Multi-touch Direct Mail Campaigns To Get A Better Response

I often hear from dental lab industry marketers that they want to “test direct mail marketing” and my first response is to recommend multi-touch direct mail campaigns.

What surprises me is how often marketers that are new to direct mail are thinking they’ll send out a single touch of say, 500 pieces to evaluate “whether direct mail works” for them. If it works, great. If not, they’ll plan to move on to something else.

That’s a shame because like so many aspects of business, especially with dental laboratories it often takes more than one send to generate the desired response.

And drawing broad conclusions such as “direct mail doesn’t work” from just one mailing results in plenty of missed opportunities.

Experienced direct mailers understand the need to use multiple touches to maximize the impact of a campaign, and are planning to implement a consistent testing strategy across each touch.

They know direct mail “works”. It’s a matter of finding the right audience, offer and creative.

You’d Fire A Salesperson That Gives Up After One Touch

Think about it this way: If you’re a salesperson, would you make one phone call, leave a message, and if you don’t get a call back just give up on that prospect?

Of course not. You’d probably try to contact that prospect a few more times because it often takes more than one attempt to make a sale. It’s always been that way and always will be.

Multi-touch marketing is at the core of the way modern business is conducted. Direct mail works the same way.

You don’t often see pattern of “single touch” in other forms of media. Whether running traditional offline ads in magazines or on TV or engaging with prospects online, do you run just one ad and call it a day?

No way!

Think about how long ads on a topic you’ve researched online follow you around — on Facebook, websites, and apps you use — for days, if not weeks.

So why should direct mail be any different?

It’s not, and you don’t need to take my word for it. According to Mike Schultz, President of the RAIN Group, says it can take an “average of 8 touches to get an initial meeting (or other conversion) with a new prospect” and in some cases it can take more.

Multi-touch marketing: Communicate with hot prospects again and again


I guess one silver lining is that because so many organizations give up way too soon, you can benefit from your competitor’s mistakes!

When you consider how direct mail pairs excellently with other forms of media — both online and offline — an integrated campaign can deliver results far more impressive than with one type of media alone.

In fact, many DentalLabSupport.com clients use direct mail in conjunction with their email campaigns. I consistently hear from our clients that there’s a combined lift when both are used.

Properly timed, email supports direct marketing campaigns and direct mail boosts email response rates. Consider these research findings:

According to a 2019 USPS white paper, The Future of Direct Mail Is Here and It’s Dynamic, 60 percent of marketers surveyed said that combining digital and direct mail increased ROI — with 68 percent reporting increased website visits.

A Target Marketing “Media Usage Survey” described a controlled study in which a print-only campaign produced a 6 percent response rate while the same campaign distributed through both print and email lifted that response rate by more than 25 percent — to 7.6 percent.

A DentalLabSupport Marketing survey reported that more than half of all small businesses use three or more marketing channels.

And with today’s automated tools, marketers can more quickly take action based on how prospects respond online — whether visiting a website, clicking a link in an email, or interacting through social media — using that information to retarget prospects with personalized direct mail that can be sent instantly to a printer/mailer for processing.

Multi-touch direct mail for the full buyer’s journey


How can you best use this integration of multiple communication channels?

One way is through pre-defined workflows designed to meet specific goals such as building awareness, generating leads, nurturing leads, promoting events, and more. But even using direct mail alone delivers better results when you don’t give up too soon.

Here’s a sample email/direct mail campaign designed to reactivate cold or dead leads. Which do you think has a better chance of energizing an old lead – a single direct mail or this multi-touch marketing campaign?




Whether you combine other channels or not, it’s important to understand that a successful multi-touch direct mail campaign requires more than simply sending out several mailings one after the other. When each is strategically timed to influence prospects along the buying journey, you can enjoy more successful results.

Attribution Makes Direct Mail Click

You see, what makes direct mail an exceptional offline media channel is that you get precise attribution you don’t get with mass media such as print ads or TV.

By using automatically generated, personalized URLs (pURLs), you can track online response (or non-response) across each “mail drop” or touch of a multi-touch direct mail campaign.. By using pURLs as the “bridge” between your mailings and the online experience, you get both the impact and high response of direct mail and the tracking and analytics you expect from digital marketing channels.

