Winston Churchill once said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” This certainly holds true for dental practice marketing.
If you are trying to encourage more patients to join your dental practice, it is critical to measure the results. And measuring results requires you to dig deeper than just a tally of new patients.
How much production was generated by the new patients? Once you know this you can compare the money spent on marketing with the return on investment; however you still need to dig deeper. There is a big difference between one-time production from patients who just wanted acute problems fixed and production that will repeat from patients who are now established.
New patients who become established patients not only bring more production in the long-term, but they also refer more new patients. Therefore, if your goal is to grow your practice in the long-term, dig a little deeper to assess the “quality” of your new patients.
- How many new patients received a comprehensive exam?
- How many new patients scheduled for recommended hygiene? For recall?
- How many new patients scheduled for at least their first phase of dental treatment?
Once you have this information, you can truly assess the results of your marketing plan. Then you can fine-tune your strategy as needed. In some cases, this may involve fine-tuning how you and your team guide new patients when they enter the practice, especially if the patients are coming in for an emergency.
Strategies are dynamic, which means the implementation gets better with proper refinements. If you are investing resources to make your phone ring, I encourage you to take a few extra minutes each month to make sure your marketing strategy is working for you.
Good article. Digging deeper into results! Yes! I often had wondered just how effective some of the common things that dentists do to market and I am not so sure that enough productive thought really goes into those things…e.g. sending letters out and gift cards to patients who happened to mentioned your name yada yada yada….personally I would not do those things. It has long been known that the very best marketing is through radio…not newsprint and not merely leaving this to staff to deal with as I think many dentists do. I would do radio and do it on a regular basis. It reaches more people…at home, in their cars, on their devices. And then Facebook!
But yes…dig deep and ask your new patient yourself…Thanks for the post Mike.
http://www.businessinsider.com/blodget-boom-will-become-bust-2015-2?op=1
Mike Smith …. I think I want to take back what I wrote about dentists advertizing on the radio…it may just betray my age….check out the outstanding graphs that Henry Blodget has on his website…within the article I linked.
Dennis Jeffers, DDS