How To Start 2019 With A Bang Part 5

This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will be sharing with you the fifth part of a series on how to start 2019 with a bang focusing on Internal Marketing. Find out more by watching the video now.

Today we’re going to look at how to start 2019 with a bang, so continuing our series on this. Importantly today, internal marketing. I want you to think about something.

Okay, internal marketing. The insight that I want to make here is there’s only three ways to grow a business. You can either get more clients, you can have them buying from you more often or the other one is called more spend.

The fact is, most of the time as a marketer when people are contacting me, they’re going Angus we want more clients. But the reality is that if you do well with your internal marketing, then you can have people who will spend with you more often and they can spend more.

In retail land, they talk about basket size. You know, each time they come there’s more in their basket.

This is why internal marketing is so important, because you don’t have to get more clients, but you can get people to spend with you more often and spend more.

So, in terms of internal marketing itself, one of the key things that we want to cover is about making your practice top of mind. Why is this so important?

The fact of the matter is for dentistry, most of your clients are going to be thinking about your practice maybe once or twice a year. And if you’re going to be able to get them to spend more often and more, then it’s not enough for them to be thinking about you once or twice a year.

The two best ways that I can think of to boost that top of mind, newsletter and email.

Now, producing a client centric newsletter is not too difficult to do as long as you realise that really people don’t care that much about dentistry. They only care what it means for them, which means if you say here’s our new piece of equipment or whatever, they might be moderately interested in that.

But if you can say “Here’s 3 Tips To Get Your Five Year Old To Brush Their Teeth More Regularly“, well then for a parent that’s a real issue so they care about it. So, that’s the first thing.

With emails, it’s basically a simpler version of the newsletter and with the newsletter try to really include in this stuff about the practice to get them to know, like and trust you. I know there are many types but maybe you can do profiles of the staff, social events, community things that you’re involved with.

Email is just a simpler version. You absolutely should be collecting emails from your clients. If you’re not, do start that and then they can always opt out if they don’t want it but you want to bring that top of mind. I don’t want them thinking about you once or twice a year. I want them thinking about you every month.

So, that’s one form of internal marketing. The other of internal marketing is at the practice. A really big focus here is what I’m calling your reception area. Now, reception area, client lounge, I don’t really like the term waiting room because nobody wants to wait.

There are three main things you can do there. One is banners, to do banners in your practice, have you ever thought about that? I just want to give you a sense of how simple that can be to do.

Did you know that you can get a full product banner from Office Works for $99? You need to come up with a simple design but as part of your internal marketing, why not have a kind of theme in your reception area?

Maybe change it once a quarter, once a month and let’s put out the banners about whitening or veneers or whatever it is. I mean, a footprint of a banner, it’s not big at all. You don’t need a lot of space, you get all that vertical messaging.

Posters would be a similar one. My advice to you in relation to posters if use frames, otherwise they can look tattered and messy, but if you’ve got a set of matching frames that you can just switch out what is in there, then that works well.

And then displays. I’ve seen practices, not so much in dentistry but in other industries where they’ll have a little table and they might have a bit of literature and a few other bits and pieces. You could really work out with your internal marketing, in February it’s going to be whitening and then you could have a few things that support that.

What else have we got here? Now, the other part is in relation to the team. You’re thinking well how do we get the team involved in internal marketing? And really your person can be part of internal marketing.

Now, I’ve given a couple of examples here. You could have t-shirts, you could have badges done. Real simple messages that cause people to ask a question. They see, let’s say you’re normally in scrubs or a collared shirt or whatever and one day a week you wear a t-shirt with a message Whitening Wow.

It doesn’t even need to be too salesy, it’s just a message.

We workshopped this at a course once and someone said, “What am I smiling about?” So it’s not salesy per se but it gets people asking the question. Nice t-shirt, what’s that about? Then you can say, well, at the moment we’ve got this promotion or a focus on whitening.

Badges, that’s about as simple and cheap as it gets. Again, same sort of thing, have a message there, you could have everybody wearing that for a month. I can tell you practices do this and this kind of focus can generate a nice increase in people spending more or spending more often.

The final point that I wanted to put there is part of your internal marketing is to partner with industry. If you have a favourite, whether it’s whitening or veneers, a favourite supplier in one of those areas, then partner with them. Ask them what kind of marketing materials they’ve got.

You could say, hey, we’d like to make a focus next month for your product. What can you provide us with?

Most industry will have a whole range of marketing materials that you can just use, so hope that’s helpful. How to start 2019 with a bang, that’s a bit of a look at internal marketing.