Do You Offer A Guarantee Of New Patient Opportunities?
Getting a guarantee of new patient opportunities from a marketing provider is the equivalent of a unicorn sighting. The few companies that will do that have confidence in their abilities and the optics to put more new patient butts in your chairs, not just a guarantee of “hits and clicks.”
It’s an important distinction; your entire marketing investment is wasted unless it leads to more new patient phone calls or online appointment bookings. Likes, follows, shares, hits, and clicks are only steps on the way to more qualified leads for your practice.
By the way, “more” is not a guarantee of performance. Your marketing firm should be able to provide firm numbers of new patient opportunities per month with agreed-upon remedies should they miss that goal.
By the same token, the words try, endeavor, attempt, focus on, strive and the like are weasel words. Either the company will produce agreed-upon results or you shouldn’t rely on them.
Get your new patient opportunities guarantee in writing. Anything else is marketing “smoke and mirrors.
Success Takes More Than Phone Calls
Most marketing firms can get your phones ringing, to a greater or lesser extent, but what happens then?
The vast majority of dentists swear up and down that their front office people are great. You might be one of those dentists. But how would you know how well your people are performing? Hopefully, you’re not spending hours hanging around the front office listening to new patient calls.
If you don’t have a mechanism in place to monitor your front office’s phone technique and their ability to convert prospects into appointed patients, you’re throwing away your hard-earned marketing dollars. When you think about the average case value of a new patient, you’ll realize that increasing the number of newly appointed patients by even 10-20 percent will make a huge difference in your bottom line.
Let’s Do This Right
SmartBox offers a variety of service level packages for dentists as well as a broad and growing range of marketing and efficiency products. Service packages require a contract, but the contract lengths are somewhat flexible.
For each service level, SmartBox will produce a certain number of new patient opportunities. There are some reasonable modifications from the “every month” requirement – outside events can influence the results to some extent – but the expectations are clear and the remedies to missing the goal as specified are laid out in plain English
Beyond our performance guarantee, we also offer Call Tracking & Monitoring services so that you know almost immediately if there’s an issue with any of your phone answerers. That aspect of our service was covered fully in Question 3.
The Bottom Line
If you hire someone to do work around your house, the expectation is that the work will be completed competently and effectively. And, in fact, most home service providers offer a guarantee that the work will be done right.
Why should your marketing provider be treated any differently? If you’re not getting a guarantee from your current firm, you may also not be getting the maximum return from your marketing investment.
Learn more about what you should expect from your current dental marketing firm, and what you can expect from SmartBox.