An example campaign: How multi-touch mailings multiply results

Here’s an example that shows how multiple mailings might work. Let’s assume that you sell an e-learning solution offering home-based tutoring in a wide variety of skills for students in grades K-12.

You might start a campaign with an initial sequence of three different direct mail packages (which could be sent along with email) each focusing on a different benefit — perhaps based on skills taught, age range, ease of use, etc.




A response to any of the three mailings would trigger another sequence of the multi-touch direct mail based on that specific benefit.

If there’s no response to the first mailing, you send another, and then another. If there’s no response after three mailings, you might give up on that prospect (for now, anyway).

If you do get a response, another sequence designed around the benefit that drove that response begins. These mailings might include a higher commitment offer — for example, a sales call. If there’s no response, that specific sequence might continue for another two or three mailings.

Here’s how these multi-touch marketing sequences look. First, you’d have three initial emails designed to segment prospects into specific follow-up mailing sequences:

Initial flow

No response Response

Offer A1 Offer A2 Responder Flow X

Offer A2 Offer A3 Responder Flow Y

Offer A3 Stop mailing for now Responder Flow Z

Then, each follow-up sequence can be structured in a similar way – but customized to the first offer the prospect found relevant:

Responder Flow X No response Response

Offer X1 Offer X2 Sales call

Offer X2 Offer X3 Sales call

Offer X3 Stop mailing for now Sales call

Responder Flow Y No response Response

Offer Y1 Offer Y2 Sales call

Offer Y2 Offer Y3 Sales call

Offer Y3 Stop mailing for now Sales call

Responder Flow Z No response Response

Offer Z1 Offer Z2 Sales call

Offer Z2 Offer Z3 Sales call

Offer Z3 Stop mailing for now Sales call

You can intersperse email into this flow, allow for special mailings to be sent if a prospect visits your website, a specific web page, or downloads a specific resource. Yes, this seems as if this flow would be complex to set up, but today’s automated direct mail platforms integrate with marketing automation tools to make this exceedingly easy and affordable.

Even just a few years ago, a multi-touch campaign like this would be far too complex and costly to execute. For example, sending a direct mail piece within a few hours of a visit to your website might mean sending only a few mailings per day. The fixed costs of setting up printing and mailing — which are the same whether sending 10 or 10,000 pieces — would have been prohibitive.

So don’t give up – at least not too soon. Because if at first you don’t succeed, that next mailing could be the one that triggers a profitable sale.

Automated segmentation for multi-touch marketing


Better yet, today’s direct mail tools are automated to segment your audience based on their response (or non-response) and send subsequent direct mail pieces with specific creative customized for each segment.


Each part of a multi-touch direct mail campaign can be scheduled to target these precise segments through simple campaign wizards — without the need to manually tabulate responses and build lists for each mailing.

For example, if you send a direct mail postcard and get a response to a specific offer, you may send another direct mail piece, perhaps a thank you letter, a week later with another offer.

If you don’t receive a response, you might send another postcard, perhaps highlighting a different benefit of the same offer.

You can even test various approaches as your campaign continues – so you can gain even more insights into what works and what doesn’t. For more information on best practices for testing, review my latest post here

DentalLabSupport.com

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Why Choose DentalLabSupport.com

How can a dental lab compete today without a professional presence? The fact is, either you’re visible, or you’re invisible. We’ve become a visual society that demands instant access to information. This is why it's imperative to keep your savvy customers in mind when developing your company and dental lab branding.

Some dental lab owners will tell you that they just don’t have the time, resources, or budget to invest in marketing materials, and they plan to continue as they always have. But in today's economy and technology-driven age, your business cannot afford NOT to change with the times.

While word-of-mouth used to be the best form of marketing, times have changed drastically. Technology has reshaped the way we do business in the dental lab industry. Many of your customers are focusing on vendors who offer website interaction, a social media presence, and professional videos and marketing materials.

In order to compete with dental labs that offer the same quality of products and services, it is imperative that your lab demonstrates a strong professional presence. This forces dental professionals to change or risk becoming extinct.

Using an outdated website and/or poorly designed marketing materials will only give your competition a marketing advantage. Worst of all, the absence of a strong professional presence, business brand identity, and most importantly, an online business, makes you just plain … invisible.

