Today we discussed the process and how to measure the effectiveness of your Dental Marketing Efforts.

Any that know our process understand that we advocate having a simple implementable plan to change most any facet of your life or practice.  The beauty and success of this plan is, in fact, the simplicity.  Too many over complicate things in life and then wonder why they don’t get results.  We on the other hand, suggest you have a simple plan and you take Action on it every day.  Too many spend a lifetime making a plan and then never get to the Action portion.  If you starting thinking the right things and doing the right things, what should logically be the results?  You got it, the right things.  

So how does this relate specifically to a dental office you might ask?  We will examine the marketing of dental offices.  We actually audited an office a while back to measure the effectiveness of their marketing.

Their external marketing efforts resulted in $176K in dentistry.  If you do the math on the number of patients, this equals $1520 in revenue per new patient.  Pretty impressive!  Their internal marketing produced $155K in revenue, or $1023 per patient.  Now at a glance, one would think, go external marketing, it works!  Now, when you factor in the cost of the external marketing ($90K) which equals $775 per patient, the net result of the external marketing is $745 per patient.  Suddenly, when comparing the external $745 per patient to the internal $1023, internal is looking better.  Now what does all of this mean for your practice?  Take the time to measure your results so you can make better decisions.  Very few practices that I go into have even half the measurement in place this office has.  They really are rock stars.  Now with this analysis in hand, they can analyze each individual marketing effort compared to the aggregate total and make killer decisions about what Action they want to take in the future.  

What Action did I suggest to them?  Decrease their external marketing and put their internal marketing on steroids.  Given they spent $775 per new patient on their external marketing, they could give each referring patient 3 crisp $100 bills and cut their cost in half.  How impactful would it be to give $100 to your patient for referring?  How excited would they get about that?  Probably more so than if they got a $35 credit on their account.  Now, if you have never measured your actual cost per patient to acquire them, how could you make a good decision on what to do differently?  You couldn’t.

If you are interested in having a marketing audit performed on your practice, contact us!

If you want to watch the video on this topic, click the link at the top to be taken back to the Blog page where you can play it.

Darren Kaberna 

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http://www.acceleratemypractice.com/