Ep. 122: Stop Wasting Your Marketing Money!
Chances are if you are a practicing dentist, you are doing some form of marketing. But is your marketing actually effective? Are you getting good ROI? Are you even keeping track of it? In this week’s podcast, Jeff goes over the importance of tracking your marketing’s effectiveness, some tips on how to maximize your ROI and how your marketing directly reflects your new patient flow.
Links:
The MGE New Patient Workshop - https://www.newpatients.net
Download the NP call log - https://www.mgeonline.com/np-call-log
Learn more about MGE - https://www.mgeonline.com
DDS Success - https://www.ddssuccess.com/
Jeff’s Email – jeffb@mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
What are the four basic components every marketing campaign needs tracked?
Cost, response, conversion, and return. Tracking only the final return hides exactly where a campaign is actually breaking down, whether it's not generating enough responses in the first place, or generating plenty of responses that the practice simply isn't converting into scheduled patients.
Why is response the single most commonly mishandled piece of marketing data, even though cost and return are usually easy to pull from software?
Cost and return can typically be generated directly from a credit card statement or practice management software once a patient's source is entered correctly, but there's no computer program that automatically tracks every incoming response and sorts it by exact source. That job has to be done by an actual person at the front desk, and it's the piece that consistently gets recorded too vaguely to be useful.
Why is a call log that just says internet or postcard as the source basically useless for making real marketing decisions?
If a practice is running three different postcard campaigns or several sources of online traffic at once, a vague source label makes it impossible to know which specific campaign is actually generating results, so improving effective ones or cutting ones that flopped becomes pure guesswork. The whole point of tracking marketing is comparing individual campaigns against each other, and that's only possible when the source is recorded specifically enough to tell them apart.
How does Jeff recommend actually solving the postcard tracking problem?
Put a small code on the postcard itself, tied to the specific mailing date and campaign, and simply ask the patient to read it back when they call in. This also catches something that's easy to miss, a patient might respond to a postcard that went out months or even a year earlier after leaving it stuck on the fridge, so without a code, that response could get misattributed entirely to whatever the practice happens to be mailing right now.
What's the recommended time horizon for actually evaluating a marketing campaign's return?
Check results at the one month and three month marks, since return on a new patient can keep building well beyond the first visit as they accept treatment over time, and larger treatment plans especially tend to get presented and accepted within that first quarter. Judging a campaign purely on its first 30 days can make a genuinely strong performer look weak before it's had a real chance to show its full return.
Episode Transcript
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How many ways could you think of to market a dental practice? I guarantee if I gave you enough time, you could easily list 20 or 30 different ideas that might result in more new patients, or at least increase treatment acceptance and improve retention among your patients of record. But since you don't have an unlimited budget, the real question with marketing becomes which options you should actually choose. The simple answer is whichever ones have the highest return on investment, the ones that genuinely work. But how would you actually determine that?
That's what I want to talk about in this week's episode. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host. This week I want to drill down on marketing analytics. I know that may not sound like the most exciting subject, but it's considerably more important than you might think. Ask any marketing expert, and they'll tell you analytics is half, if not 75 percent, of what actually makes a campaign successful, and it's genuinely easy to do once you know how. That said, I've seen it handled poorly, in some cases horribly, in probably 85 percent of the practices I've looked at.
So this week, we're going to cover simple, easy to implement analytics methods you can put into practice starting this week, methods that should improve your marketing's effectiveness and potentially make, or save, you real money.
So what do we actually mean by analytics? For starters, an accurate measurement of what your marketing campaign did or didn't do: cost, distribution, how many postcards you sent, how many ads you ran, which specific audience or demographic received it, homeowners, or people 45 and over if you're marketing restorative work, and the overall return on investment, the actual income tied to that specific campaign. It also means tracking what happened once these prospects actually contacted the office, did they convert or not, giving you a real sense of your conversion rate relative to the number of people responding.
With this data, you can determine a few things: how effective your marketing actually is, what it costs you per phone call, how many responses you're getting, how many new patients a given campaign is actually bringing in, and ultimately, the full return on investment, we marketed to homeowners in this zip code, got this many responses, this many converted, and here's what the practice actually made.
This becomes even more important once you're running multiple forms of marketing at once. If you were only doing postcards, plus referrals, there'd only be two real sources to track. I've genuinely never seen a practice running just one form of marketing though, you'll always have people who noticed your office because you're in the same strip mall as their supermarket, people referred by other patients, and if you participate in any insurance plans, patients coming directly from an insurance directory. Even running only two intentional marketing channels, you'll still end up with more than two actual sources of new patients.
If that were genuinely all you were doing, this wouldn't be as big a deal, you'd still want to track it, but separating the sources would be simple. The problem is, no practice is really doing just that. The average practice is running some form of mail marketing or a newsletter, plus something on Google or Facebook, is listed in various online directories, and if you're in a smaller town, might be advertising in a local paper or a coupon mailer too.
This is exactly where tracking becomes essential, when you're comparing every form of marketing against every other form, grading which ones are actually more effective. Why does that matter so much? Say one campaign costs $200 to acquire a new patient, and that patient is worth roughly $1,000 once they come in and accept treatment. Meanwhile, another campaign costs $400 to acquire a new patient worth that same $1,000. Wouldn't you want to direct more of your limited marketing budget toward the $200 campaign instead of splitting it evenly? You'd make more money overall, and if your practice is growing as a result, you can eventually afford to do even more marketing.