You still have the choice to take charge of your destiny
DentalLabSupport.com, an exclusive sales & marketing agency for labs can help to bridge the gap between the professional side of dentistry and the digital age of marketing by offering creative media and online business solutions to the dental lab industry, from concept to completion.

Understanding the needs of busy dental labs, DentalLabSupport.com believes that each project should be approached differently and customized to match the client’s needs. By working with a professional company like DentalLabSupport.com, a dental lab can create concepts that translate across multiple types of platforms, such as traditional marketing media, online business websites, videos, social media networks, photography, graphic design, motion graphics, company identity branding, trade show banners, events graphics, and more. 

Companies such as DentalLabSupport.com work to find real solutions that help your dental lab be as successful as possible.

For more information about dental lab marketing, contact DentalLabSupport.com or call 888.715.9099 for a free consultation. 

How advanced features like call recording prove ROI

In our quest for bigger and better sources of marketing data, it’s all too easy to get stuck on the analytics treadmill and ignore the information that’s you’ve already collected. Fortunately, when you use advanced call tracking software to analyze your campaigns, the information you need to achieve superior ROI is often right at your fingertips.

And one of the DentalLabSupport's features that best demonstrates how marketing tech can empower you to work smarter, not harder, is Call Recording. With our call recording features activated for your account, you’ll be able to play back recordings of every single call that comes in to your tracking numbers.

This is a great way to get an at-a-glance view of how your phone team is performing, but the usefulness of this feature far exceeds surface-level analytics.

Don’t let a single call slip through the cracks

During our many case studies, we heard a lot about how powerful call recording can be when used in conjunction with our DLS call tagging system.

With our comprehensive tagging system, you can quickly and easily categorize calls — like new leads, repeat callers, and missed calls —  and then identify those that should be reviewed for deeper analysis.

Proper categorization of inbound calls is a powerful way to prove the value of the work your agency does for clients. For example, with a thoughtful tagging and analysis scheme for your data, combined with a careful review of the corresponding call recordings, you can demonstrate how your campaigns have resulted in a steady increase in calls that deliver qualified leads for your client. Or, perhaps your advice on efficiency has helped a client pare down the number of missed calls per month, resulting in fewer frustrated voicemails from prospects.

In both cases, this can be a powerful demonstration of the value — and the ROI boost — your work is delivering for your client. And even better, much of this tagging work can be automated when used in concert with our suite of Conversation Intelligence automation tools.

Identifying and filling skill gaps

Beyond tagging, call recordings are also a supremely useful resource by themselves. Your agency might not have considered that call coaching could be a selling point for clients, but we’ve seen plenty of testimony from DentalLabSupport users that suggests otherwise.

With call recording enabled for the client’s account, you can instantly achieve a frontline view of how your dental lab's phone team is performing. By reviewing recordings of inbound & outbound calls, you’ll be the first to know whether the client’s team is sticking to the script and performing well, or whether there are skill gaps that are causing prospects to drop out of the sales funnel.

Let’s say that your dental laboratory is getting a healthy number of inbound calls, but you’ve crunched the numbers and it seems like prospects just aren’t converting at the rate they should. This is a perfect time to dive into the call recordings and see whether your phone team is having trouble sticking to the script, or effectively conveying their product’s value to callers.

By listening to call recordings, your dental laboratory can then take a direct hand in shaping how the call team is performing. Perhaps the sales script needs some tweaking, in order to better reflect the search keywords that are driving the most calls. If many callers are searching for a specific feature before calling, but the call recording then reveals that the feature isn’t part of the sales team’s usual script, you’ve just identified a key gap that needs to be filled.

Taking a comprehensive, hands-on approach when it comes to call recording will do more than just help your dental labs's bottom line — it provides real proof that your dental lab is driving results.

Here at DentalLabSupport.com we’re constantly developing innovative new tools like Account Center, which helps your dental labs marketing team manage multiple clients with simplicity and ease.

Building client partnerships that last

A careful and considered use of marketing technology can give you a real competitive edge and set you apart from other dental laboratories, who are always looking to entice clients away from you (IE, the competition). With advanced call tracking and analytics in your arsenal, you’ll be well-equipped not just to deliver real value, but also to prove the value of your marketing efforts in a way that establishes trust, and builds relationships that last.

