BLOG: Tips for writing your 2021 premium services marketing plan
Our concept with this blog is “tiny is mighty” — shout out to André Chaperon, marketing guru — ie, small changes in the way you do things can be leveraged into major results.
But when it comes to marketing planning, most of us don’t give it much thought. It’s easier to just spitball a budget and delegate it to your staff.
Unfortunately, being lazy about it can leave a lot of money on the table or, worse, flush a lot of money down the toilet. Even when we do think about it, our eyes typically glaze over at the thought of spending thousands of dollars on billboards and television commercials.
Fail to plan = plan to fail
OK, so where to start, then? You’ve probably heard the saying attributed to Ben Franklin, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. And worse, if you don’t define what success or failure is for your practice, you are likely to just “successfully” spend your budget for the year and repeat it the following year and so on, with no clear idea if what you are doing is effective.
If your practice is already working on a marketing plan for 2021, check out part 2 in my next post. If the concept of a marketing plan sounds daunting, now is the time to get with a plan.
Short, sweet, usable marketing plan breakdown
The plan consists of:
1. Setting service line revenue goals (premium cataract, LASIK, aesthetics, optical, etc).
2. Allocating budgets at the service line level (click here to see worksheet for example).
3. Picking the tactical campaigns to achieve those revenue goals.
4. Standing up the team — people, process and technology — to get those tactics and campaigns running (and keep them running if you intend to keep running them).
5. Defining the metrics and methods for measuring success.
So, the goals drive the budgeting, the budget allocations are spread across tactical campaign types, the tactics beget the metrics, and the metrics help us decide what is working and what is not (and what we should continue to invest in).
OK, you may ask, but what about branding? Yes, branding is important, especially for new or less mature practices, and we will address this more in later posts. But we find that well-established practices tend to overspend on branding to the detriment of those service lines that will provide more of a return on investment of marketing dollars.
In part 2, we will introduce a strategy called the 7 Rs. Tactics like TV, advertising and social marketing need a set of strategies to see the results you believe will be instrumental in attaining your revenue goal overall and within each premium service line. Also in part 2, we will show you a revised budget worksheet sample that maps strategies, tactics and dollars to service line marketing plans.
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