As we forge ahead into 2022, let’s take a moment to applaud your marketing efforts for 2021. Did you increase your patient leads? Run a successful Facebook ad campaign? Congratulations! Those are both awesome achievements! Ones that often require a lot of brainstorming, research, and planning.

If you’ve done all that in 2021, you may have used a marketing calendar!

What is a marketing calendar? A marketing calendar is a great resource tool to visually map out your marketing efforts for the year, month-by-month. They’ll take some time and resources to create, but it’ll be so worth it. Click here to skip down to our free template.

With over 20 years experience marketing for orthodontists, we understand how busy practice life can get—especially in a pandemic. That’s where a marketing calendar comes in handy! Allowing you to set your practice goals for the year, plan out your marketing campaigns, and alleviate the stress of last minute planning while you maintain and grow your practice.

What Should be Included in a Marketing Calendar?

Ok, so how do you create this helpful roadmap of your marketing efforts for the year? And how detailed does this thing need to be? Crafting a marketing calendar can seem overwhelming at first, but follow these 6 steps and you’ll be sailing through your goals in no time.

1. Decide on a platform or app you’ll use to host your marketing calendar

There are a lot of helpful free and paid tools available to help track your marketing efforts. But no matter the size of your practice, you want to make sure it’s user-friendly, meets your unique practice needs, and accessible to all of your team.

It really comes down to two options:

• Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets
• Paid Calendar Software

We have found that Google Sheets fulfill the needs of most of our marketing teams. They can be shared and updated real time with other team members, which can be difficult with Microsoft Excel unless you’re using cloud based file storage, and can even be formatted to even appear like a regular calendar. 

The benefit of some paid calendar softwares, like those that will come with a Canva or Hootsuite plan, is they will automatically fill in with things like scheduled social posts. But you’ll still need to manage pieces manually like events or referring dentist drop offs.

2. Establish Your Target Audience

No one knows your patients better than you and your team! If you don’t already have a target audience profile built, look no further than your practice management software. All the answers you need for your target audience are in your patient paperwork and profiles:

• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Occupation
• Services/Products Bought (e.g. orthodontic treatments)
• If you have access (through a data provider) —Interests, hobbies, socioeconomic status

Find all the common characteristics with your current patients and you’ll discover your target audience. Is it who you thought it was? Or maybe you’re looking to attract more adult patients? Knowing your current patient profile is key to reaching those leads!

3. Define Your Goals

What are you looking to accomplish this year? These are your practice goals! Let’s take a look at the most common goals for orthodontists:

• Increase new patient acquisition
• Increase practice awareness
• Build trust between your practice and community

Did you know that if you set specific and challenging goals, team performance increases by 90%! Why’s that? When you have a detailed game-plan for reaching goals, your team has the motivation and accountability to help your practice meet them. So be specific in your goals! Use numbers, percentages, and dates. By deciding on your goals for the year, you’ll be setting yourself up for success.

4. Identify Your Marketing Strategies

So you have your goals set, but how do you achieve them? While there’s many marketing strategies your practice can use, here are 4 of the most common:

• Paid advertising. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the most popular mediums to use for paid advertisements. They’ll appear at the top of a search results page or in your audience’s feed. You’ll need to include your paid ads strategy in your marketing calendar and account for all that goes into creating a compelling ad.
• Content Marketing. This strategy focuses on creating and sharing your content with your target audience and is most commonly correlated with your Search Engine Optimization strategy. Planning out your content for the year can save you time and help to avoid falling behind.
• Social Media Marketing. Content marketing goes hand-in-hand with this strategy! Your social media profiles are a great way to show your fun side to your patients, and also perfect for promoting your content and treatments to drive traffic back to your website. A successful social media strategy requires one thing above all else: Consistency. That’s where a pre-planned calendar comes in handy. Social media platform algorithms will reward posters who provide engaging content in a consistent manner to their audiences. Your calendar doesn’t have to outline every word and photo you’ll post throughout the year, but it should provide some guidelines of the types of content you’d like to post at a high level. This helps prevent creative blocks when you’re just not sure of what to post.
• In Office Events + Activities. We may live in the world of digital, but there’s no getting around the necessity of good old fashioned traditional marketing. Does your practice host patient events, referral contests, or referring dentist drop offs? Outlining these activities throughout the year will help to stay on top of things and better plan budget and resources.

 5. Identify Important Dates

When making your marketing calendar for the year, you’ll want to keep your selling cycle in mind. What months are busy and do you have any slow periods? You’ll want to account for those in your marketing planning. Here’s a few important dates for orthodontists:

• Notable slow or busy times – think back-to-school, holidays, and Summer months. A look at how many new patient appointments you scheduled per month the year prior will help to identify these trends
• Patient events and cyclical contests
• Referring Dentist Drop-offs
• Community events sponsoring/attending
• Orthodontic Holidays (Check out our marketing calendar example for these!)
• Regular holidays (e.g. Black Friday)
• Conferences attending or staff retreats – if there are times your normal availability is altered, this should be captured in the calendar

Charting all these opportunities to engage prospective patients and current patients is fundamental to creating your marketing calendar. Sounds like a lot? No matter the holidays you choose, eNox Media can help you craft engaging content and ad campaigns for your practice. You won’t want to miss out on these great opportunities to increase brand awareness, new patient leads, and engage your patients throughout the year!

6. Determine Project Timelines

Here’s where the accountability for meeting your practice goals comes in!

Your marketing calendar is vital to avoiding missed deadlines. With each marketing project you’ve planned, roles, budget, and due dates will be tracked on your marketing calendar. Your team will know who is responsible for completing each task—from research to revisions. And be able to celebrate their achievements!

 Free Marketing Calendar Template

Stressing because it’s already the new year and you haven’t started prepping your marketing calendar? Good news! We’ve got a marketing calendar template, free of charge—just for you!

We’ve taken one of the most popular marketing calendars out there and adapted it for orthodontists. It’s easy to download and customize for your practice. Using this marketing calendar as your guide throughout the year will allow you to focus on your patient care and experience without stressing over marketing campaign deadlines.

Fill out the form below to download your free orthodontic marketing calendar template.

Need help creating your marketing calendar?

Want to focus solely on your practice? Let us handle the rest! We are an award-winning orthodontist marketing agency that helps orthodontists reach their marketing goals with ease. So you can focus on what matters—your patients.

Set your practice up for success this year! Reach out to us or book a complimentary discovery session today to discuss what your practice needs and goals.