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How to Grow and De-Stress Your Dental
Practice – Get Expert Tips and Advice

May 22, 2018 5 minutes To Read

Everyone knows there is no one single “best’” way to market your dental practice. All practices are unique and the patients that they serve respond to different types of marketing messages.

This said, there is an easy way to evaluate the effectiveness of all the dental marketing sources that practices use. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on a dental KPI dashboard called Market IQ. This automated dental analytics software gathers all the information needed to evaluate the performance of each lead source for your practice. With this information, it is easy for each dental practice to discover which marketing is producing the best leads.

Let’s look at how it works.

Easily See Which Numbers Your Practice Should Watch

Dental practice management software (PMS) plays a vital role in running a modern dental practice. Unfortunately, most dentists (and their staff) find it cumbersome and time consuming to extract the information needed to understand critical aspects of their practice. Many practices simply look at the number of new patients that came into the practice on a monthly and annual basis. When this is done, practices only see the final results and miss a lot of important information that leads to the results. This is no way to compete with corporate dental firms that utilize smart data to make marketing decisions.

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With the dental tracking software, Market IQ, it automatically provides the first set of numbers to look at when evaluating your practice’s marketing performance, including:

  • Total number of leads generated
  • Number of leads converted
  • Ratio of leads converted
  • New patients added

The Lead Conversion by Source bar graph makes it easy to visualize which lead sources are contributing the most conversions to new patients in the practice.

Call-Tracking for Dental Practices

To ensure the accuracy of the information regarding sources of leads, the dental KPI software, Market IQ, utilizes a technology know as Dynamic Number insertion.

Here, each marketing channel receives a unique phone number that allows the dental marketing software to track the source of the call-back number to the marketing campaign that generated it. With this smart dental call-tracking feature, the software not only identifies the source of leads, but also provides recordings and transcriptions of the conversations for all calls received. This allows practice managers to evaluate critical telephone skills and coach team members as needed to help improve conversion rates.

Best Dental Marketing Lead Sources for New Patients

3 Critical Metrics

ROI: Market IQ brings all of your dental marketing data together and merges it with your practice management system to give you instant access to view your dental marketing return on investment (ROI). Within the dental dashboard, the ROI home screen makes it easy to see the value that your dental marketing created in terms of production booked and total opportunity created. The New Patient Production by Referral Source is displayed so dentists can easily identify which dental marketing channels yielded the most revenue for their practice from these new clients. The Production by Referral Source shows production that was generated for a given time period by existing patients.

Treatments: The next critical metric to look at is the Treatment Presented by Referral Source. In the dental KPI software, Market IQ, it displays this information in an easy-to-understand bar graph that reveals the amount of treatment that was presented and accepted by each lead source. Your team may be doing a great job with their phone and treatment presentation skills, but if the leads converted do not buy into treatment recommendations, they are of little value to the practice.

One great example of this is “Free Whitening” dental marketing campaigns. Some offices find that most patients seeking the free whitening will do very little work and thus have cost the practice in wasted time, materials and precious marketing dollars. Other lead sources may attract patients that desire cosmetic dentistry and have the resources to afford the procedures. If a practice is focused on attracting patients with dental emergencies, they should expect a lower amount of new patient production for the referral sources for those campaigns. Using dental software, Market IQ, dentists can track leads to determine if they are converting the patients into good long term clients.

See Figure 2

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Cancellation rate: The final – and critical metric – to look at when evaluating the value of your marketing lead sources is the canceled/broken appointment rate. Market IQ automatically tracks this information for your practice; allowing you to see if some of your marketing sources are generating patients who are not committed to treatment.

With these three critical metrics, the office can confidently decide which marketing is generating the best clients for the practice and focus their investment of time and money on the ones that benefit the practice the most.

Market IQ makes it easy for your dental practice to identify it’s best marketing sources and invest wisely.

Give it a try today and call (866) 216-8416.

 

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