Last night was the video conference call for the guys on the business course following the 3rd module that they’ve attended this year. The subject was marketing.
Last week they attended two days of an intensive marketing workshop, were presented to by web designers, experts in inbound marketing and practices that have performed extraordinary marketing feats (not ours, someone else’s)
We tried to give a sense of where marketing was in dentistry from our perspective and how people might go about costing it and calculating return on investment and what’s important in their own environment.
At the hang out on the Zoom video platform last night though I got a sense of them being overwhelmed with the tasks in front of them. A few weeks ago we had done the same thing with financial management in practice and people had to write their own financial sheets. It’s tough this course and it asks a lot of people but it’s not supposed to be easy.
It made me think about what happened when at our place in 2013 we decided to re-brand the practice after I’d bought Campbell and Peace from my then partner Ian Peace. In April and May we decided to plan for an October re-brand and in what has now become a legendary meeting in my working life, I sat in Marie’s kitchen with her and Hayley and we wrote down what we wanted to do in branding and marketing. We weren’t in any way experts in this area, in fact we aren’t now, but we knew the message we wanted to get across and what we wanted it to look like. By the time we’d finished the list there were a lot of things on it.
There were things like uniforms, signs, stationery, practice information leaflets, patient leaflets, referring dentists leaflets, boxes for treatment plans, USB cards, coffee cups, advert, website, radio, TV – pretty much everything we could think of. What we then did was prioritise them into 5 different groups. We put a ‘1’ beside the most urgent down to a ‘5’ beside the least urgent and then scheduled the 1’s.
A couple of months ago we finalised our practice leaflet and that was one of the last things we did in a 4-year plan.
It’s very easy to suggest that all you have to do in times of being overwhelmed with any task is to sit down and schedule, to chunk it into small pieces and then knock off a piece at a time but there is no other way apart from utter collapse.
So it goes something like this… “This afternoon’s job is to schedule a marketing plan. We’re going to write it today and try to put some costs and timelines beside it then leave it for a week and come back to it. We’re going to re-visit it again and then sign it off”
It was alright for us because we started the project 4 years ago. Our difficulty now though is that we’ve reached the end of it and we have to reinvigorate it and change it again. We have to remember what it was like at the kitchen table because whatever happened at the table that day was hugely successful. For everybody else, they just have to find their own ‘kitchen table’.
Blog Post Number - 1281
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