How To Start 2019 With A Bang Part 2
This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will share with you the second part of a series on how to start 2019 with a bang. Find out more by watching the video now.
Now the topic for today is part of a series, How to Start 2019 With A Bang! Has 2019 started a bang for you? I hope it has.
As a reminder last week we looked at, the first thing to do is run some reports, understand what 2018 was like for you in terms of new patient numbers and new patient sources. And doing that alone will cause you to probably make some changes.
You might find that some patient sources didn’t work very well so now maybe you need to kill those off. Maybe there’s new things you need to add.
We’re going to spend a whole series on this. There’s a lot of great content. If you haven’t already like Dental Profit System on Facebook, then you’ll make sure that you’re always getting this content.
Now once you’ve figured out where your patient numbers are coming from, what the numbers are like, what I would be aspiring to is this term here. It’s a term that I’ve come up with. My aspiration. My aspiration for you in your business is that you have what I call local omni presence.
I want you to be basically everywhere so that when people are thinking about a dentist, they see you all over the place and they go, “Well I better give that dentist call because they’re the right ones.”
At least some of the elements of what I call omni presence, omni presence is like everywhere. The first would be your online presence. Now that wouldn’t be a big surprise but what are some of the things that you could think about there?
You could have a look at your Google and we had a whole session on that last year. You could go back and look at that one.
- Your Google listing
- The map
- What are your reviews like
- Your website, has it been updated in the last few years
There’s a whole range of stuff you can do with that. And the idea is to have a look at that through the eyes of the new patient. Imagine that you’ve never seen it before. What do you notice? We’ve literally just done that with my own team and discovered a bunch of things I had never have thought of. That would be the first thing.
The second thing’s around social media and in terms of social media, the easiest and best thing for most practices to achieve through social media is about boosting your know, like and trust. Yes, you can use social media for direct marketing, having an offer and bringing people in but what I find works even better is helping people know you.
If you imagine someone who doesn’t know you at all, use your social media to get them from “don’t know you at all” to “starting to get to know you”, then “starting to like you”, then “starting to trust you”, and then picking up the phone. And the strongest play in this space by miles, is video. Making videos, do a tour of the practice, introduce yourself.
Just so that people know you as people rather than being this kind of faceless business.
Next one is internal marketing. Here’s a reality. How often are your clients thinking about your business? And the answer is really if ever, maybe once or twice a year. What can you do in your internal marketing to take these people from thinking about you once or twice a year to thinking about you once a month.
- Could you do a newsletter?
- Could you do an email?
- What are you doing with your reception area?
People will inevitably spend some time sitting not too long but do you refresh it every month, every quarter? What’s some stuff you could do internally to shine the light on different things at different times of the year?
What about business partnerships? I’ve got an insight for you. Nearby you now, I guarantee it, is a local non-competing business that has already got a trusting relationship with your ideal clients. Ever thought about that?
There’s already a business near you whose non-competing, they’re not a dentist and they’ve already got that trust, which is what you’re desiring to get with potential patients. If you could work with them and partner. This could be other businesses, this could be community organisations, it could be charity. The better you can do together, the better you can grow.
Now, over the coming weeks I’m going to go into these in more detail but that’s just a handful of things you could do to be boosting your local omni presence as I like to call it.
Finally, another way to start the year with a bang is to get some help. One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve got older, as I’ve done a lot more personal development, is you’ve got to play to your strengths. My business is a disaster when it’s me trying to do everything.
More and more I’ve brought on other people, I delegate out my weaknesses and again, allow me to do the things I’m best at. Now the question is, is that what you’re doing with your business or are you trying to be coach and the team at the same time.
Getting help can be really helpful.
All right, well hope that makes sense. If we can help in any way, then by all means get in touch.