If you are a dentist or a marketing professional whose mission is to help provide a positive ROI to dental clients, you’ll appreciate these appropriated lists of tactics and strategies.
Marketing Mission
A Tactic is defined as an action carefully planned to achieve a specific end.
A Strategy is defined as a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.
Though closely related, both tactics and strategies have similar but separate important roles in our marketing world.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu. That is a pretty powerful statement, and one that should be held in high regard.
I’ve come across some really great articles this past week regarding the two, and I found that though they are different entities, they are so closely related.
According to a great article I read by Charles Crawford, the seven tactics that are proven to provide positive ROI for any dental practice looking to build new clientele are
1. Having a high-converting website
2. Regularsearch engine optimization (SEO)
3. Local SEO(great video explaining local SEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If_KxSyja48)
4. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
5. Social media marketing(SMM)
6. Retargeting
7. Quality patient management
As previously mentioned, the two are so closely related that when I came across another article that listed the ten strategies that are said to help with dental marketing, I found it interesting how closely they followed those listed above:
1. Build a high-converting website – also a tactic
2. Regular SEO – also a tactic
3. Local SEO – also a tactic
4. Google Adwords – PPC, also a tactic
5. Social media marketing – also a tactic
6. Retargeting – also a tactic
7. Google optimization and rich snippets
8. Online reputation management
9. Quality patient management – also a tactic
10. Facilitating referrals
Seven out of the ten were also on the list of tactics. That right there says to me that both tactics and strategies are equally important, but one doesn’t work well without the other.
You Can’t Have One without the Other
To create a plan is only half the battle. You must put in place a strategy that will work with your tactics to generate a plan that has limitless shelf life—especially in a dental marketing world that changes pace so quickly and without notice!
~Jason
