Configuring Your Successful Marketing Triangle
Inside Dental Technology delivers updates on digital workflows, materials, lab techniques, and innovation in dental technology through expert articles and videos.
September 1, 2014
Volume 5, Issue 9, September 2014
Page(s): p. 20-21
Marketing success is about achieving the outcome we want from our promotional efforts. In most cases, the goal is to attract more—perhaps better—dentist–clients. The harsh reality is that marketing success seldom just happens. Without exception, positive outcomes occur because of a combination of many factors working together to generate the desired results. Instead of considering all possible success factors, it is better and easier to focus on three categories: your own good stuff (YOGS), your marketing attitudes, and your actions. These three aspects define a marketing success triangle in which each element is interconnected. As a result, they coexist simultaneously and support each other.
This subcategory includes attributes such as your intellect, appearance, health, and physical energy. It contributes to your personal likeability, which, in turn, makes a significant contribution to your ability to attract like-minded, potentially ideal clients.
1. Your Intellectual Stuff: As dental laboratory professionals, our intellectual stuff sets us apart in the dental marketplace. Factors such as how we think, learn, understand, process, and retrieve information are critical to how we communicate our marketing messages.
Two more key criteria that must be met for dentists to make the decision on whether to engage your services are trustworthiness and competency. That’s why it’s effective to include client testimonials in your marketing materials, confirming that you possess and consistently apply these characteristics.
2. Your Emotional Stuff: Among other things, dentists want us to understand how they feel about a given situation and how much better they will be once the situation has been resolved to their satisfaction. While they may not want us to share their pain, they expect us to share the joy of their successful outcomes.
3. Your Social Stuff: Social stuff, or people skills, is all about how we relate to and interact with others, both individually and in groups. This includes our ability to understand, appreciate, and get along well with dentist–clients, their patients, and their staff.
4. Your Spiritual Stuff: The most intangible aspect of your own good stuff, this subcategory addresses the foundation of what you stand for and who you are. It reflects your purpose in life, determines your morality, and influences your moral choices. Simply, it is the single most important contributor to your trustworthiness.
5. Your Personal Brand: This is based on that unique combination of personality, skills, and other good things that make you who you are. Your personal brand is very valuable. However, it is only when you apply YOGS to your personal brand and to the entire marketing function that its true value is realized.
Attitudes and beliefs are not the same thing. When we believe in something, we are confident in its truth even if we cannot prove it. An attitude, on the other hand, reflects how we feel about something. Our attitudes about marketing influence our actions. Attitudes are the link between your own good stuff and your marketing actions. Positive outlooks lead to positive actions, which, in turn, lead to positive outcomes.
Here are some examples of personal characteristics that influence attitudes.
1. Change: We must be willing not only to accept change but also to respond quickly or risk being left behind by the competition and clients alike.
2. Collaboration: Few of us can market effectively on our own. For the best marketing results, collaboration with others such as your marketing dream team and your network of contacts is essential.
3. Concern for Others/Friendship: The more we give to dentist–clients and their patients, the more we get back from them, and we all win. The best marketing includes elements of friendship and friendliness.
4. Respect for Others/Serving Others: Ideally, dental laboratory professionals respect everyone with whom they and their marketing efforts come into contact. Like respect for others, serving others is what dental laboratory professionals are all about.
5. Openness: Openness is not only the best approach to marketing communications, but it is the only approach. Developing and maintaining a profile that includes any form of misrepresentation is not possible.
The final third of the Successful Marketing Triangle is the work done to attract more clients.
Three kinds of actions are:
1. Planning: This stage is focused on gathering the information necessary to set marketing goals and develop the strategies to achieve the desired results.
2. Doing: Once the marketing plan is developed, the next stage is implementation in order to derive the results that you want.
3. Evaluating: Evaluation is continuous, helping you improve or at least duplicate desirable results and reduce the occurrence of less satisfactory ones.
Even the best marketing success actions can be made more effective and efficient with the appropriate application of YOGS. How can you use these elements to improve your marketing actions?
1. Accurate and Simple: The more focused and accurate you can make your marketing communications, the higher the likelihood of attracting exactly the kind of clients you love to serve. Also, by keeping your actions simple, you can increase the accuracy of your marketing actions and communications.
2. Acting Smart: Working smart is working to achieve specific goals. If you are working smart instead of just working hard, you can expect much better results from your marketing actions.
3. Committed to Completion: Laboratory professionals who are committed to completing current actions are more likely to achieve their desired results from marketing actions than those who jump from one act to another.
4. Timely and Responsive: Success in any human endeavor is due in large part to being in the right place at the right time and responding appropriately to opportunities that arise.
5. Systemize and Integrate: Once marketing actions have been systemized, the easy next step is to integrate these different systems into a comprehensive marketing plan. If your personal skills include systemization and integration, applying these abilities to your marketing actions will position you to outperform the competition.
About the author
Nick Azar is a DAMAS consultant, business strategist, executive coach, and founder of Azar & Associates.
