If your dental chairs are full, but you’re not making enough money, look to your marketing.
There’s an old saying in marketing: You get the customers you market to. If your average case value is lower than you want or needs it to be, it’s time to shake things up in how you go about attracting new patients. You’re certainly not getting the kind of return on investment you should be from your marketing.
Are You Still Using An Outdated Dental Marketing Approach?
The time-tested formula for dental practices is to market based on low price, specials, discounts, and insurance acceptance. It’s time-tested, but its time has passed. Here’s why.
There’s too much competition.
If your price is low, one or more of your competitors will offer a lower price. Then you’ll have to cut your price even further, eroding your already anemic margins. This is a price war that only practices with the deepest pockets can hope to win.
The patients you want and need to grow your practice aren’t interested in discounts and specials.
Average wages in the United States have only grown 9.3 percent since 1973. The costs for dental procedures have grown 45% just since the year 2000!
Discounts and specials attract cash-strapped prospects who are interested in one-off procedures. There’s no comparison between those prospects and loyal patients whose lifetime value to your practice is orders of magnitude greater.
Dental insurance won’t fund your retirement.
Delta Dental is leading the charge to shift more of the costs of dental care to patients. At the same time, they’re decreasing reimbursement rates. You’re getting new patients who are only interested in the care that insurance will cover. With the exception of routine preventive care, and maybe a crown, that’s not much.
“These aren’t the new patients you’re looking for.”
If your new patient stream consists largely of people who will only pay as little as possible for care, you’re pretty much stuck. But those are the prospects you’re marketing too!
In almost any market, roughly 30 percent of prospects have the ability and willingness to pay more for the right dentist. Those are the “better” patients you want and need to grow your practice and make the kind of income you deserve.
Getting more and better patients in a consistent new patient stream is what SmartBox does for more than 550 dentists on three continents. And SmartBox dentists can enjoy much higher case values. Just as Dr. Thomas J. Feder of Belleville, Illinois.
“Our average case value has increased,” Dr. Feder says. “People are coming in looking for dentures and implants. The practice is now overwhelming our dental lab.”
What SmartBox has done for Dr. Feder, we may be able to do for your dental practice. Here’s how to find out.
Visit smartboxdentalmarketing.com and reserve your free, no-obligation Practice Discovery Session
. Invest 20 minutes of your time to discover how SmartBox reliably delivers more and better patients to your practice so you can focus on doing the dentistry.
We’ll take the results of that phone call and send you your personalized Patient Attraction Roadmap – again, absolutely free.
With SmartBox, you can have:
- more patients, more profits, more and freedom
- higher average case values, and
- a much greater return on your marketing investment.
Or you can keep getting what you’re getting right now… not enough.
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