Big Picture Marketing™

We are excited to introduce the first video in a series that will help you best take advantage of your marketing opportunities. Please take a moment to view the video and see how you can start using Big Picture Marketing™ today to build your practice.

Daniel Pisek, President and Practice Marketing Coach of Full Contact Marketing, talks about the 10 BIG ideas to successfully market and move your practice forward.

Download and complete the Big Picture Marketing™ Scorecard

Why Flexibility Is Your Key to Personal Branding Success

By: Jim Joseph

If there’s one thing that marketers could be accused of, it’s too much planning. I know that sounds counter culture, but it’s true. If we are not careful, we could spend our mornings planning our afternoons and our afternoons planning our next mornings. We won’t get anything done as a result.

From a personal perspective, we can’t spend our entire life planning for the future, or we’ll never have enough time to enjoy what’s in front of us. We have to live in the moment and consider what’s happening around us in real-time.

Life isn't just about planning, so I don’t want you to get the wrong idea from this series of posts: personal branding isn't all about planning either; it’s about living.

We need to have the ability to react to what’s around us and be willing to change our minds. We have to be able to change our course, even at a moment’s notice.

The big brands do this all the time. When a new competitor enters the market, it may force a new strategy and approach to combat it. When forces in the economy affect demand, it may require a new product formulation or pricing scenario. When consumer sentiment takes a pop culture turn, it may require a new messaging dimension.

Every good marketer knows that a big part of branding is being flexible and responding to what’s happening in the marketplace. The same is true of your personal brand.

First of all, you could merely change your mind and not really like the direction your personal brand is taking. Life may not be turning out the way you expected and that’s OK. Embrace it, be flexible, and change your path.

You’re a brand, as we’ve been saying, so you are allowed to evolve. Just look at how brands like Banana Republic, Ford, and AT&T have evolved through the years! At many times during their brand life cycles, they hit a fork in the road and had to evolve to continue their success. You should do the same.

Every milestone event, like a divorce or career change, is a chance to repurpose your personal brand and update its course. Perhaps an opportunity comes along that you were not expecting, like a new job or potential partner. Be flexible with your personal plan to accept the challenge and recreate your brand.

The point here is to remain open, flexible and adaptive throughout the entire process. Having a plan in place doesn’t mean you simply put your head down and plow ahead regardless of what happens. You may need to make a change.

Grow your brand at the same time as you grow as an individual. Change with the times and adapt as our culture evolves. Enhance your brand with opportunities that come your way and seize the chance to move in multiple directions.

There is one big piece of advice, however, that you need to keep in mind along the way: hang on to the relationships you have developed at each crossroad. The people you meet not only make up your brand, they also carry you from milestone to milestone. I’m still connected with colleagues and friends from my very first job to my last one. These are the people who have made me the brand I am today.

Social media makes it so much easier to stay connected and share what’s going on with your brand. Keep these people in your life as you bring others in. The unique mix of relationships will propel you to the next milestone in your journey.

The folks you have known for years will give you the comfort and stability you need to keep progressing forward and the new people you meet along the way will force you to be flexible and change as required to accomplish your evolving goals.

Read more about the author: Jim Joseph

10 Steps To Creating A Mobile-Optimized Content Marketing Strategy

1. Embrace mobile-first as the new mindset

The paradigm shift started with design. The old approach to design for mobile was simple: create a website that worked for users on standard computers (e.g. for the “large screen”). Then get creative and find ways to scale it down for mobile devices. For sites that required more effort than simply being made smaller, designs could be simplified or made more “tappable” as an extension of the touch screen environment.

In recent months, many leading experts in the area of design have come out in opposition to this approach and suggested that good design in 2013 and 2014 is mobile-first. Half of all internet searches now take place on mobile devices, and that number is expected to rise. The implication is that the same kind of thinking needs to be applied to how we create content. Simply writing short and breaking your paragraphs into smaller chunks of text isn’t enough. Tricks for making longer content more digestible might work in the short-term, but thriving in the mobile world requires an increasingly forward-looking approach.

2. Acknowledge tension between long-form and short-form content

If you scan the help wanted ads for freelance bloggers, it’s easy to see the shift to long-form content. Ads that once asked for rates for 500 word articles no longer want submissions less than 1000 words. The assumption here is that longer content can go more in-depth, show more expertise and create more value for the reader.

