3 Steps to a Successful 12-Month Dental Referral Marketing Calendar

Want more high-value patient referrals over the next 12 months? In this episode of the Dental Referral Marketing Podcast, we break down the 3 specific steps needed to build a predictable, high-growth referral marketing calendar.

Whether you are a dental specialist looking to strengthen GP relationships, a dental office leader driving practice growth, or a DSO executive optimizing marketing ROI, this step-by-step framework is built for you. Dental CMOs and marketing directors will learn how to transition from reactive marketing to a structured, 3-step system that consistently fills your chairs.

Tune in to discover how to map out your touchpoints, maximize your referral network, and scale your practice production.

Action Steps & Resources:

• 🚀 Free 1-Hour Training: Claim your spot for our monthly "Level Up" Zoom training sessions. [Request your Zoom link: https://www.referralconduit.com/podcast-free-level-up-training ]
• 📈 Scale Your Referrals: Request limited (problem-focused) or comprehensive coaching sessions to accelerate your growth at ReferralConduit.com.
• 🎧 Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a weekly episode, and share this track with a colleague who needs to see it!

📑 Dental Specialty Marketing Months:

• February: Gum Disease Awareness Month
  Use this month to educate patients about gum health. Remind them that gum disease is often silent. Focus your messages on the importance of regular cleanings. 
• April: Oral Cancer Awareness Month
  This month highlights early detection and screenings. Dental teams are the first line of defense against oral cancer. You can offer free or discounted screenings to get people through the door. 
• September: National Gum Care Month
  This gives you a second chance to talk about gum health. It is a great time to focus on flossing. You can share daily tips to keep the conversation going.
• November: Mouth Cancer Action Month & TMJ Awareness Month
  November brings another push for oral cancer awareness. It is also the time to talk about TMJ disorders. Use this month to discuss jaw pain and specialized treatments.

Thanks for Listening! Please do not hesitate to reach out if you would like assistance for your dental practice(s) to grow your referral marketing program, on-board new dental associates to your referral network, plan and execute dental referral marketing events for your referral network, online seo/ai growth strategies so your dental website and practice are visible to potential new patients and more. 

See you in the next weekly episode, posted Monday mornings at 8am est. time. Referral Marketing made simple for Dental teams who want to grow!

