As a practice owner, it’s important to view marketing as an investment not a cost.
For every £1 you put in, you want to receive a greater amount back in sales.
But in order to do this, you need to understand which of your marketing activities are performing well and generating sales for you, and which ones aren’t.
You see, the mistake that most practice owners make when trying out different marketing strategies, is that they don’t have a system for doing this.
They dip their toes in the water with a number of different marketing strategies, without properly measuring the results that each one gets.
And what this ultimately means is that they’re throwing money at the wall and hoping that it sticks.
So, what can you do to focus your efforts on what’s working and maximise the returns on your marketing investment?
The answer is to create a tactical marketing plan.
A tactical marketing plan is a simple spreadsheet that allows you to plan, track and measure your marketing activities so that you can identify what’s working and what’s not.
Here’s how it works…
Start by listing all of your marketing activities each on a separate row.
Then for each activity, you are going to be targeting/measuring 3 KPI’s:
- Number of leads generated
- Cost of leads generated
- Annual £ value of leads signed up
For each of the above KPI’s, you want to have a target number, and an actual number.
So, at the beginning of each month, you will set your target KPIs for number of leads generated, cost of leads generated (budget), and the annual £ value of leads signed up for each of your marketing activities.
And then at the end of each month, you will insert your actual KPI’s.
Over time, as you gather data and continuously update your tactical marketing plan, you’ll begin to learn which activities are performing really well, and which one’s aren’t.
For example, you might be running a telemarketing campaign which is generating 5 leads a month for your practice, and you might be running some PPC ads on Facebook which are generating 2 leads a month.
On the face of it, it would seem like the telemarketing campaign is the more successful activity. But when you look at the annual £ value of leads signed up, the telemarketing campaign has added £30,000 in annual revenue and the PPC ads have added £50,000 in annual revenue.
What you can see here is that the quality of leads from your FB ads are better than your telemarketing.
This is just one example of the types of results you can find from having a tactical marketing plan that you otherwise wouldn’t have known.
Applying the pareto principle
Once you have enough data on your tactical marketing plan, you can apply the pareto principle to further maximise the results that you get.
The pareto principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of activities.
Look at which 20% of activities are giving you 80% of your results on your tactical marketing plan – and invest the remainder of your marketing budget into these activities to maximise the results that you get from them and multiply your ROI.