Interested in seeing the benefits call tracking can bring to your dental lab? request a personalized demo of DentalLabSupport.com Sales & Marketing Platform. Call 888-715-9099 or info@dentallabsupport.com

Why Timing Matters in Sales Automation for Dental Labs

It's all about timing. Even the most well-intended sales automation strategy can fall apart if you don't reach your leads while they're most receptive to your message. And after reading this post, you'll understand just why this timing is so crucial, while learning best practices that help get you to better Sales Automation for your dental laboratory.

Timing Matters For Your First Email

Sales automation, as you might be aware, begins with the first email a contact receives from you after signing up and becoming a lead. And at this early stage, timing is already crucial: a study by the Harvard Business Review found that leads are no less than seven times more likely to become customers if they're followed up with in an hour or less. 

Unfortunately, most businesses do not take advantage of this fact. The same study also found that the majority of businesses don't follow up with their leads until at least 12 hours after the initial sign up. As you can imagine, this delay can result in a significant opportunity cost. But it's also an opportunity! If you follow up with your leads quickly and efficiently, you will not only increase the likelihood of turning them into customers - you'll also stand out from and make a better impression on potential customers than your competition.

Timing Matters Throughout the Funnel

Of course, the timing of your emails is not only important during the first part of your sales automation process. Instead, you should take special care that your automated emails are timed just right in order to optimize your lead nurturing efforts. That's true both in terms of the frequency with which you send emails, and the actual times at which your emails arrive in your audience's inbox.

There's a fine line between persistence and pestering. While most leads will welcome an email about once a week with dental industry and company updates, they will frown upon daily emails that keep pushing them toward making a sale. The best frequency will depend on your exact industry, but according to research firm MarketingSherpa, there is a clear correlation between an increase in frequency beyond once a week and a decrease in email performance. In general, once a week is a good goal to shoot for - as long as you have interesting content to share.

Timing Matters When Closing the Deal

Thanks to a fast follow-up email along with well-timed emails throughout the sales automation process, you're getting plenty of sales-qualified leads. As it turns out, timing matters one more time: when closing the deal. Put simply, you don't want to miss out on sales opportunities by missing the perfect window to make that sales call.

That's where lead scoring comes in, a process that allows you to determine which leads are ready to become customers based on their interactions with you. We've covered lead scoring extensively on this blog, but would be remiss not to mention it as a crucial mechanism to get the timing in your marketing automation just right.

Sales automation, in short, is all about the timing: from sending your first email to scheduling your lead nurturing efforts all the way to closing the deal, taking action at exactly the right time means increasing your chances of growing your customer base. And a good CRM can help with all of these efforts! Contact us to learn more. 

DentalLabSupport.com Sales & Marketing Platform Developed For Dental Labs 1.888.715.9099 - info@dentallabsupport.com

The 5 Types Of Direct Mail Campaigns

David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Direct mail has been always been an essential marketing tool here at DentalLabSupport, and I suspect it will continue to be effective for a long time coming. In this post, we’ll explore why it’s so popular and how to take advantage of direct mail to increase marketing alignment with sales and more importantly, close more revenue.

Why is Direct Mail so Effective?

First of all, it stands out and makes a great impression. In the world of cold emails and auto-dialers, direct mail shows a high level of commitment (financially) and breaks through the noise. In other words, it gets noticed more than other marketing tactics.

Second, it scales linearly instead of with diminishing return like ads. In other words, the cost per box is the same as you send more, but for ads the next click costs more than the last one.

Finally, it aligns marketing with sales. Sales teams love direct mail. They see how it benefits them more than some other marketing channels and it’s much easier to integrate into sales stages and processes.

Why is Direct Mail Gaining Popularity?

In addition to being an effective marketing channel, it’s getting more popular because of increased interest in account-based marketing (ABM) and technologies like PFL that help marketers (including us at DentalLabSupport) scale direct mail.

Having a service and technology for direct mail has been crucially important at DentalLabSupport. Not only can you tap into existing expertise, but the technologies integrate deeply with LabCell CRM, an exclusive marketing software developed for dental labs, for automated sending, task follow up for sales, and simple tracking in attribution solutions.

Marketing attribution helps us measure the effectiveness of running ads, sending direct mail, and follow up outreach by sales teams all in one attribution model.