It’s a natural outgrowth of Google algorithm updates such as Panda, which use content quality as a key metric for how sites rank. The end result should be something that’s read and shared more, ultimately making it more likely to perform well in search engine rankings.

The tension here is whether or not someone is likely to read a 1000 word treatise on your chosen subject on their smartphone. What’s worse for marketers is that the most truthful answer is “it depends.” It depends on your market, the subject, and the use context of their query. Is your 1000 word piece providing them step-by-step guidance for a problem that they need to solve right now?

Are you providing insight and entertainment so gripping that their entire bus commute slips by while they’re reading your material? Or is your subject matter best broken up into digestible bits that are more easily consumed on an as-needed basis? This leads to my next point.

3. Understand your audience’s mobile habits

It’s amazing how many conversations about mobile strategies and content marketing in general happen in the absence of audience data. Can you answer the following questions about your customers and prospects?

• What percentage of your audience accesses your site on mobile devices?
• Are they using tablets or smartphones?
• What activities are they doing on your site, independently and as compared with your overall traffic?
• What content are they accessing – by topic and by format?
• How much time do they spend on your site? An audience with an average of 10 minutes is different than an audience with an average of 90 seconds. It’s all about attention span.
• Do they consume visual content?
• What other sites, social media platforms, and activities are they doing on mobile?

The greater the depth in terms of your understanding of your audience’s mobile habits, the more compelling your content will be. But specifically, understanding the makeup of their mobile universe will help you create content that feels native – rather than retroactively shoehorned to fit in.

4. Focus on your headlines

Writing the kind of headline that grabs a reader’s attention, piques their interest, and refuses to let them go until they've devoured your content is just good copywriting.

But when writing for mobile users, it’s doubly important that your headline is:

• Highly relevant to your audience
• Answers the question “what’s in it for me” by showcasing the benefit to the reader
• Has a powerful, timely hook
• Evokes an image or an emotional response in the reader
• Loaded with proof elements

5. Find opportunities to work your lead-ins

Your article’s lead in, or what’s called lede in journalism, is the first paragraph or two. This is the hook, and what carries the reader through the journey of the broader piece. But the mobile environment is likely to shift the focus on these first, few crucial paragraphs.

Article summaries are becoming ever more important. It’s possible that these “executive briefings” are all that people will read if your content is accessed via mobile. Can you offer the kind of “quick hits in three bullets or less” summary that could give your key takeaways in a few minutes of casual, mobile browsing?

The natural fear is that if you give all the secrets away early, people won’t keep reading. But I’d argue the other perspective: If you deliver tremendous value early on, readers won’t be able to help but keep going. The readers with a screen that’s too small to read 2000 words on still get the value of a positive brand contact and are likely to come back for more.

6. Mix up your content lengths

Strategically, long and in-depth content is vital for SEO. But from a human readership perspective, there’s a big need for hard-hitting, insightful articles that deliver a ton of value in a compressed space. This means that your tactical approach to content generation will need to vary based on the channels that you’re targeting. One strategy is to find a site architecture that features short summaries, as outlined above.

Another is to consciously vary the lengths of the content that you create. Could your site have a version of your blog that mobile readers land on, that highlights short summaries and offers the chance to click over to longer articles? Can you offer two versions of every piece – the long version and the quick hits? Can you vary content on your blog day by day, providing both in-depth tutorials and shorter pieces?

7. Don’t overlook the power of formatting

Reformatting existing content isn’t enough (although you should be doing this). But good mobile formatting should become an essential part of your mobile-first content strategy. You want to be at the forefront of establishing a new model of writing for the web. Mobile-friendly content development is about:

• Getting to the point, quickly and efficiently
• Thinking about a layout that integrates tappable elements that make calls to action easy to take
• Big fonts that are easy to read
• Colors that pop
• Visual elements – like visual content and videos – wherever possible
• Text layouts that are clean and streamlined when you’re dealing with written content

If you've got a website or branding style guide, it may be time to revisit it and revise it to reflect the minimum standards that will help mobile content thrive.

8. Consider the reading level

There’s an old maxim in the newspaper industry that you should write to an eighth grade level. To some, that sounds condescending. But it’s actually congruent with one of the biggest takeaways of any copywriting or direct marketing course: write the way you speak.

In other words, don’t make it harder to read your writing (or listen to your podcast or watch your video) by using it as a place to show off your vocabulary. To a certain extent, you need to know your audience. A blog post targeting plumbers and targeting Ph.Ds. in economics have different universes of potential vocabularies that seem “mundane.” Content for plumbers can refer to parts that the average reader has never heard about; economists will take certain academic concepts for granted. But both have a threshold of what’s easy to get through and acceptable in normal conversation. Remember that this is even more important when you’re dealing with mobile content.

