In this short article, I’m going to share the simplest possible secrets of making marketing work for your practice. These secrets are not even known to some big companies whose advertising you may see every day. But once you see how simple they are, you’ll see that it’s 100% possible to make these secrets work for your practice.
What am I talking about when I say “wildly successful”? I mean that you know without question that your marketing is working. You know because you can see the results in black and white. And you see the new patients walk in the door and know which marketing action brought them there.
Despite what some people may tell you, achieving a great return on investment (ROI) doesn’t require a huge marketing budget or a marketing agency in a tall, downtown office building. It requires something completely different and much, much simpler.
It requires a fool-proof tracking system that traps every lead coming in from marketing efforts, preserves it, and provides fast analysis of the results.
The best—by which I mean
most effective—marketers will implement and get maximum utilization out of a system like this. They’ll know the results of every individual marketing channel running on behalf of their business or client. They can quickly tell you the dollar value of each lead. They can determine—fast—when to pull the plug on one campaign or marketing channel so it can be overhauled, and when to pour the dollars on another channel that’s hot.
It’s all in the tracking. When you have the right system measuring the results of every dollar spent, you know it’s working in your own practice. You also know how well it’s working and you can also see as soon as it’s time to change things up.
An Entirely New Generation of Lead Tracking
What is this new generation of lead tracking? It’s a cloud-based system that automatically captures every lead then tracks the outcome for each lead. This system can provide you with more accurate marketing feedback than most big advertisers have. Plenty of those marketing execs are just throwing bushels of money at the image they want to build for their clients. They can’t or simply don’t track the number of people who respond to their ads.
But you can. It can be surprisingly affordable given the fact that when you utilize it properly, you get more results for every marketing dollar.
If you can believe it, it was not so many years ago that this kind of work had to be done entirely by hand and on paper. Working out the value per lead might take someone a couple of days and a year’s worth of paper records. Now, a person with a practiced eye and a good tracking system can make that kind of analysis in minutes.
Benefits, in Brief
When you have access to a well-built system like this, here are some of the ways it can benefit your marketing efforts.
- No leads ever wander off to someone’s desk drawer, email inbox, answering machine, or shredding machine!
- Every lead is recorded in the cloud for safety and permanence.
- It’s possible to
instantly detect when your staff follow-up fails.
- You can
quickly know which marketing channel is giving you the best ROI.
- You also
know which campaign needs to be yanked for an overhaul.
- You can
analyze which leads turn into arrivals in your practice but never turn into closes for their treatment plans—another sign that one of your channels needs an overhaul.
- Every type of lead is accurately identified, including emails, online chats, completed forms on your website, phone calls in response to different offers or coming from different media.
- Any authorized person can access this information from wherever in the world they are, any time of the day or night.
- Each lead’s contact information is captured immediately and never lost.
How to Make It Work for You
When you have this type of automated system for your dental marketing tracking, you have access to your data in an Excel-type spreadsheet stored in Google Drive. Each lead, no matter where it comes from, will be listed there along with contact information, time, how they contacted you, and the medium that caused them to call. Was it a Facebook ad, website contact form or chat, or a phone call? Did they search for a dentist in their town then find your website or respond to a postcard?
Each marketing activity gets its own dedicated phone number and that number is recognized by the lead tracking system. So when the lead calls in on that number, the source of the call is automatically registered. That information will be entered along the left side of the grid along with the lead’s name.
Move down that spreadsheet to the right a few cells and you’ll see a record of each effort to reach the person, when the calls took place, and who made them. Move right again, and you’ll see if the lead was scheduled to arrive for an initial appointment and then if they actually showed up. Finally, you can see whether or not they were closed for treatment.
Fast Analysis Enabled
Let’s look at some of the examples of how an analysis of the information in this spreadsheet enables you to maximize your ROI.
If the initial lead was received on Monday and no one called them until Thursday, then right there you know your internal system is not set up to take advantage of every lead. It might not be your staff’s fault. Maybe the person who usually does this work is out sick and everyone else is busy doing their jobs the best they can. Whatever the reason, you can see where the fault lies and that helps you work out the right solution.
Suppose the lead is promptly called, they schedule an initial appointment, but then never show up. There might be a problem with the demographic receiving the ads. Maybe the ads or offers aren’t really reaching people who are sufficiently concerned about their dental health to spend money on it. Maybe the special offer wasn’t appealing enough. Or maybe the staff working with these dental patients don’t have the right script or adequate communication skills to fully close them on arriving for initial visits.
In many practices, the receptionist is the one that handles these calls in or leads coming in from the website or other channels. When things get busy at the front desk, the receptionist has to handle the people coming to her to be welcomed and sent to treatment, or who are scheduling their next appointments while they also update their insurance information. This is a big reason proper lead handling breaks down in so many of the practices we work with. Once you see the lost leads in black and white on your spreadsheet, it’s so much easier to realize how much money you’re losing by not addressing this staffing issue. That makes it simpler to make the right decisions.
When the channel for bringing new patients into your practice is broken down, the location of the breakdown will be obvious when you have a good dental marketing tracking system. There’s no need to ask anyone for their opinions about what happened to the leads or why your dental marketing isn’t getting a good ROI. You have a fast, analytical grasp of the situation just by scanning the spreadsheet.
Adding Marketing Experience to This System
When we set up one of these systems for XPress, Inc. clients, we add our expertise to their dental marketing tracking system. That means we help them identify the right solutions for leads that don’t make it all the way to being closed for treatment plans. We never waver in our intention to make every marketing channel achieve maximum ROI for every dental marketing client.
We can also customize a tracking system for your special interests or requirements. Do you want to know how many of your patients have been rescheduled for further care? Would you like to integrate postcards and magazines into your tracking and be able to analyze their success separate from other channels? We’ve done that.
We’ve also customized systems to help offices with specific internal problems. For example, missed calls on the weekend. We can set up an auto-response function to capture those leads and even get them booked for appointments. Or create automated chats that encourage website visitors to schedule their first appointments. Once we establish a tracking system, there are few limits to the number of ways we can make it work to your advantage.
If you’re ready for a dental marketing tracking system that can increase your ROI for every marketing dollar spent, give us a call.
