Who better to approach for effective communication advice during these unprecedented times than a company called Corona Marketing Limited?! Time for a rebrand…or not.

Chris Baker considers what you need to be doing now…

2020 has been one hell of a year. Whatever wonderful plans you had at the start of the year in terms of your business have probably gone out of the window. In the last six months you will have had a myriad of concerns – NHS contracts, how to pay your team, to furlough or not to furlough (who in January had even heard of the term furlough?), how to pay suppliers, how to mothball a dental practice – the list goes on and on.

Marketing of your practice has rightly, been way down the list. Marketing the fabulous teeth whitening you do, the no doubt impressive 3D scanner, or eulogising about how dental implants can enhance your patients’ lives hasn’t been the right thing to do in the last few months. However, pretending that your marketing is irrelevant in the current situation would be a big mistake too. Communication with your patient base has NEVER been more important.

When we get through this, and we will get through it, people will remember how brands and their communication made them feel. Many people are feeling sad, alone and somewhat anxious. And, we are also logging on to social networks much, much more than before in search of information. How you communicate with your audiences across the various touchpoints during this pandemic will have a big effect on how quickly your practice comes out of it and gets back to normal.

And, as the Covid-19 pandemic will be with us for some time yet, what should you (and your team) be doing over the next few weeks and months?

Rebuilding Patient Confidence

You need to be reaching out to all your patients and reassuring them that a dental practice always was a very safe environment to visit and the extra measures due to Covid have simply added to those.  Attending for a dental ‘check-up’ has always been incredibly safe – in fact, outside of an operating theatre, the dental surgery environment is just about the safest place to be! With already high standards of infection control, the changes dental practices have had to make to protect patients from the unknown aspects of the current Covid pandemic have come naturally to their teams.

Communication channels

Website

Ensure that your practice website is up-to-date with all the pertinent current information in terms of appointments/care on offer, emergency points of contact, advice and so on. This should be easy to find – a pop-up on the homepage that is clear and unavoidable.

Email

You should be sending your existing patient base a ‘Keep in Touch’ email every month that will include:

• Updates and any changes in the current situation in terms of delivering dentistry
• If we do go into lockdown again, home care advice – for instance if they are an orthodontic patient with braces, direct them to bos.org.uk for advice on how to look after them
• Oral health education
• How they can look after their bodies and minds
• Community and Corporate Social Responsibility items – how you, and they, can help the community during this difficult time

In person

More on this in the next article! However, ensure that you and the team are on message, know what needs to be said, what needs NOT to be said and when to say it all.

Social Media

We think that ‘selling’ posts on social media are right out (we would argue that they often don’t work anyway).  Think what would you like to see on your Facebook timeline or pop up on Instagram? Above all else, this is the time to be authentic.  When this is all over and life and work return to some kind of normal, the public is going to be able to make choices again.  You can’t feel particularly connected to a building or indeed a scanner but you can feel connected to a person, a group of people or a team.

Here are our top tips for being authentic…the list of stuff you can post you will find in plenty of other places.

• Share what you are doing to help stay connected as a team, family or group of friends. Do you share recipes, Zoom through the week or send memes to each other?
• What do you love? For instance, many of us love animals. Like new-born babies we like to show our pets off. If you like cars you probably like doing the same.  Post you furry work colleagues and ask people to post theirs, cleaned the car…show it off, burnt a cake in the oven…tell us about it.
• Actions not Words! If I said to you, ‘Food banks are really low on items at the moment – it’s a good idea to pop something in their bins when you do your essential shopping’ you would probably agree I was right and then possibly do nothing about it. If I said ‘Today I gathered up all the pot noodles, tinned peaches and toilet roll I’ve been hoarding and took it all to the food bank (and showed you a picture of me and my full trolley, facemask, gloves and chemical warfare suit walking into the supermarket) you might, just might be more inclined to do the same…maybe without the suit.

So, let your imagination run wild……OR, just post emergency advice/oral care tips/absolutely nothing like many other practices and hope that when it’s all over you haven’t lost patients to more proactive, reactive and fun practices.