social media marketing? blogging? internet marketing? Facebook advertising? email marketing? content marketing?
You need to learn: Tracking & Data analysis basics!
For me this is a skill you HAVE TO LEARN it is not a nice to have, it's a MUST HAVE as a business owner or practice manager so that you can track all your digital dental marketing activities. How else are you going to make informed decisions about your marketing? Stop relying on others to tell you how your promotional activities are doing. Tracking is not as difficult as we are lead to believe – it is actually pretty simple to learn and understand if you focus on simple key performance indicators and do not get distracted by the non-essential items (impressions, likes, comments, shares, bounce rates etc).
Maybe you are in the 1% of dental practices that are tracking their dental marketing activities, that is everything! – [then this post is not for you, thanks for reading this far - you are probably better off spending your time reading this blog instead It’s all about the ads, no promotion! :)] but chances are that you are part of the majority of dental practices that are NOT tracking every link or online dental marketing activity.
Please start to track everything you do! At Yelloveddub we feel so strongly about this that we made it our WHY, OUR CAUSE, the very reason we are in business is to help all dental practices to start making informed decisions about their online marketing activities. You can only make informed decisions about your digital marketing if you track everything!
4 benefits of tracking dental marketing
- Eliminate guesswork – Tracking the dental marketing messages and activities you perform will inform your future marketing efforts. Data-driven marketing decisions will empower you and your dental practice marketing. No more guessing + no more assumptions = informed decisions
- Optimise marketing efforts – Once you start to review, measure and analyse you will begin to improve the effectiveness of you marketing efforts. You will be able identify which efforts have the greatest impact, and as such, know where you should spend your money and time going forward.
- Confidence to try everything once – No more agonising over marketing proposals or trying a new way of promotion. You will know which marketing cost levels work for your business based on your ability to have tracked, measured and calculated what it costs you to acquire a lead from your previous marketing activities. You will have learnt to ignore assumptions and rely on what the data tells you. With new marketing activities you start to: Test. Measure. Iterate. Rinse and repeat!
- Identify trends early - Knowing how your target audiences respond to your marketing messages and in which medium will give you insight into what is resonating with them and help you to spot opportunities for your dental practice to take advantage of – be it a new type of treatment introduced or seasonal trends which help you prepare and plan better for future promotions.
As I have mentioned before, tracking dental marketing activities is not difficult, really it isn't, and there are free tools you can use that make it even easier! (so no signing up to expensive web dashboards) Get on track and empower your marketing decisions today.
BOTTOM LINE:
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it
What to do about it?
If you're a dental practice and you want higher value customers in your market then get the online strategy that will get your ideal customers to find you, trust you and buy from you!
Brendon Macdonald
Brendon helps businesses' ideal customers find them, trust them and buy from them.
Founder, ideas guy and solution chaser. Passionate learner and brainstormer. Inspired by inbound and growth driven design. Brendon has extensive experience in digital marketing in the B2B & B2C dental sectors, having worked with over 100 dental practices and global companies alike.
He helps businesses' ideal customers find them, trust them and buy from them.