Marketing Analysis Dashboards Save Dentists Money
Marketing your dental practice is one of the many things in which dentists receive little or no training during school. Instead, when opening their own practice, most dentists throw together a team of vendors to help them, all of whom are all doing their own thing without knowledge of what the other is doing. Given this lack of coordination, the dentist is left to quarterback this team while trying to produce and manage their dental practice. Not surprisingly, this creates a lot of wasted dollars, especially when it comes to their dental marketing strategy.
The ADA reports that dental spending reached 122 billion dollars in the United States in 2016. And, depending on the practice’s individual goals, most dentists spend 4-8% of their budget on dental marketing – nearly 5 and 10 billion dollars!
Seeing that most practices convert only about 10-20% of the leads for which they are paying, these statistics could argue that a lot of the dental marketing budget went to waste. If the conversion rate among all U.S. dentists is 25%, that means collectively between 3 and 7 billion dollars were wasted on ineffective dental marketing strategies.
How Can You Stop Wasting Your Dental Practice Marketing Budget?
According to Wendy O’Donovan Phillips, President of Big Buzz Inc., dentists often take a “dart in the dark” approach to marketing their practices, dabbling in a few different strategies here and there – such as dental social media campaigns, direct mailers, Google Ads (formerly AdWords), and dental search engine optimization. But until the results of these “darts in the dark” are gathered together and analyzed, dentists will continue to buy into strategies that simply do not work.
Discover What is Working and What Isn’t When It Comes to Marketing Your Dental Practice
Gathering data for each new patient lead source can be time consuming, cumbersome and oftentimes incorrect. And, you simply cannot solely rely on the patient to provide this information by asking where they heard about your practice because staff may forget to ask, or patients may not always remember.
Instead, Market IQ from Practice By Numbers is a dashboard analytics software for dental practices that ties information together from all of your lead sources to help you automatically identify which campaigns are most successful for your dental practice.
Through the dental marketing dashboard provided by Market IQ, dentists can now easily see the number of new patients (leads) generated from a particular dental marketing campaign. By using a unique technology called dynamic number insertion, the dental KPI software is able to track the true lead source of all online leads. Figure 1 below shows how Market IQ displays new patient lead conversions by each source, making it easy to identify your best and worst dental marketing campaigns.
Converting Leads into New Patients
The cost of acquiring a new patient is not cheap, making it important to fully understand which dental marketing channels are performing best for your practice. Leads that do not convert into new patients cost money to generate and respond to, but they generate no income for the practice. Leads that are converted into patients will have different values based on the treatment booked.
With Market IQ, dentists can easily see both the total production booked and production for each specific new patient lead source. Plus, smart integration with your dental practice management software and Quickbooks lets practices understand their dental ROI (return on investment) and make decisions that help dentists and office managers stop wasting precious dental marketing dollars.
