goals, and make sure each employee is on the same page. When a whole team is working towards the same goal, they feel happier, more caring, and their performance is better.

3. Improve and Expand Your Services

Improving and expanding your services can strengthen your competitive position. Ways to improve your practice are moving to a bigger space, including additional associates, or providing your patients with several payment options. Make sure to get the right balance of first-class service and cutting-edge technology to become a successful dentist.

4. Offer a Wide Range of Financial Options

Patients will feel more inclined to accept treatment suggestions and come back for ongoing dental care if the dentist provides them with different payment options. To ensure financial circumstances do not affect dental health care decisions, convenient options to offer besides insurance coverage are credit, debit, personal check and cash, and special financing.

5. Forge Strong Dentist-Patient Relationships

Being able to count on a set of recurring patients who also recommend the practice is essential. Moreover, retaining recurring patients is less expensive than implying strategies to acquire new ones. However, doing so takes more than offering quality service and convenient hours. To create long-lasting relationships with them, it is important to reach them on an emotional level and earn their trust.

What is a healthcare marketing strategy commonly used to grow your dental practice? Offering your patients quality content through cross-channel marketing on an ongoing basis is a popular technique. Thanks to social media, you can easily show your patients that you truly care about their health by connecting with them, sharing interesting health care information, and answering their questions.

6. Obtain Patient Referrals

The best way to grow your patient base is through word-of-mouth referrals. However, your patients usually forget to support your business. How to increase patient volume in a dental office, then? You can encourage your current patients to do it. For instance, you can provide your patients with quick links to online review sites, hand out referral cards at the office, offer a referral bonus program, or even encourage your employees to grow your practice.

7. Improve Your Scheduling System

What can increase productivity in a dental office? Top-level dental scheduling software is not only used to book appointments; it must create a better patient flow, maximize productivity, and contribute to the first-class customer service your patients expect. Therefore, you must make sure your scheduling software is updated, efficient, and flexible.

8. Train Your Team

In terms of staff-quality, the answer to the question “How can I grow my dental practice?” might seem too obvious. However, it is not as simple as it seems. It is important you keep in mind that the first impression you give to your potential patients is not when they are sitting on your chair; it is right at the front desk. Hence, the attitude, communication skills, and professionalism of your front desk team can make your dental practice either grow or break.

Make sure each one of your employees is trained to make the most of each patient interaction. You can noticeably improve patient satisfaction with a training program that includes technical expertise and dental best practices, customer service techniques, and advanced communication. What is dental marketing about if patients do not find at your practice the high-quality service you promote?

The post How Can I Grow My Dental Practice? appeared first on Athena Marketing - Official Dental Blog.

If you run a dental practice, you have probably asked yourself the following question: “How much should a dental practice spend on marketing?”. It is a great question. Each dental practice has particular goals, local markets, and financial situations. Nevertheless, acquiring new, top-level patients to your dental practice is absolutely necessary, as well as maximizing recurring revenue from them.

Starting a Percentage-based Budget Dental Practices Need

As in each stage of their life cycles dental practices need different marketing budgets, these estimates can vary as follows:

New Dental Practices

New dental practices debt is considerably high, but attracting new patients quickly can allow them to begin paying their bills and loans. When it comes to new practices, most dental business experts suggest spending 20% of projected gross revenue on marketing. How much should a dental practice spend on marketing when it is starting? Keep in mind that it depends on your local market. If you are facing strong local competition in a large city, your benchmark should be about 30%, for instance. However, 20% is adequate if there is little competition.

In terms of goals, what is dental marketing like for new practices? To make an impact in your community, your first marketing campaign is vital and needs to reach as many people as possible. Excellent marketing strategies to implement are using search engine marketing, paid ads, and developing a resourceful dental practice website. Despite search engine optimization (SEO) does require time and investment, the payoff is quite significant. Acquiring new patients will be much easier once you are at the top of search engines and create a great online reputation. Meanwhile, pay-per-click ads will let you appear at the top of the search engines to be easily found by new patients.

So, if you are starting your practice and you wonder “how much should I pay for a dental practice?”, ensure you invest a considerable portion of your initial funding towards a well-planned marketing program that makes your potential patients notice you. If you get it right, SEO will offer you the best return on investment with a constant flow of revenue and new patients.

Established Dental Practices

If your dental practice is already in this stage, you must be wondering “How can I grow my dental practice even more?” Several dental practices wish to grow to one or two million dollars in revenue, but their current website or digital marketing is not performing as well as the competition, and they struggle to find new patients and meet their goals every month. Then, how much should a dental practice spend on marketing if the practice is already established and looking to grow? To begin achieving successful results and fix current issues, these practices should spend 5-10% of the gross revenue they are aiming for.

When used correctly, an SEO program will bring effective and long-lasting results after six months or even a year. Similarly, pay-per-click ads are considerably useful for established dental practices in the short term as they are for new dental practices to place you at the top of the search engines. It is also important to redesign your site following current trends to improve your SEO.