Michelle Hougland

Host - Dental Referral Marketing Podcast

CEO/Founder - Referral Conduit Software

michelle@referralconduit.com

www.referralconduit.com

https://www.referralconduit.com/contact

https://www.referralconduit.com/podcast-free-level-up-training

Transcript

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So you know you should do a marketing calendar for your dental specialty practice, whether you're oral surgery, periodontist, an endodontist practice, or though, pediatric, but you just don't know where to start. You're in the right place. Hi, this is Michelle with the Dental Referral Marketing Podcast and also CEO of Referral Conduit Software. In this episode, we're going to be going over the key strategies that are required to building out a successful dental marketing calendar. In today's episode, you're going to learn how to reverse engineer your year. Even if it's mid-year, it doesn't have to be the end of December when you're listening to this episode. The best time to start is now. You're also going to learn what tools you can use to help map out your practices marketing calendar. And then last, we're going to go over what events and outreaches you should be placing on that calendar based on your practices' seasons of existence, meaning, are you a new practice? Are you in the midway of your career? Or are you a tenured provider looking to exit, maybe with a DSO, adding new associate, and so on? This podcast is designed specially for dental practices that are looking to grow new patients through referral marketing. This is referral marketing by working with, I like to coin it and I should trademark the phrase, relationship marketing. I can't tell you how many times I've used this through the years working with practices. Relationship marketing, it's not something that comes quick or easy. It is something, though, that's extremely rewarding and successful. If you apply the proven strategies, today's episode, let's start on point one. Learn how to reverse engineer your year. What do you mean by that, Michelle? Well, even if this is mid-year, you're starting your marketing calendar right where you are. I would encourage you that this marketing calendar should begin for the beginning of your next month. Now, if you're listening to this podcast on the 31st of a month, you may want to give yourself a little grace and expand it to the following calendar month. We're going to do a little homework here, and I hope you have pen and paper ready or your cat your phone ready to take notes so that you can apply these principles. To reverse engineer your year, I would look at there's three core strategies. One, let's look at the core elements of the year, such as summer breaks, holidays, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And then spring breaks for your area, which is just a week typically, but depending on your region of the United States or in other countries that you may be listening to this, spring breaks could overlap or go back to back. This could not only mean spring breaks for your practice and your families, but it's also for the referring practices in the area that you market to. So I would go ahead first of all and take into consideration these core elements because that will have an influence on your calendar and your efforts. For instance, you don't want to send your marketing associate out to go market to an area when their office is closed. Okay. Are there any dental-related events, conventions, dental-related months, such as like February, I believe it's uh gum disease awareness month or oral health month. Don't quote me on that. I'll have it in the show notes. And then September also relates to that. And I believe that one's gum disease awareness month. But look at it as it relates to your specialty. And you can just use Google. I love using currently Google Gemini. It's their AI version of Google. And just go in and search what are the dental related months or holidays and do it for your specialty. And then it's going to zip out as you, if you've ever used AI before, which I'm sure many on this call have. And if not, today could be the day. But go in and just enter, you know, um dental-related marketing months. And then it'll it'll give you ideas that you can add to your calendar. So we want to have those core elements. And the last thing we want to do is is there any times of the year that your practice is particularly closed? Or maybe you have one of your associates is expecting a new baby and they're going to be out for about three months on maternity leave. Or for the dads, I've had this as well with our associates where they are on paternity leave. Are there any major dental conventions that are going on that you need to be aware of? Not only if you're not attending, but your referral sources may be attending. And this could give you ideas for topics. So once you've gathered all that information, go ahead and make a list of those items. That's what we're going to be placing on a calendar. The next point we're going to talk about is what tools now can you use to map this out for your practice? I find, you know, there are some fancy tools that are out there, things that cost money. But if you're just getting started on this or you're you're trying a new technique by listening to this podcast, thank you, by the way, let's just start for free. You're going to want to try to put this together as lean and cost effective as possible. All right, last and final point what events and outreaches should you apply to your dental referral marketing calendar? These are going to be determined based on how long has your practice been in business? Are you at the beginning of your practice endeavors? Are you maybe midway and you're just looking to maybe add a new associate or two? Or are you at the latter part of the practice, the season, where you're maybe considering an entertaining DSO offers to sell your practice or to phase out? This is going to all determine the amount of effort and activities that you're going to put into your marketing calendar based on the amount of need that your practice has for referrals. The other thing is how many current referral sources do you have feeding new patient referrals to your practice at this time? This is something that you can find in your practice management software, whether it's Dentrix, EagleSoft, OpenDental. Oh my goodness, there's so many out there now. Denticon, SoftDent, Curve, you name it. They all, all the ones that I have worked with, they have a referred by report that you can pull. It's important to get the referred by coming into your practice, the ones, not the ones that your doctor is sending out to other specialists or other general dentists, but the ones that are being tracked as they're coming in. Hopefully your team has been tracking this. If they have not, don't get discouraged. They can start today. And I would encourage you to update your intake forms to add that. And then just, you know, in your next team meeting, make sure that you structure that as a requirement that it needs to be entered into when they're asking patients on the phone or on your new patient paperwork. I remember when I started working with One Practice, they didn't even have it as a field available on their new patient form to be able to say who may we thank for referring you. So if yours does not have this, I encourage you, please go put that on there today and make sure you share it out with your non-clinical team who are taking in the new patients coming into your practice. Make sure that it's on your website form as well so that you, when you pull this report, you know the number of referrals that are coming in. And also you