The importance of a marketing strategy for optical practices
A robust marketing strategy is essential for any modern optical practice looking to grow and remain competitive. Unlike relying on chance opportunities, a defined strategy allows you to systematically target ideal customers and position your practice as a preferred destination for both vision care services and spectacle sales.
Why have a marketing strategy?
A strategy outlines realistic growth objectives based on your capacity, staff members and opportunities. It profiles your ideal patient demographics and identifies how to best communicate with them through various channels like social media, email and advertising. Having a documented plan makes your entire team accountable and aligned on practice building priorities.
So, if you’re still not convinced that a marketing strategy would benefit your business. Read on and discover the top reasons to invest your time in creating a marketing strategy.
It stops you guessing where to spend your marketing budget.
Without a clear and thought-through strategy, it is easy to spend money here and there in one-off campaigns. Often this can feel like you are giving it a go and seeing what comes of it. This can lead to wasting both time and money.
It ensures you are consistent with your marketing approach.
Have you found that you are inconsistent with your social media posting? Realising you need to post something at the last minute as you haven’t had much content that week. Building a strategy in advance, allows for planned content that really speaks to your target customers rather than random awareness days that don’t resonate.
It allows you to track success with clear KPI’s and calculate your ROI.
As we all know, writing down your goals makes you more likely to achieve them. Documenting what success looks like will also allow you to adjust and flex your strategy to ensure the best ROI. For example, if we are looking to grow our Instagram following, how much are we looking to grow it by and by when.
It provides a great reference point.
A marketing strategy serves as an essential reference guide. There are many moving parts in marketing – different platforms, target audiences, campaigns, etc. It’s unreasonable to expect someone to remember all those details.
The documented strategy captures all that important information in one place. It gets new team members up to speed on marketing goals and plans. It also acts as the go-to resource when questions come up.
So, what does a marketing strategy look like?
It can be in many forms, but a simple excel or powerpoint document that you can regular revisit is often best.
It provides a clear framework of different marketing tactics for reaching this target audience, including details on planned activity and the relevant methods of communication. An example of marketing tactic that sits within your strategy maybe to utilise email marketing to provide consistent touchpoints with your existing customer database and keep them informed when new spectacle or sunglasses come into store.
Crafting an effective strategy
I always advise customers to start with a SWOT analysis of their business and their current approach to marketing. To build a SWOT follow the few key rules below:
Strengths- What are your Internal strengths that you can lean on to help you achieve your goals – An example maybe that you already have a significant-sized email database.
Weaknesses – What are your internal weaknesses that you need to work on to achieve your goals – An example maybe that you have little to no following currently on Instagram.
Opportunities- What external opportunities, such as resource, people or training can you take advantage of to help achieve your goals – An example maybe that you already have a member of staff in your practice that has good experience posting on their own social media accounts.
Threats- What external threats, can you predict and mitigate to ensure you reach your goals – An example could be online prices are causing challenges with your customer retention.
Once you have built your SWOT, see where you can link your Strengths and Weaknesses to your Opportunities and Threats. In the examples above you could utilise the member of staff with good social media experience to help grow your Instagram following, providing a great platform to advertise new spectacles or sunglasses frames.
Rather than starting from scratch, there are some fantastic free resources available to support in building a marketing strategy. Hubspot provides a great guide and template (8 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2023 (hubspot.com)). Not all points will be relevant to all business but will provide the starting point of the steps needed.
We offer a complementary marketing audit to help you take the first step in building your marketing strategy. If you are interested, please send us an email on contact@h6marketing.com and we would be more than happy to help.