The single biggest mistake that dentists make with their marketing is not having a process in place to accurately track their return on investment (ROI).
Most dentists rely on new patients to recall where they saw a dental practice advertised. But research has shown that patients’ recall is spotty at best. If you rely on self-report, you’re not getting accurate information about what parts of your marketing are working.
That means you’re throwing away some of your hard-earned marketing dollars. Few dentists can afford to let that happen.
There is a definitive way to precisely measure your marketing ROI, and that’s phone tracking.
More patients are booking first appointments through dentists’ websites. The vast majority of new patients, though, still pick up the phone and call your practice. That’s what makes phone tracking so valuable.
At SmartBox Web Marketing, we offer our dentists our exclusive Zetetics® phone tracking services. We assign unique numbers to each of your marketing vehicles – newspaper ads, radio and/or TV spots, Yellow Pages ads, social media posts, and so on. Each of those numbers is forwarded to your office phones.
When a call comes in, Zetetics automatically logs the marketing source of the call, records the call for later review, and saves everything in an easy-to-access database.
SmartBox reviews each and every call for appropriate phone technique on the part of your staff. Problem areas are identified and brought to your attention for correction.
We send you two monthly summary reports – a Call Matrix Report and an ROI Report – which we review with you at monthly Strategy Session calls. In fact, over 120 separate reports are available with Zetetics.
You’ll know every single month what parts of your marketing are providing excellent ROI in the form of new dental patients, and which ones need to be tweaked for better performance.
But first the phone has to ring, which brings up the other side of your dental marketing. Patients need reasons to notice you and choose you.
There’s an enormous amount of advertising vying for people’s attention and the Internet is particularly crowded. Your website has to rank on the first page of search engine results or the likelihood is high that prospective patients won’t find you. Your website content has to provide easy-to-understand answers for their dental problems and give them the confidence to schedule that first appointment.
It takes multiple contacts with a prospective patient before they decide on a dental provider. That means you have to stay in front of those patients until they’re ready to buy. Email campaigns, e-newsletters, informational social media posts, white papers, and videos provide the necessary “touches” to convert prospects to patients.
That’s a lot of work for any dental practice. Fortunately, SmartBox provides complete dental practice marketing services.
If you’d rather focus on what you went to dental school to learn to do, contact us.
Go to www.smartboxwebmarketing.com/blueprint and schedule a Patient Attraction Blueprint™ session. They are free to serious dentists who want to see a patient attraction system that can double their practice. You can get more patients, more profits, and more freedom.