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ePaper created 2017-03-17, 11:21:45 | version 1.38.0
| practice management marketing actions Template for end-of-treatment protocol So Mr Patient, now that we have arrived at the end of your course of treatment, I’d like to ask a couple of questions: · Are you happy with the clinical outcome? · Are you happy with the customer service that the team delivered? If so, I’d like to ask some favours: 1. We are growing the practice at the moment and we would like to see new patients and would love to see more people like you, because we like you! Would it be OK to give you three of my referral business cards to pass on to any family, friend or colleague who may be interested in visiting our practice? 2. We have noticed that online reviews are growing in importance and would like to invite you to submit a review of your experience on Google, Facebook or any other review site that you may be connected to. 3. We love to collect testimonials from happy pa- tients. They are great for our marketing and can give confidence to others who may be nerv- ous. We find that 90 % of those who do consent to a testimonial prefer a written commentary, as they are uncomfortable with a video camera recording, whereas 10 % are happy to be filmed and photographed. May I ask, are you a 90 %’er or a 10 %’er? 4. If a 90 %’er, I’d love to organise a written testi- monial from you. 5. If a 10 %’er, we would like to invite you to one of our quarterly video testimonial evenings here at the practice. Every three months, we set aside some time early evening and invite four to six of our 10 %’ers to come along for some light refresh- ments and to have their photograph taken profes- sionally (at our expense) and to be filmed for four minutes or so. The questions we ask on video are: How did you find us originally? What was it that had you looking? How was your customer service experience? What difference did the treatment make? It would be lovely to invite you to our next event. The dates are... the company intends to use cognitive computing to bring that data into a useable domain. With global health care data expected to grow by 99 per cent in the next 12 months, the search is on to find a new unified theory that will bring all of this information to the fingertips of government, business and in- dividuals. The question is, can we cope with this? In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Israeli au- thor Prof. Yuval Noah Harari visualises a completely connected world in which “Data-ism” dominates. There he writes: “Sapiens evolved in the savannah thousands of years ago and their algorithms are not built to handle 21st Century data flows. We might try to upgrade the human data-processing system, but this may not be enough. The Internet-of-all- Things may create such huge and rapid data flows that even upgraded human algorithms won’t han- dle it. When cars replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn’t upgrade horses—we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo Sapiens.” A rather grim and ominous suggestion perhaps, but by jolting our sensibilities, Harari makes us pause for thought. Let us narrow our field of vision from these impossible numbers and facts. Pundits suggest that you and I are interrupted by advertising and brand exposures 5,000 times in an average day and mentally register around 350 of these. We note 150, think briefly about 80 and pause at 12 to think about whether they are relevant to us at this time. Thus, the challenge facing the dental marketer is how to become one of 12 out of 5,000 at the right time, on the right day, for the right person. Big business has a simple solution to this problem; it is called big money. Whether it is a Super Bowl tel- evision commercial, a giant bill-board on a motor- way or, nowadays, massive expenditure on Internet visibility via paid media, those with the deepest pockets offering the best products and services are the winners in the race to attract that poverty of attention first mentioned in 1971. So where does this place the independently owned dental prac- tice? You are a mouse, wandering between the legs of a herd of bull elephants, all trumpeting their mat- ing call. No matter how loudly you squeak, at best your sound will be drowned out and at worst you may be trampled in the rush. I have watched the world of digital marketing in dentistry very carefully over the last five years and have reached some conclusions that are likely to land me in trouble with traditional digital marketers. However, I did not get where I am today without stepping on the fenced-off grass every now and then, running along the side of the swimming pool 08 CAD/CAM 1 2017