Another added benefit is that services like DLS provide better economies of scale for assembling and sending boxes. Internally, we wouldn’t be able to do this cost efficiently.

Five Ways to Take Advantage of Direct Mail

After a few years of experimentation and deep discussions with other marketing leaders, I’ve learned there are 5 distinct direct mail “plays”  and campaigns to execute. They are awareness, appointment, shareable, closer, and advocacy plays.

Awareness mailers are designed to make a positive first impression. The call to action is light (if it exists at all). Think of this as a billboard or TV ad. For example, we’re sending printed versions of our DLS magazine.

Appointment mailers, or sometimes called “meeting makers,” are the bread and butter of direct mail. These have strong call-to-actions, often times come with an incentive, and are used to convert warmer leads into opportunities. We’re sending chocolates along with an Amazon gift card.

Shareable mailers are designed to get more people involved in the deal and help you grow the number of champions at the receiving company. This can be something simple like a box of cupcakes or something clever like a popcorn machine for their office.

Closer mailers, or sometimes called “clutter busters,” are sent to the decision maker of the deal. Closer mailers can also be used to help accounts and opportunities that have stalled. These are highly branded and personalized. It can be something physical like a bottle of wine with a Forrester report on your product, or an experience like tickets to join you in a suite at a sporting event.

Advocacy mailers are for new customers. They are designed to help turn customers into advocates who spread your brand both internally at their companies and externally to others. We’re sending branded boxes with branded swag, a custom letter, and handouts for the champion to share with the rest of the marketing team.

Conclusion

If you haven’t experimented with direct mail or account-based marketing before, feel free to contact us to learn more.  DentalLabSupport.com 1.888.715.9099  info@dentallabsupport.com.

The Role of Your Dental Lab Marketing Department — And What You Should Expect From It

Marketing vs. Sales in Professional Services

One of the first steps is to be clear about the language we use to describe a marketing department and how it differs from a sales function. The reason that this distinction is so tricky is that many firms do not use traditional language to talk about these concepts. Sometimes the term dental lab business development is used to refer to the sales function. In other firms, business development refers to both the marketing and sales function. In this article, we are going to use the traditional definitions.

Marketing is the process of understanding your marketplace and competitors, defining your firm’s market positioning, pricing and services, promoting the firm to your target audience and explaining how they might benefit by working with you. Put another way, marketing is about offering the right services with the right benefits to the right prospects.

Sales is the process of qualifying your prospects and convincing the right ones to buy your services. It’s about turning business opportunities into clients.

While this difference seems pretty simple on the surface, there are a few areas that can cause confusion. In some organizations, for instance, the sales function is also responsible for generating and nurturing leads until they become viable business opportunities. As you will see below, we have some strong opinions about this practice.

Dental Lab Marketing Department Functions

So what exactly should be the role of your marketing department? What should you expect from your marketing team?

Whether your team is in-house, entirely outsourced or a combination of the two, your marketing team has five core functions.

1. An understanding of your target market and competitors

Marketing should always start with the market. You should expect Marketing to be able to give you detailed and specific descriptions of your target markets and your key competitors in those markets.

But you already know all about your competitors and clients, right? Wrong. Unless you are already doing systematic, structured research, you are kidding yourself. Anecdotal experiences can lead you astray.

Our research shows that internal staff almost always inaccurately perceive their market and their clients’ true feelings and priorities. In fact, firms that do objective research on their markets and clients grow faster and are more profitable.

A professional marketing function can commission this research and allow you to make decisions based on marketplace reality, rather than hunches and wishful thinking.

2. A strategy to drive growth and profitability

Once you have a research-based understanding of your firm and its place in the market, your marketing department should be able to help craft a compelling strategy to drive growth and profitability. That strategy may require adjustments in your target market, service offerings (see the next point, below) and marketing plans.

Your strategy should clearly identify compelling competitive advantages (your differentiators) and a clear market positioning (are you the premium-priced leader or a value-driven alternative?). Think of these as tools to describe your brand. How do you want to be known in the marketplace? As you wrestle with your options, expect to be challenged with new thinking and bold choices.

You will also need a marketing plan. This plan will map out exactly how you are going to build the visibility of your brand and generate the new opportunities your business development (sales) team will convert into new clients.

3. Which services to offer and how to price them

Historically, many firms have left the key decisions about what services to offer and how to price them to individual operating executives or the finance and accounting function.