The more general your audience, the better off you are writing to that 8th grade ideal. Get to the point. Be succinct, be clear, and be efficient with your words.

One strategy that can help you do that is to use a Fleisch-Kincaid readability score. The Fleisch-Kincaid readability score gives you a grade level associated with what you write. It’s built right into Microsoft Word’s review feature, and it’s a great way to do a gut check on what you’re writing. It looks at word length, sentence length, and overall construction. If the score is higher than you’d like, take a look and see if it’s possible to reduce the number by playing with these elements.

9. Introduce video and visual content

Videos, infographics, images, and other visual content is becoming increasingly important. If you've shied away from introducing this to your content strategy, moving in the direction of mobile-first is a great time to do so.

Taking a mobile-first approach to video requires paying close attention to the rise of micro-video. Services like Vine, with its six second limit, are pushing the envelope in terms of how brands convey their message. It’s not always practical to convey a message in six seconds, but look at video and visual content through the same lens as text: can this be shorter, tighter or more efficient with my viewer’s time?

10. Use secondary screens

When in doubt, defer secondary content to another screen. If it’s not absolutely essential to the point that you’re making on that page, consider a link instead of embedding it into your content. This is counter-intuitive to a world of content creators that embed video, create pop-up image galleries, and have busy sidebars of products and services. Instead, look for opportunities to defer unnecessary (or less necessary) content and allow your visitors to choose their own adventure as it were. The more streamlined your overall site and content presentation, the better.

Conclusion

Creating a mobile content strategy for your business has many components. If you’re just embarking down that road or you’re revisiting your progress, I’d encourage you to find ways to create for mobile and then “scale up.” Not only will your workload be reduced further than doing it the other way around, but you’ll be setting up a content creation process that’s sustainable into the future.

Read more about the author, Jayson DeMers

Your Brand Is A Valuable Asset. Manage It Well. (Part 2)

Your brand is an important asset. When you buy a new dental chair, the day after this hard asset is installed into your office it begins to depreciate. When you invest in a professional approach to branding and nurture the brand with good marketing, you have an asset that will appreciate and play a very significant part in the overall success of your practice during its lifetime. Getting your practice started. With many doctors that I meet, there are infinite ideas for how they want to launch their new practice. While it’s great to have ideas, investing time and money on ideas that establish your brand to make a good first impression and immediate emotional response to connect with potential new customers is the first order of business. After all, when starting a new practice your business goals are very simple: Attract the right kind of new patients. To do this you need to understand what type of practice you want to be and the type of clients that you want to have in your practice. Think of your brand, and the marketing that follows, as a bridge that connects your practice to this clientele. The clearer your vision, the stronger your brand will be.

Your brand needs to flow throughout the practice. The colours on the walls and style of uniforms must reflect that personality. The look needs to be consistent from the sign out front to the furniture in the waiting room and treatment rooms. Growing your practice. With a strong brand in place, you have a head start with your marketing. Your marketing will be more effective if people can immediately associate your brand with something. If we placed the Apple logo on a coffee cup, people would automatically expect great quality and be prepared to pay a little bit more for it. Leverage the equity that you have established with your brand to move your practice forward. Be bold. Along with direct marketing, look for opportunities to team your brand with other like-minded brands in the community.

Branding is also a great motivator for your staff. When a team is on board with a common goal, they will represent and reinforce the values of your brand from the greeting on the phone to their interaction with patients in the office.

Office staff may change, hygienists may come and go, and you may want to bring on associates, but the look and feel of the practice will stay the same and that goes a long way to ensuring the loyalty of your clientele.

Also, customer loyalty comes from consistently delivering on the promise of your brand as well as keeping current. Styles change, but with an established brand you don’t have to reinvent yourself all the time. Starbucks recently freshened up their logo, but it was just a tweak. The logo is still instantly recognizable. Over time you can choose to update your logo or refresh the office interior while still keeping your brand association intact. Realizing your optimal practice sale price. When the time comes to sell Cobblestone Family Dentistry, having that brand is like staging a home for sale. It makes it easier for a potential buyers to see themselves owning the practice because they see the practice’s personality, not yours. It’s not only an easier transition for the new dentist, but for the patients and staff as well. It will still be the familiar Cobblestone Family Dentistry.