know the number of referral sources or also known as your providers that are sending you patients. I always like to drill into the number of providers that you're receiving referrals from, because providers can change their location, their practice location many times, especially in this uh day and age in our dental industry. Uh, there's many times that a maybe a general dentist that's newer coming out of school will practice in this location two days a week, and then they go to maybe a completely different practice brand and work one day a week over there. So this is important information for you and your team to know. But regardless, go ahead and go into your practice management software, pull that report on the number of referral, uh, the name, the one that would have your name of your referring providers and the number, the detailed report that shows the number of referrals that they are sending into your practice. I would include, if your practice management software offers it, to also, when you're pulling this report, show the production that's coming as a result of these referral sources. Go ahead and pull this for the last calendar year. Uh, so just do January to December. It's really important to have a full 12-month view because there's an ebb and flow ups and downs. I know, for instance, March, October, gosh, August, those are usually really great months for production and referral sources. But the months such as July and December are really low because they do not have, you know, because you have holidays and vacations and that type of thing. The last thing is your allocated marketing budget. You can, I would recommend between 1 to 5% of your practices revenue for a calendar year. You can get this by running your production report. Uh, I encourage you probably look at your net production to keep it simple. This is the earnings after you have applied insurance adjustments. If you need any help with that, again, reach out. I do offer one-on-one uh Zoom virtual consulting sessions. We can look at your like a limited focus to be able to help you with a need, or if you're looking at more comprehensive, I can help you with that as well. But pull your report on your net production for the last calendar year. And from that, then just determine from that 1% up to 4% to 5% for your marketing budget for the next 12 months. This will determine how much money do you have to apply to your outreaches and events that you're going to place on your calendar. Um, I would encourage you, please, a pro tip, uh, don't come out the gate with a 5% marketing budget. If you're maybe midway through uh your practices season, maybe your provider is 10, you know, 10 years in, you have a good two to three weeks of patients on the schedule currently. Those are also new patients and surgeries. Um, don't, um, depending on your specialty, I know and uh orthodontists typically wouldn't have surgeries, so to say, but um uh usually about three weeks out scheduled, you would not want 5% marketing budget. I think you could still see a huge uh result based on your efforts on your marketing calendar from one to two percent, uh, and then uh it more of a grassroots boot uh boots on the ground effort. And then from there, you'll be able to say, okay, well, if I have, let's just say uh your practice did 1 million last year with one full-time provider, and uh you so from there you have 1% that you'll be able to apply for the year for your marketing efforts. Then you can reverse engineer your calendar based on considering like what we talked about, what are those core events, you know, the holidays through the year, what are the dental conventions through the year, um, what are uh spring breaks and the things we spoke of? And that'll let you know the amount of time that you have left on your calendar to be able to apply things such as two, I would recommend at least two CE educational group events a year and at least one social event a year. You want to spread these out, though, to get the most bang for your buck and your time, um, and not to fatigue your referral sources with too many things thrown at them at once. So I would say it at the at the maximum, one event a quarter would be sufficient. And try to stay away from the summer seasons. Um, just like you and your family probably enjoy having time off in the summer, so does your referral sources. And so, even though they may be gung-ho and excited to attend an event that you're planning, they just may not be in town because they're on vacation as well. So I have found over my years of uh being an executive or referral marketing director and having my own business that you just when you're working with dental practices, um, you just really try to stay away from those summer months. Use that for more like monthly like raffles for teams, or um you can use it for email campaigns or newsletters. But I would not plan any of those CE or uh social events typically during the summer months. So uh we like to break up um in corporate setting uh our seasons based on quarters. So for instance, Q1, January to March, Q2, uh April to June, Q3, July to September, Q4, October to December. I would recommend having a core event, outreach event in Q1, Q2, and Q3, but stay away from the summer months. Uh and then preserve Q4 for uh more of holiday outreaches and that type of thing and things, thankful, you know, gratitude, uh uh gifts and appreciation during the Thanksgiving time to show appreciation to our referral sources. So once you have uh written down your core events, your core holidays, your event, your educational and your social events that you'd like to do, and put those on the calendar, then you can fill in the gaps on those uh those seasons in between, those weeks in between you're having an event so that you can reverse engineer and back it up. So let's say you have a CE event that you have now put on your calendar for April. Uh, you want to then mark on your marketing calendar uh probably at least two months in advance to be able to begin announcing by outreach events, um uh seemed focused topics for deliveries for your referring offices, maybe lunch and learns as well, uh, to ramp up and get your referral network excited about your April event coming. So this way you can space out in between the flow of your events for this next 12 months on your marketing calendar. There's so much more that we could talk about regarding dental referral marketing and about your marketing calendar and how to structure and build that out. Uh, I have started a monthly uh level up training that is completely free. I do it via Zoom. If this is something that you would like to be able to dive deeper on, this is a group setting completely free. Make sure you check out the link in the show notes below. And I would love to connect with you guys directly. We're gonna be going over many different things that will continue to level up your referral marketing outreach efforts. By using these three points that we discussed in today's episode, you now have the simple framework to build out your own dental referral marketing calendar. Make sure you tune in weekly where I publish new episodes to continue to help build your marketing outreach efforts. Also, check out the show notes, the links below, as I hope to see you in our monthly group level up training. It's completely free in a Zoom call. I'd love to see you there. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of the Dental Referral Marketing Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and share with a colleague ready to grow their practice. Visit referralconduit.com for more tools and insights. I'll see you in the next episode. Have a great day, everyone.