Top Ten Ways to Destroy your Practice Promotion

We're not really sure who invented the "Top 10" format of communication. It could have been
David Letterman, maybe it was ESPN - who knows. But dentists seem to like this format, so we
decided to use the popularity to help our News You Can Use readers.

Top Ten Ways to Destroy your Practice Promotion

Last Edition we talked about #10 - no budget.

This edition we are going to talk about #09: Improper budget allocation

Budget allocation ties directly in with establishing a reasonable and responsible annual promotion budget.Allocating the budget to certain projects is the next logical step. Once you have a budget calculated to the promotion of your dental practice, what are you going to do with those dollars?

Unfortunately, that decision is usually dictated by which ad rep happens to call the office or take you outto lunch! It might be the Yellow Page rep, the local newspaper sales rep or even a radio station rep. There isn't enough room in this News You Can Use edition to completely discuss proper budget allocation. In general though, you start with internal projects, a solid website/internet presence, targeted external mail projects, and response tracking on at least your mail campaign. These three projects (if done properly) represent the least risk to 95% of the dentists in the country. This is where you start using your annual budget - on the mediums that statistically represent the least risk to your budget.

Over time, the call tracking will tell you how they are performing. You will visually see (and can listen in on the conversations if you want to), the impact of your marketing dollars at work. As long as things are progressing as planned, you are well on your way toward a consistently producing promotion foundation for your dental practice.

As the practice grows, revenues will rise (assuming you are attracting the right patients), and there will be more room in your annual budget. Assuming your foundation is producing, you then allocate some of the budget into the print media and ultimately mass media (radio, TV, billboards, etc). It is almost never a good idea "jump around" or allocate a large percentage of your budget in a mass media if you haven't already been successful generating new patients from the prerequisite mediums. If your dental practice is a small solo practice, expanding into alternate mediums might take more than a year or two. OK, that's fine. As long as the foundation is producing a positive result and revenues are moving forward, do not expand beyond your top budget range. Of course, there are exceptions to this. You may be more risk tolerant than most dentists, or, you might have an aggressive growth strategy. You might be in an incredibly underserved area and want to take advantage of the opportunity before ten other dentists open up their practices in the area. But for most of you, stay within budget and allocate that budget in a least risk first order.

In the next installment of News You Can Use, we will discuss #08 in our Top Ten Ways to Destroy your Practice Promotion. Number eight is, Not Understanding the Dental Consumer Market.

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