Brand recognition doesn’t happen overnight though. It’s best to be planning the sale of your practice in advance. An investment of $10,000.00 for a complete professional branding package, as well as some good marketing to build this brand in your office and out in the community, at least three years before listing the practice will deliver a strong return. I’ve discussed this thinking with some of Canada’s leading practice brokers and they agree that well branded practices are better positioned to sell more easily and for more money than a poorly branded or unbranded practice. Your brand is your lifeblood. Your practice is a business with a life and your brand is the blood that pumps through it, keeping it strong. In order to keep that business healthy, you have to manage your marketing well -- and that starts with your brand.

Bottom Line: The article outlines the importance of marketing and your brand name to the health of your practice.

Your Brand Is A Valuable Asset. Manage It Well. (Part 1)

by: Dan Pisek, Practice Marketing Coach

It’s 10 a.m. and you are craving a cup of coffee. Right across the street all lined up in a row are Tim Horton’s, Starbucks and McDonald’s. Which do you choose and for what reason?

I have presented many seminars and workshops where I start with this coffee choice scenario. The Tim Horton’s devotees choose to go there because they associate the brand with convenience and serving a good cup of coffee at a fair price. For the Starbucks crowd, they are fine with paying a little more for a premium cup of coffee and an experience which helps them boost their own image just by carrying the white and green cup around town. McDonald’s is usually the loser in my audience opinion poll. People comment on how it is a very good cup of coffee, convenient to get, and how you can’t beat the price… especially when it’s free. But even with the McCafe experience, people still associate McDonald’s with “would you like fries with that?” It’s a prime example of the power of branding and how it can really support or work against your business goals.

While the coffee business these days is very competitive, so is the world of dentistry. Let’s face it, in most places you don’t have to look too hard to find a dental office. Dr. John Doe DDS, Main Street Family Dental, and Dentistry on Main are there in a row competing for your attention. Now, more and more dentists are realizing that an effectively branded practice is a key component to their success when getting started with a new office, growing their existing practices or getting their practices ready to deliver a larger sale price when it comes time to retire. What is a brand? It’s the personality your practice would have if it were a human being. It’s what people think of when they hear your practice name or see your logo. In the consumer’s eye, the expectation is for you to provide great care on the clinical side of things. Much of it is about the personality of your practice. Do you project the image of a progressive-minded practice and what will you provide by way of patient experience? Effective branding of your practice is about effectively communicating who you are as a practice to set yourself apart from the competition. Ignite your practice brand. Just like you want a strong foundation to build your home on, you want a strong foundation to build your marketing on. After all, everything that you do to market your practice is an extension of your brand. There are three key areas to consider to effectively brand your practice:

1. Your name. Just using your name to identify your practice does very little to tell people anything about what you are as a practice, where you are located, the type of dentistry you provide or anything about the patient experience that they can expect. Cobblestone Family Dentistry immediately speaks to the young families living in the Cobblestone Plaza neighborhood  Also, today communities comprise a mixed cultural diversity and keeping last names out of the practice name also keep the practice culturally neutral. A depersonalized practice is also better positioned for growth, especially when hiring associates. Patients make an appointment to see one of the great dentists at Cobblestone Family Dentistry and don’t feel short-changed that they aren’t seeing the dentist whose name is on the door.

2. Your logo. It’s important to have the right look for how your practice name is presented. Just like the Apple or the Nike swoosh, you want a logo that your customers will associate immediately with your practice and be part of the emotional reaction to the brand.

3. Your website. Nowadays, so many buying decisions are made on the Internet, including healthcare choices. Your brand must translate well to your website. Image is everything here. Even if you start off with a very simple splash-page, be sure that it is in tune with your brand. You can always add to the website as the practice grows.

Continue Reading: Your Brand Is A Valuable Asset. Manage It Well. (Part 2)

Success Begins By Taking Ownership Of Your Situation (Part 2)

A tale of two dentists

Six months ago, Dr. M decided to buy his first dental practice. He purchased his first new practice from Dr. R. Upon taking ownership of his new practice, Dr. M decided to take a very conservative approach with his transitioning plan. While he was the new face working in the practice, he did nothing else by way of making changes or taking ownership.