Breaking down the revenue growth you would like to see in your practice is also very helpful. For instance, if you want to grow your practice by $240,000 in revenue for the year, you will need to acquire 240 new patients who bring in $1000 per year, which means you need 20 new extra patients every month. Therefore, considering the average cost of acquiring a new patient is $100 – $300, keep in mind you might need to spend $2000 to $6000 additionally. Spending a few hundred dollars every month to acquire 20 new patients would not be achievable by any marketing method, so remember that you need to spend money to get more. It is completely worth it in the long-term.

Dental Practices That Have Become Stagnant

To replace those patients who fall off, established practices need to attract new patients. How much should a dental practice spend on marketing in this case? The best option is to consider the revenue they would like to see and work on a budget of 5-10%. It might be necessary to increase your marketing budget to invest in a new website or a few other marketing assets. Keep in mind that underinvesting in marketing can result in shrinking or stagnation if your competition is marketing aggressively.

Best Strategies for Dental Patient Marketing

Although you have invested a lot to create a welcoming and professional environment for your new patients at your dental office, keep in mind that your website is your virtual dental office. This virtual office should be developed to attract and get new patients. So, how do you market a dental practice? The most effective marketing channels to acquire new patients are:

– Social media marketing

– SEO

– Pay-per-click advertising

– Mail campaign to a local area

– Targeted brand-building advertising in print media for high revenue practices

Depending on your practice revenue, growth goals, the competitiveness of your market, and your budget, your investments on the different marketing channels will vary. For instance, if your yearly practice revenue is $750,000 your marketing budget would be $3500 – $5000 per month. Therefore, your SEO and PPC budget could be $1200 each, while your social media, mail campaign, and printed ads budget could be $500 each.

Planned marketing is vital to acquire new patients and develop a thriving practice. Nevertheless, keep in mind that dental patient marketing should always remain humanized. What is a healthcare marketing strategy that helps patients while allows your practice to grow successfully? Take advantage of social media to market your practice while sharing high-quality information with your patients. It is a simple way to show them you care about their health while you remind the community you provide a service.

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How to Market a Dental Office

Create an Efficient Website for Your Practice

If you wonder “how can I grow my dental practice with a website?”, consider it is probably the first interaction your patient will have with you. Therefore, it must make an excellent first impression. Some basic features your dental practice website should include are be well-organized for easy navigation, look professional, and offer clear information about your services.

Focus on Local SEO

Although essential dental terms can help your business, local keywords will be what really let you get new clients. There is no point in a patient in Boston finding your site when you are located in Los Angeles. Using local SEO means to rank for terms like “Los Angeles dentist” instead of just “dentist”, which not only will help you be found by the audience who is exactly using these terms on Google, but you will also be found by those users looking for a local dentist “near me”.

Diversify Your Keywords

If you want your practice website to play a good role in the modern dentist marketing game and stand out and be easily found by search engines, you should get creative and use different keywords. An excellent dentist marketing strategy is to consider emergency keywords, such as “emergency broken tooth”, for instance. Think about all those specific terms your patients could search for. What is dental marketing without taking advantage of your professional knowledge?

Create a Community on Social Media

How do you market a dental practice on social media? Take advantage of the excellent way social media provides you with to communicate with your patients. You can build online communities by generating conversation, updating information, collecting reviews from patients, and much more. All this will give your patients a good first impression of your practice.

Offer Valuable Content

What is a healthcare marketing strategy that helps your patients at the same time? Using valuable content such as e-books or blog posts is a great way to bring visitors to your practice website, create relationships with them, and turn them into patients. A FAQ section or a blog on your website is a great way to add new content regularly and send more traffic to your site while your patients receive beneficial healthcare information.

Use Appointment Reminders

Sending all your patients friendly reminders of their appointments or reminders to schedule their appointments are ways to maintain relationships with them while making sure they get the care they need. These reminders can come in the form of texts, phone calls, or e-mails.

Create AdWords Campaigns

Users searching for certain keywords can find your practice if you use a pay-per-click platform to display your practice ad. Dental advertising is more effective when you use location-based keywords to boost the relevance of your ad placements. Use all the features of your dental practice that set you apart from the competition on your descriptions and headlines to highlight them.

Use Newsletters

Similarly, blog posts and newsletters are content marketing strategies; however, newsletters are delivered right to your patients’ inboxes, so instead of waiting for them to find you, you are who reaches them. But, how do you market a dental practice through newsletters effectively? Keep in mind your patients or potential patients will have the option of unsubscribing at hand, so make sure your share valuable information they want to see, to they feel happy to see it in their inbox.

Start Remarketing Campaigns

Reaching out to users you already have a relationship with and trying to get them to take a specific action is what we know as remarketing. For instance, you can get your current patients to book their six-month appointment. You can also use remarketing to promote new procedures or products to existing patients, such as a risk-free tooth whitening procedure.