Decisions about service lines and pricing are important elements of a growth plan. They should be informed by an overall research-based strategy, not individual client requests. Why? It is too easy to get over-extended trying to be everything to every client. You will soon lose focus and experience, increasing costs as you struggle to provide an ever-expanding array of services.

Innovation and client responsiveness can all too easily become undisciplined dabbling. A strong marketing department plays a leading role in maintaining that balance.

4. A steady flow of new leads and opportunities

More leads! Better opportunities! Who doesn’t want a steady flow of well-qualified new business prospects? Fortunately, that is exactly what you should expect from marketing. While some firms assign lead generation and nurturing to the sales (business development) function, we think that is a bad idea in most cases. The time horizon for lead generation and nurturing can be long. Nurturing leads can take months, even years. Sales are almost always placed on a much shorter operational cycle (“what can you close this month?”).

Your marketing team should turn your overall strategy into a formal plan to generate new leads and nurture your existing prospects until they become well-qualified opportunities. This plan should look ahead at least a year and be guided by clear, trackable metrics (more on this below).

Be careful that you do not continually add new “marketing ideas,” underfunding campaigns or other unplanned initiatives that may derail the plan. If you fall into any of these traps, you cannot expect the plan to work, nor can you hold your marketing team accountable.

Also, be patient. Lead nurturing can take time — sometimes a very long time. Don’t focus only on immediate results. You will need new clients next year, and the year after as well.

What you need to provide

At this point, we have identified what benefits Marketing can provide to your firm. But what do they need to be able to deliver these results? The answer is straightforward. They need four basic things:

1. Talented people. Your marketing team must include people with the right skill sets and experience. If you don’t have these talents in house, you may need to outsource parts of the process or do some hiring. We’ll discuss these options when we cover how to structure your
   marketing department, below. A word of caution here: marketing professional services is its own specialty. Don’t expect someone with general marketing expertise to understand the unique rules and dynamics of the professional services marketplace.
2. Adequate resources. Your team must have sufficient resources to do the job right. Underfund the effort and you will not get the results you deserve. The requirements are not excessive. Our research shows that high-growth firms spend no more than average on marketing — and yet they are still able to deliver outstanding results. But don’t expect superior results with stingy resources.
3. A seat at the decision-maker’s table. The kiss of death is investing in your marketing then ignoring your team’s advice. It happens more often than you would think, especially in flat organizations, such as partnerships, where decision making is diffused over many people. If your decisions are broadly consensus-based, you may be better off delegating marketing decisions to a single partner or a small committee.
4. Patience and cooperation. Once the previous three considerations are in place, you will see impressive progress. But there is a catch. Just like any other functional area of your organization, Marketing needs cooperation and a bit of patience from the firm. Support your marketing team’s efforts over time and you will reap the rewards.

These four basic requirements lay the foundation for marketing success. But what does an effective marketing department look like?

Marketing Department Structure

Structuring a modern professional services marketing team is not easy. At many firms, marketing is a relatively new function — one, regrettably, that is not always highly regarded. In addition, many firms are working in a very competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace. When they lack marketing agility, firms put themselves at risk.

To keep things simple, let’s focus on the three aspects of departmental structure that are most relevant to professional services firms: the Role of marketing, selecting the right Resources and Reporting Relationships. 

1. Role of Marketing In The Dental Lab

At different firms, marketing comes in different guises — from a low-level support function charged with basic implementation responsibilities to a comprehensive team of specialists who deliver the full spectrum of strategic and operational skills. In our experience, the more comprehensive its marketing function, the more success a firm enjoys. (Keep in mind that marketing expertise does not necessarily need to reside in-house. See Resource Requirements below for the details.)

At many firms, a key decision revolves around lead generation and nurturing. Do these functions belong to marketing or sales? We believe that marketing is their proper home.

Why? Many, many firms today employ the Seller-Doer Strategy, so their busy professionals lack the time and focus to carry out a long-term program. Better to leave these tasks to individuals whose attention is not divided between business development and project delivery. Make lead generation and lead nurturing a prime role of the marketing department.

2. Resource Requirements

Where will you find the people with the specialized skill sets and experience needed to pull off the comprehensive vision we believe is so important? Well, you have two choices: staff up your in-house team or outsource the skills you need.