Dr. M called me recently to explain his situation in more detail, and let’s just say that his situation was not a good one. First of all, he paid a premium purchase price for this practice. He explained that currently, patients were coming in for their appointments and wanted to deal only with Dr. R. Dr. M was learning that Dr. R had a very unique way of running his practice, a unique style in managing his patient relationships, and a very “patient friendly” way of handling the financial side of his patient accounts.

Furthermore, the practice team that Dr. M inherited were all extremely loyal to Dr. R. Things were great for the team under Dr. R: premium wages, extra paid holidays, and regular trips away for training sessions. Having no relationship with his team to that point, they had high expectations of working standards and he had a serious financial obligation to Dr. R.

Dr. M was between a rock and a hard place. To add one more piece to this crisis, Dr. R had informed Dr. M that he was going to stop working at the practice in four months. With all of this, Dr. M had to get going with a change in approach to managing his practice. If he had any chance of realizing the type of success that he envisioned when he purchased this practice, he needed to disrupt the status quo and change the game to suit himself.

Conversely, Dr. E also purchased her first new practice last fall from Dr. S. This was a practice in a smaller town, where the selling dentist was very well known and well liked by his existing patient file and office team. For Dr. E, there was a lot to like about this practice. She had a vision for this perfect practice and her ideal lifestyle - and this practice purchase worked on all counts.

After the sale was official, Dr. E immediately went to work in making this practice “her” practice. Being very charismatic and personable herself, she made it her mission to personally meet everyone associated with the dental practice. While Dr. S was still working in the practice as an associate on a twelve month contract, she first engaged her team with her vision for the practice. Then she went about meeting every one of her patients that came in each day, with a smile and a warm hello.

On the strategic side of things, Dr. E understood the importance of having a professional marketing approach to support her in making this “her” practice. There were a lot of smart things happening at this dental office: the updating of their brand identity and office decor, the implementation of the first website the practice ever had, an introduction to an expanded scope of services, and continually communicating the respect that she had for Dr. S and her team. Dr. E wanted to ensure that the right message was getting out to her patients - the right way.

Last week, during my Marketing Team Rally Session with her and her team, it was clear to me that everyone was on board with Dr. E and her new dental practice.

The next step was to begin planning our strategy for how we would begin building awareness around her dental practice and herself in the local community. It was time to shift gears with our marketing into “new patient acquisition” mode.

To effectively transition a practice, your first six months of activity are very important to making the right first impression to everyone involved and to set yourself up for the success that you desire. Make sure that your first marketing priorities focus on brand development and existing patient retention. Once the house is in order and marketing foundation is in place, you can then begin actively growing your practice through external marketing channels and with the referrals of “your patient file”.

Bottom Line: This article uses a case study approach to explain the need for a professional marketing plan when transitioning a dental practice.

Success Begins By Taking Ownership Of Your Situation (Part 1)

Whatever the situation with your practice purchase, you can turn the corner more effectively if you immediately take “ownership” of your new business with a professional marketing approach – one that brings the doctor, the practice team, and the patient file, together as one. 

by: Daniel Pisek, Practice Marketing Coach

More and more young dentists today are starting their businesses by purchasing an existing practice -rather than building from scratch. This is especially true in more established cities, where many dental offices exist and competition is fierce. With dentistry becoming more competitive every day, dentists are seeing more value in getting a head start by purchasing patient files, rather than starting at ground zero. For them, the future business model is in “Transitioning A Practice”.

For every doctor looking to purchase an existing practice, there are many factors that influence a buying decision. While the number one factor in evaluating a practice is always the number and quality of the charts, there are also many other variables that need to be considered. For example, one must take into account practice location, storefront visibility, local community demographics, current branding identity, team dynamic, and marketing strategy. These variables need to be considered to really understand the current situation and business potential of that practice.

Having worked with many dentists to successfully transition their new practices, I will say that every case is unique - with its own storyline and cast of characters. Consider the associate dentist taking ownership of the practice after the principal dentist has passed away. Or the purchasing doctor who had a verbal commitment from the selling doctor to stay on for six to twelve months, only to have the selling doctor vanish forever after the sales contracts were signed. And the dentist who bought the state of the art practice in a great storefront location, but then realized that the practice had been terribly managed and patients were unhappy with inconsistent office hours and an unprofessional approach.

Whatever the situation with your practice purchase, you can turn the corner more effectively if you immediately take “ownership” of your new business with a professional marketing approach – one that brings the doctor, the practice team, and the patient file, together as one.


Continue Reading: Success Begins By Taking Ownership Of Your Situation (Part 2)