Marketing your practice to local businesses

OpenAmy D’Arcy Burt, regional support manager from Practice Plan, discusses how you can market your practice to local businesses to attract new patients through your door.

Within your local area there are quite a few opportunities to work with other local businesses for mutual benefit.

For example, if you have hairdressers, beauty salons, wedding or clothing boutiques in your area, you can look to build a relationship with these businesses, partnering up to create a local club feel for your patients and their customers, so that they are encouraged to use both sets of services.

All sounds simple, but when looking to explore this option, there are a few important things to consider to ensure that you get off on the right track.

Things to consider

Take the time to do your researchwho are your potential business partners? Is it the small businesses that are close to you or the larger corporate companies? As a team, consider creating a profile for each local company that you are going to approach. Gather as much information as you can to start to get more of an in-depth view as to how you can look to work together. Remember to focus on the benefits that you can offer to their employees as well as the benefits to their customers.

Building a campaign of activity – the idea is not to tackle this sporadically but to approach it over a set period of time, with planned activity to execute. This will allow you to measure your activity and, along the way, assess what is working and what isn’t. That way you will be in a better position to think of new ideas to replace those that aren’t quite working as well as you hoped.

Making first contact – remember, first impressions count, either look to nicely package up your offer and post it out to the business or arrange to meet up with them face to face. Your goal is to ensure that you are getting in front of the right contact so that you can focus your efforts and your proposals towards the decision maker.

The key to successful marketing to local businesses is the relationship aspect, so ensure that you nurture them and keep talking to them to see how you can best accommodate their employees and customer’s needs.

Ways to build your campain of activity

  • Your employee offer – if you can get the employees from other local businesses to experience your services then they’re going to talk to their customers about you, and in turn, become the best advocates for your practice. So have a think about the exclusive offers or deals you could offer to attract them to try out your practice
  • Your communication – ask the business you are talking to if there are any opportunities where you can communicate to their staff or customers. They may have a monthly newsletter that you can appear in, a staff notice board or offer for you to attend their next staff meeting. Have a good think about the ways in which you can support each other to grow your relationship and encourage referrals
  • Your social network – are there any opportunities to tie in your social activities? Invite local businesses to like your Facebook page and vice versa. Encourage each other’s customers to like, comment and share. Create content that is mixed so that there is a bit of variety in your messaging and offers
  • Your success stories – focus on the treatment you would like to grow and put together testimonials to showcase your success stories. Make sure that you explain how your treatment has really made a difference to that patient’s life – the idea is to inspire potential patients. Also think about creating an offer exclusively around that treatment, make it time bound and perhaps use a code so that you can really measure the results of your activity.

Practice Plan is a specialist provider of practice-branded patient membership plans and an increasingly significant source of wider business support services for dentistry. Over the years, it has helped thousands of dentists introduce membership plans to become profitable and sustainable businesses. Access to experienced regional support managers, customer service advisors and expert marketers as well as dental business consultants and speakers, means a practice will get the practical and strategic advice needed to help them achieve their unique goals.

If you’d like to know more about how Practice Plan could help you make a greater success of your practice, visit
www.practiceplan.co.uk/dental-plans or call 01691 684165.

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