The in-house approach is appealing from an accessibility perspective. And if a person is fully utilized there can be some cost savings. Of course, no single person is likely to possess the full range of skills you need to implement a modern marketing program. So you are faced with the challenge of filling in the gaps. But how?

One avenue is training. This is, or should be, a given. Technology is always evolving and new research findings continually challenge our long-held beliefs and assumptions — what worked five years ago may not be what is most effective today. That means ongoing education is a must.

But even if you scrupulously train your marketing team, you’ll still need outside help on occasion. In fact, our recent research has shown that high-growth firms tend to spend more on outsourced resources than their slow-growth peers.

How do you decide whether to outsource a marketing function? Ask yourself a series of five questions about each function that is a candidate for potential outsourcing (see Figure 1).

Some dental laboratories outsource all of their marketing so that they can concentrate their internal resources on core functions only. However, most dental labs employ a mixed model in which some functions are handled internally and others are outsourced. Specialized services that are not used on a regular basis are often the best candidates for outsourcing. Examples include research, strategy development, analytics or the development of a new website.

3. Reporting Relationships

Whom should the marketing department report to? Many firms struggle with this question. The answer may depend on the role and resources choices you make.

At firms with limited marketing personnel, it makes sense to have the department report to the head of Administration or Sales (Business Development). The latter situation works particularly well when Marketing’s primary role is to support Sales. In neither of these cases, however, is Marketing in a position to make a major contribution.

As the marketing Role increases in sophistication, it should be allowed to influence major strategic decisions. This can be accomplished by having Marketing report to a senior partner who has responsibility for both Marketing and Sales. Having a single point of decision making minimizes conflict and makes it easier to align goals and priorities. It also gives Marketing a seat at the table when major decisions are being made.

A variation on this theme is to have the Marketing leader report directly to the CEO or Managing Partner. This gives him or her visibility into the firm’s strategy, which can only make marketing more effective. This reporting relationship is also well suited to our vision of Marketing as a key function that can drive growth and profitability of the firm as a whole.

Learn the best techniques and strategies to market your professional services firm with Hinge University

A Final Thought

In many consumer-facing industries, marketing is a core function that the rest of the organization is built around. These companies evolved in that direction because it gives them an advantage in financial performance. Perhaps there was a time when professional services firms did not need the perspective and discipline that marketing offers. No longer.

With the rise of digital communications, the collapse of geography and the proliferation of new competitors and business models the pressure is on. The advantage will go to the firm with the greatest marketplace visibility and the best value proposition. And that is exactly the promise that marketing can deliver.

What role is your marketing department playing in your firm’s success?

For more information about Dental Lab Marketing and Dental Lab Sales, visit DentalLabSupport.com.

How to Run a Successful Lead Generation Campaign

One of the main objectives of running a successful lead generation campaign for your dental lab (and one of the most important) is to do just that, generate leads. The campaign process involves classifying prospective customers and qualifying their probability to buy in advance of making a sales call. The purpose of lead generation can vary from driving sales leads to something like increasing webinar registrations, but in the end they have the same goal and that is to get prospects to raise their hands. Before we go into how to build a successful lead generation campaign, we need to understand a few basic terms.

Basic Terms of a Lead Generation Campaign

• Lead: A prospect that has some level of potential in becoming a client. The individual usually shows interests and provides his/her information to your firm.
• Qualified Lead: A prospect that meets all of your firm’s qualifications and criteria necessary to be considered more likely to become a client.
• Lead Generation: The initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a your firm.
• Lead Generation Campaign: The process of capturing and simulating interest in a service or product for the purpose of developing leads. This includes a strategy using a particular media source and an offer to create inbound leads.
• Nurturing: Some leads qualify early on, while others may take more time. Many of your leads will need some nurturing through frequent communication until they are ready to be contacted by someone from your business development team.
• Hard Offer: This is typically an offer for a service or product that usually requires the prospect to act immediately. Often times these offers are limited to a few people or may have an expiration date.
• Soft Offer: This type of offer usually doesn’t require an immediate response. An example of a soft offer is an email newsletter subscription.
• Lead Capture: The use of marketing automation systems, allowing marketers to gather contact information from web forms, landing pages and email campaigns.
• Landing Pages: A page that a visitor can land at or arrive on in response to clicking on a link or offer.

