Importance of Planning Your Marketing and Using a Marketing Calendar for Your Dental Practice Success
I got a question, “How can I come up with all these marketing ideas?”
By planning in advance, you won’t be forced to come up with ideas on the spot and that takes the pressure off you. Create a yearly marketing calendar to solve that frustration.
Do you know the biggest problem I see? People are not writing it down. And the rule saying goes, “if you don’t write it down, it doesn’t happen.”
It is good to get a dry erase year-at-a-glance calendar and put it up in your team area to make it your dental marketing calendar. We write it with a dry erase pen because you can easily change it whenever you need to especially when unexpected things happen.
Always plan it out. I would have a file folder that I would put ideas into that came up throughout the year. When we sat down to plan our yearly marketing, I had resources to help me decide what we should do and I wasn’t always starting with a blank slate.
For instance, just for these weekly marketing tip videos, we usually plan it out 2-3 months advance. We get the ideas from the questions you send in or issues I see and assign topics to each week. All our other marketing for business happens that that same way.
With that calendar, we have a sense of direction of what we have to do for that month.
For my dental practice, we had an theme idea for every month. The easiest way to do this is tie what month it is to the marketing.
So for instance, January was about New Year’s Resolution so we would have a “New You, New Year” marketing campaign and tie it to the benefits of a dental service that would achieve this. We had one calendar event and at least one piece of marketing going out each and every month.
That calendar kept reminding us what we needed to focus on during that month. We would have a meeting where we all brainstormed and planned what we are going to do throughout the year and decide on something that we would promote each month.
So plan ahead and make sure to calendar your plans and you’ll see more successful dental marketing results after that.