If you handle marketing for a large dental or medical practice group, you may be familiar with this scenario...
You’re a marketing executive responsible for the marketing for not just one, but tens or even hundreds of office locations that operate under your practice group. You may be working with a small team, or you may be working alone.
Regardless of the team of support you have, you’re the one running the show, and it’s easy to get stretched thin as your responsibilities stack higher and higher — especially as your brand continues to add new locations.
You become bogged down with day-to-day tasks like:
- Fixing issues on a number of different websites or web pages
- Responding to online comments and mentions directed at your brand or locations
- Managing and tracking live marketing and advertising campaigns
- Addressing marketing questions from your practice group members
- Handling any PR-related need that arises for your brand, both planned and unplanned
…and the list goes on.
As your brand grows, so does your daily to-do list, making it more and more challenging to focus on your highest-priority projects and long-term goals.
In situations like these, it’s the perfect time to start thinking about how you can maximize the efficiency of your marketing team, which may open the conversation of outsourcing some of your marketing. There are a number of different circumstances in which this may be the best option for your medical practice group.
5 situations where it may be wise to consider outsourcing
- When you’re spending too much time on marketing execution and not enough time on marketing strategy
As a marketing executive or director, your time is not best spent writing and uploading content to web pages, setting up Google Ads campaigns, or spending hours sifting through a number of different spreadsheets or online platforms to figure out how your latest campaign performed. As the marketing leader for your organization, it’s much more valuable for you to spend your time driving the larger vision, strategy, and overall direction for the story and message that your brand needs to tell in order to attract more patients.
If the day-to-day logistics of marketing execution and management is getting in the way of planning for your long-term goals and working on more strategic initiatives, then that’s a good sign that you need to bring on more help — and outsourcing is a great way to do that without the added cost and time investments that come with hiring full-time staff.
- When you want to expand into marketing strategies that are outside your wheelhouse
As your practice group becomes larger, your marketing needs will inevitably become more complex. You may find that there is a new need to expand your marketing efforts to new tactics or channels. For example, you may find that you’re ready to dive deeper into areas that fall outside your realm of expertise, such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media advertising, or video marketing. When these needs arise, you require additional resources to fill these gaps for your team. Partnering with a full-service marketing agency can be extremely valuable, as this gives you access to experts from a variety of marketing disciplines through a single partnership.
- When you’re frequently tasked with major fluctuations in your workload
Even if you feel your team is generally able to handle your organization’s marketing needs without outside help, you should consider the impact of last-minute, urgent projects that get thrown on your plate and how that affects the overall workflow of your team. As a marketer for a large practice group, this type of work environment is to be expected — so, while you never know exactly when and how these fluctuations will occur, you can still plan ahead by giving your team the built-in bandwidth it needs. By having a marketing company available to support your team, you can ensure that marketing efforts like your website management, social media marketing, blog production, and ad campaigns don’t have to be interrupted due to shifting priorities.
- When your brand is outgrowing your marketing technology
You may have adopted marketing tools that worked for your brand initially — but as your practice group grows and (like we mentioned before), your marketing needs become increasingly complex, you could end up outgrowing your marketing solutions. For example, you may have a platform that wasn’t built to support the number of locations your organization now includes, making it difficult to track and analyze your data across your entire practice group (which ultimately leads to data inconsistencies). When this happens, it’s time to look for a marketing partner that has the resources to invest in state-of-the-art marketing technology that is better equipped to meet your organization’s needs and has the ability to scale with your growth. A partnership like this not only gives you access to more advanced tech, but it also usually comes with a layer of support for leveraging that technology in the best way possible.
- When you don’t want to commit to the cost and time investment of hiring and training full-time employees
Costs of growing your team in-house can add up quickly between recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, salary, and benefits — and if there’s turnover, your investment is wasted and you start all over again with replacement costs. Research shows that it costs employers 33% of a worker’s annual salary to replace an employee who leaves, which is $15,000 to replace someone earning the median salary of $45,000 a year. Depending on the specific needs of your practice group, you may find it more cost-effective to work with a company that can give you access to a team of marketing experts who you do not have to train or replace, and who are available at a more fixed cost.
Tips for finding the right marketing partner
When hiring a marketing partner for your practice group, here are a few things to look for. Find a company that…
- Offers a wide variety of the services you need under one roof
By working with a multi-solution provider, you save time by not having to manage numerous vendors. Additionally, your marketing partner is also able to deliver a more cohesive strategy, ensuring that all the moving pieces of your marketing plan are properly aligned with each other and with your brand.
- Has expertise serving multi-location medical brands like yours
Multi-location brands cannot be marketed the same as small, independent businesses. Therefore, it’s important to find a marketing partner who understands what it takes to support organizations that have tens or hundreds of locations. Your partner should also understand the nuances of marketing for the medical industry, and they should have a proven track record for helping clients succeed within this space.
- Is a leader in marketing technology
The digital landscape is constantly evolving, making it easy for your marketing technology to become outdated. When choosing a marketing partner for your practice group, consider whether their technology is robust enough to support organization of your size (or the size you want to reach in the future), allowing for streamlined data reporting and analysis across your brand. You should also ensure that their technology is equipped with modern-day capabilities that can keep your practice group competitive, such as the ability to leverage machine learning for smarter insights about your campaign performance in real time.
If you want to learn more about how your practice group could benefit from marketing support, speak to a member of our team at Scorpion.