Building Your Lead Generation Campaign

Imagine this scenario for a moment; you are at home when suddenly you receive a phone call from a local moving company. Earlier that day you filled out a form on their website. You input your name, phone number, zip code and services you are interested in. While on the website you also downloaded a guide on how to get ready for your move. In doing so, this local moving company generated a new lead, and that lead is you. With the information captured, they are now able to contact you with further value and information. That is how the lead generation process takes place. 

The process begins with several main components. These components are necessary in order to maximize the number of qualified leads that you receive. Below are a few components to consider:

• A lead generating website: As the name implies, lead generating websites are meant to generate and nurture new business leads. There are variations on the types of leads a website might be looking for. For instance, one site may be focused on recruiting where another may be more interested in generating new business teaming partners.
• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System: CRM systems are intended to collect information on prospects. The information you can gather in a CRM on your contacts can include their website, email, phone number, mailing address, content downloads and open opportunities you may have with them. Your firm can customize your CRM based on the information your firm needs to qualify your leads.
• A Content Marketing Strategy: A strategic plan focused on generating and distributing educational content to your target audience on a consistent basis.  An end goal of your strategy could be to drive your audience through the content funnel, gaining their trust, having them view you as the expert, and then contact you when they are ready to buy.
• A Content Calendar: A resource tool that marketing teams can use to plan all content marketing activity for both traditional and online marketing. The benefit of using a content calendar is being able to visualize and strategize how your content is distributed.

Generating Leads Through a Successful Plan

By understanding the basic terms and having all of the components that make up an online lead generation campaign, you can then start to develop your plan by going through these 5 steps. It’s important to know that your process will vary depending on your objective, target audience and use of media.

1. Set your campaign objective: Your objective can vary based on the outcome that you want to achieve. You may want to start off by defining your goal by either the number of leads expected or revenue per lead. These are just a few examples of what your campaign objective could possibly be. In order to better define your objective you may want to ask yourself the following questions:
   • Who is your target audience?
   • How will you reach them?
   • What do you want them to do?
   • What call to action do you want to offer them?
   • What are you going to offer them?
   • How will you follow-up?
   • When will you will follow-up?
   • Who will follow-up?
   • What will you do or what will you ask when you follow-up?
   • How will you record and report on the results of the lead?
   • Who will you report these results to?
   • When will you evaluate your lead generation efforts?
   • What will you consider a success?
2. Evaluate and select your campaign target: This may come from your current list of contacts that you have or you may want to focus on an entirely new target group for your lead generation campaign. Either way, make sure you have identified who those groups are and what their pain points and issues might be that your firm can answer with content.
3. Determine your media outlet: While there are may different media outlets ranging from email marketing to eBooks and guides, our research has shown that firms generating more than 60% of their leads online are 2x more profitable than their competitors. Therefore, choosing an email campaign or holding a webinar would be an example of a great strategy for generating more online leads.
   
4. Develop an offer: To reiterate, a lead is a prospective client who has peaked interested in your firm’s product or service. In order to identify these prospects in your list of contacts, you may want to send out an offer. This could be a free download to a guide, registration for a free webinar, etc.  When the lead responds to your offer, their information is captured. They are then pulled into your lead generation campaign where you will continue to nurture your leads until they are ready to close a deal.There are several main mechanics to creating an offer. First you must create a landing page where a prospect lands for a distinct purpose. This is usually prompted by an offer and a call-to-action in which the prospect is prompted to fill out a form. Your hard or soft offer respondents become, as what we at DentalLabSupport like to call, a “new hot lead.” There are several different places you can promote these offers such as on a blog, on a webpage, on social media, in an email…these are just to name a few.
5. Create a communications strategy process: This includes what your follow-up process is going to look like. Strategizing how you will respond to your leads, what kinds of material will you share, who will contact them, and finally defining what your proposals will look like as well.

Looking at all the elements of a successful lead generation campaign can make your head spin a bit. So in conclusion, make sure your campaign includes a clear understanding of your target market, multiple media channels to capture and narrow down your leads, compelling offers, and a strong strategy that tracks performance. If you have all of these then you are good to go!  For more information about launching a successful Lead Generation Campaign for your dental lab, visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099.