Use Mail Offers

How much should a dental practice spend on marketing? Despite this strategy might be expensive, dental office marketing can draw upon mail to reach audience locally, which is exactly the main target audience for all dental practices. Besides sending postcards and discount flyers periodically to attract new patients to your dental office, you can also send brochures about high-end cosmetic procedures to high-income neighborhoods, where homeowners are more likely to be interested and able to afford them.

Dental Office Marketing

The previous dentist marketing strategies are quite effective to get more patients and boost your practice success. Remember to establish a dental practice marketing plan and focus on what you can offer that is unique and special to stand out.

Connect with your patients using the knowledge you have about them; use the keywords you think they will search for and attend the events where you think they will be. Combine different dental office marketing strategies and your appointments will increase noticeably.

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Modern Dental Marketing: What Is Dental Marketing Like These Days?

Nowadays, dental marketing involves employing digital tactics such as social media marketing and local SEO, while refining the traditional advertising strategies. Modern dental marketing allows your practice to reach a larger audience, reach those who need your services the most, and forge lasting relationships. This can be possible thanks to social media and online platforms and tools.

Dental Practice Marketing Evolution

While in the past an awareness campaign consisted of word-of-mouth, flyers, and newspaper ads, now modern dentist marketing awareness is now totally different. How do you market a dental practice these days? Dental marketing strategies have evolved with internet and smartphone usage; now including blog posts, social media pages, and research pieces. Not only do these strategies enable your practice to reach the right people, but they also provide a better return on investment (ROI).

Marketing for Dentists: Main Components

Similarly, digital marketing and an effective dental marketing strategy require a multi-channel approach that uses everything the web has to offer. Despite dental marketing is constantly evolving, there are some essential components.

– A practice website: What is dental marketing doing for your practice if you don’t have a website? A website is a place to offer information about your local practice and your services, host content, and send the right signals to Google for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. A practice website with the right features will help both your practice and potential patients.

– Social media: You can stay in contact with current and potential patients by developing and maintaining proper social media pages. You can answer their questions and provide them with a quick way to review you. Moreover, social media is a fantastic way to host contests or giveaways. Sharing pictures of your practice parties and events can make your patients feel closer to you and your staff.

– Sharing quality content: If you wonder “how can I grow my dental practice by just posting online?”, you should know it’s not only about posting. Quality is what really matters. Show your expertise by creating and sharing quality content on your practice’s site. Not only will this increase your chances of being found by potential patients, but it can also result in organic traffic growth.

– Using Google My Business (GMB): If you want to be found by potential patients locally, this is the right way to go. You can register your practice’s address, phone number, and additional details necessary to find you. When people search for dentists in the area, you and your competitors will come up with their Google rating, which is a useful guide for potential patients.

Benefits of Dental Office Marketing

– Practice awareness: Establishing a name for your practice through proper dental marketing is vital to engage the audience.

– Forge strong relationships: What is dental marketing’s mission in terms of humanizing your practice? By creating content that answers their questions, you can create meaningful relationships with your patients and potential patients and show them the top doctor you are. Through articles and blog posts you can share your expertise, gain more credibility, and increase your chances of new patients choosing your practice.

Dental Marketing and Advertising Trends

There are plenty of emerging trends coming for both dental advertising and dental marketing.

– Social media upcoming role: It is predicted by analysts that despite social media is already important for dental practice marketing, it will play a bigger role in the future. This is due to the younger generations being more social media savvy, making social media an effective way to get new patients.

– Video marketing growth: Digital marketing experts predict that users will look for informational videos on a variety of conditions, including meeting your staff and learning about your expertise, which will lead to a noticeable video marketing growth.

– Interactive tools and content introduction: If you wonder “what is a healthcare marketing strategy that is showing great growth?”. Well, more and more practices include interactive content and tools to help their visitors determine potential causes of pain, estimate costs, or get health-related recommendations.

Dental Practice Advertising

Despite the previous marketing strategies are mainly focused on organic marketing, dental ads should be included in your dental office marketing plan as well sometimes. With paid ads, you could immediately be found by potential patients. Some dental advertising options are Google ads, Facebook ads, community newsletters, and direct mail advertising.

– Google ads: Despite organic marketing efforts could get your site to the top Google’s search results, paid advertising is a way to ensure that anyone local to your area searching for your services will find your brand.

– Facebook ads: Paid search and paid social are different in several ways. While paid search works with search queries, Facebook ads work by targeting specific audiences with particular online behavior. Therefore, potential patients can become familiar with your practice’s brand and image, even if they’re not actively looking for a dentist.

– Community newsletters: Associating your practice with community publications and sponsoring community events will raise awareness, establish your place in the community, and reach local potential patients.

– Direct mail advertising: When it comes to dental marketing strategies, the mail is still a good tool. Acquiring patients who don’t own a smartphone or aren’t internet savvy is possible with dental brochures, newsletters, and postcards. How much should a dental practice spend on marketing? Well, despite this tactic could be expensive, it is effective for new practices that need an initial wave of patients that will eventually spread the word, submit online reviews, and engage on social media.

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