How to Supercharge Your Dental Practice Marketing
Introduction Discovering What Works Enquiry Handling Supercharge!
As you are well aware, marketing and advertising is absolutely key to the success of your dental practice. However, after speaking to many dentists it seems there is uncertainty in understanding what s generating enquiries and what isn t. You are likely to have several ways of generating patient enquiries; adverts, a Google Places listing, your website etc. The problem is, how do you know what s working? You have the drive to implement new ideas but in many cases you do not always have the marketing budget. That s always the kicker. So what s the big secret when it comes to supercharging the marketing of your dental practice? Do more of what works, and stop spending money on what doesn t. Introduction It s a simple philosophy that has some incredible and powerful technology behind it and in this ebook we re going to guide you through this process so you can give yourself a huge ROI boost with your marketing. Imagine discovering that 80% of your phone enquiries are coming from one source, while several aren t bringing in any at all? Would you keep spending large amounts of money on those ads or would you cut them out altogether and allocate them elsewhere? Several dentists have made similar discoveries and are finding their marketing efforts are producing a much greater ROI. Here s how they do it.
discovering what works Before we dive into the specific insand-outs of the process, let s first identify exactly how your prospective patients are getting hold of you. If they are cold prospects who have never heard of you before, they may have found you by looking in the yellow pages or a local business directory where they took action by calling you directly from that - especially true if it s an emergency. Most likely, though, they would have done a Google search and ended up on your website. Most dentists have a phone number at the top of their websites as well as a contact form where they can email you somewhere on the site. This form gives your prospects another option to contact you if they don t have an emergency. From this we can tell that the two response mechanisms that your prospects and patients will use to enquire will be through the phone or email, so this is what you will need to track. You likely offer a large array of services, and as such there may be several pages that cover all these topics. Your job now is to find out what pages your visitors are viewing and which are leading to a phone call or having a contact form filled in. If you have a web designer looking after your website then you most likely have Google Analytics in place. This is a great system for tracking how many visitors you re getting, where they come from, which pages they re visiting and which are converting.
If you don t have Google Analytics applied to your website then speak to your webmaster and get it in place ASAP. Your website is a marketing engine and that engine needs diagnostics just like any other system. If you do already have access then it s wise to set up some Goal Conversions, which allow you to track which traffic sources and web pages on your site are leading to a form being filled out. So you have your digital activity covered, but what about your telephone calls? Google Analytics can only track your web activity, and it certainly doesn t cover print advertising. This is where call tracking comes into play. If you re using several ads to drive a telephone response to your practice then it s paramount you have unique phone numbers applied to them. This way you can use an online system like Mediahawk s call tracking software to track which of these traditional marketing efforts are working and which aren t. You should also be tracking which of your online traffic sources are bringing in phone calls too. By having Mediahawk in place you can track both your traditional marketing efforts as well as your digital efforts. You might be wondering what kind of sorcery allows each visitor that comes to your website and phones your practice to be tracked, and this is because each visitor is assigned a unique telephone number for every page they visit. This powerful technology gives granular insights into your marketing and advertising. If you want to see what call tracking can do for you. Click to learn more With your web analytics and call tracking in place, you can now see exactly which marketing channels are driving enquiries to your practice - both online and offline, email and telephone. With this information at hand you can begin to make better marketing decisions for your practice and start to drive it towards some real growth by supercharging your efforts, but before we do this we need to take care of what s happening on the other end of the phone when your prospects and patients call you.
Knowing where your enquiries are coming from is only half of the picture; you also need to know what s happening inside of your practice once those prospects and patients speak to your staff. This is where the same technology we talked about in the previous section comes in handy. ENQUIRY HANDLING ENQUIRY HANDLING
A huge pain point for many dentists is not knowing how the phones are being answered and if their staff are following instructions when talking to their patients. They want to give focused training to help staff perform better, but while they re busy working in the business it can be hard to find out what s going on in this area. Sometimes a receptionist can miss out on upselling opportunities, give misinformed advice or forget to enter patient details into a CRM system. A little bit of guidance can go a long way in catching these opportunities and fixing operational problems. In order to know what to fix, however, you need to listen to the phone calls in question - which is hard when you re working on serving your patients all day. That s where call recording can become incredibly useful. INBOUND CALLS By listening to your inbound calls you can monitor how well your staff are doing with their phone calls, identify any weaknesses and advise them on how best to fix these. This will help build a better relationship between your practice and patients and also increase revenue by fixing missed upselling opportunities. Another reason this is important is the fact not all patient enquiries are treated equally you will have some that are quite passive and others that will be urgent in nature. Emergencies will be treated differently to check-up appointments, as example. Mediahawk comes with a complimentary call recording system as part of your call tracking solution, and who doesn t like hitting two birds with one stone?
SUPERCHArGE You've got everything you need in place (call tracking, web analytics and call recording) and after a while you'll gather enough data to make some great factbased decisions, but what is it you should do with this data? call tracking web analytics call recording
The most obvious is by improving your advertising and marketing efforts. If you're doing more than one print ad - whether it be in the newspaper, billboards or otherwise - then you'll clearly be able to see which are working and which aren't. Take a look at the ads that aren't working and figure out if they're bringing in enough ROI to justify running them any longer. If they're not, cut them and put the savings from your marketing budget into testing something new. www.mediahawk.co.uk/blog/ (check out the Mediahawk Blog to get some great ideas.) Use this same system to see which keywords are driving enquiries. If you're running any pay-per-click ads (PPC) on Google, Bing or Yahoo you might find that many keywords aren't bringing in any leads at all, or are leading to phone calls that hold no relevance to your business whatsoever. If they're not working for you then, you guessed it, cut them out and allocate that spend somewhere else (you can test new PPC keywords or put it towards another channel). When you know what is working the next step is to split test those efforts against each other to try and increase response. This is a super way of giving yourself a quick boost in enquiries by leveraging something that has been proven to already work. You should only ever test one element of any particular marketing effort. For example, if you're testing to see how you can improve a newspaper ad then you might test a new headline to try and grab a readers' attention more effectively. Once you've decided to do this then do no more - you should change the headline and the headline only. You might also want to test new copy, calls-to-action and images to see if they make a difference. Once you've decided on what you're testing and which element you're going to change it's time to track performance - do this by using Google Analytics and Mediahawk to measure your digital and traditional efforts and see which one comes out as the winner.
There is much you can learn by using the right technology. As a dentist it s important to make sure you re looking after your patients, but as a business owner it s to be certain your marketing spend is going in the right places and your patients and leads are being taken care of in the right way. CONCLUSION If you are not using analytical software such as call tracking as part of your marketing strategy you will be missing out on a vital understanding of what elements of your marketing mix are making the phone ring. With this vital information you can then be more scientific in making your marketing efforts to be more effective.
Track Inbound Sales & Staff Effectively with Mediahawk! See how Mediahawk can work for you - request a free demo of our call tracking system today. Discover how you can: Boost the ROI of your marketing and advertising Save 1000's from your budget Increase staff performance for greater patient relationships Click to learn more