So you want to be able to grade every marketing effort against every other one, both so you can reinforce and expand what's working, and so you stop pouring money into something that quietly isn't. If you can compare everything side by side, you can decide what to reinforce, what to scale back, and what to cut entirely. Done consistently, this actually puts you in real control of your new patient flow.
I'll touch on this briefly, and I have a future episode planned specifically on marketing to your existing patient base too, since you absolutely should be doing that, don't assume that because someone's already a patient, you no longer need to market to them, that's a genuine mistake. But for this episode, let's focus specifically on new patient marketing.
If you could genuinely control your new patient flow, knowing exactly what it takes to bring in 50 this month, or 60, or even 70 if you're planning to bring on an associate, that creates real security and a real sense of control over your practice. The problem is that marketing analytics in the average dental practice tend to be handled purely by feel and opinion, which, honestly, is also how management often gets handled. How good a job is Susie doing? I feel like she's not doing well, since we had an opening in the schedule, even though her actual statistics, which nobody's tracking, might be genuinely strong.
The same thing happens with marketing. I don't think we're getting many new patients from that campaign, or the quality of patients from this one isn't great, when in reality the campaign might have generated 50 new patients and only two weren't a great fit. When it comes to analytics, and honestly management in general, and I know this might sound a bit cold or clinical, obviously you're dealing with real people, that's a separate consideration entirely, but when it comes to evaluating performance, a properly represented statistic simply doesn't lie, unless the numbers themselves are wrong. No matter how much I personally like a particular campaign, and I've been there myself, it's either generating responses that turn into something, or it isn't. It's either making money or losing it.
You have to be willing to approach your own marketing with genuine humility, not walk in assuming you already know best, because that attitude tends to backfire. I've had pieces I genuinely liked, that looked great, that simply didn't generate response. Thankfully not often, or I wouldn't be very good at this. But the point stands, you have to set your personal attachment aside and look honestly at what's actually working. You can't just will something into being good, unless someone genuinely isn't sending it out when they claim to be, or the responses aren't being tracked properly. You have to be willing to look at this with real humility, because ultimately, it's just numbers, folks. If you have accurate numbers, properly represented, you can see clearly whether something is actually working.
So what should this actually look like in practice? We want something genuinely simple you can implement in a dental office so you're not throwing money away. There are four basic components worth tracking for any marketing campaign: cost, response, conversion, and return.
Cost is straightforward, how much did I spend to print and mail these postcards, run this Google ad, or pay a company to manage my Google or Facebook ads? Response is the second: how many responses did this specific campaign generate? Most people assume what marketing produces is a new patient directly, it doesn't. What it produces is a response, a phone call, a form submission, or a walk-in. I saw your sign on the highway and that got me to come in, that's a response. You sent me a postcard for a discounted exam and I called after receiving it, maybe even the third copy of it, that's a response. I searched dentist near me, clicked your ad, and called, that's a response. With implant funnels and certain pay-per-click campaigns, you'll often get a form response instead, someone filling out an inquiry form, sometimes directly through your website requesting an appointment. That response still has to be followed up on, but a response is genuinely all your marketing is ever going to produce. From there, it's the office's job to convert that response into an actual patient.
So: cost, response, then conversion, did that response actually turn into a scheduled, seen patient? Don't fall into the trap of assuming a weak conversion number means the marketing itself, or the quality of the leads, was the problem. In most cases, unless your receptionist is genuinely well trained, the real issue is that the office simply isn't converting them.
And finally, return on investment. I'm often asked what time horizon to use when evaluating return. Think it through: if you send out postcards, get a batch of calls, convert maybe 50 to 60 percent of them into new patients, they schedule, show up, get diagnosed, and treatment gets presented, that whole cycle takes time depending on how the campaign runs. I'd generally expect to see some initial return within the first month. But the maximum return on a given campaign might not show up for a few months. So I typically recommend checking both the one month and three month marks specifically. Run Google pay-per-click, get a batch of responses, see what those patients generated in month one, then compare that against the cumulative total by month three, since that tells you the real trajectory. Technically, if someone becomes a lasting patient from a single campaign, that return could keep accruing for years, but checking the one and three month marks gives you a solid initial read, since that's usually the window in which more substantial treatment plans get presented and accepted.
Now, out of those four components, cost, response, conversion, return, which one do you think is most susceptible to human error and gets mishandled the most? Take a second and think about it. It isn't cost, and it isn't return, both of those can typically be generated directly from your financial or practice management software. If you're entering data correctly into Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, or whatever you're using, noting that a given patient came from a specific source, you can run a straightforward report on return. Cost is just as simple, check your credit card statement or your checkbook.
Conversion, if you've been listening to this podcast a while, you might guess is the weak link, and you'd be partially right, national conversion rates genuinely aren't great, usually not because receptionists are bad, but because they simply haven't been trained on what they're actually supposed to be doing. Still, in most practices, conversion can at least be tracked, especially with cloud-based call recording already in place.
The one that gets mishandled the most is response, and tracking it accurately is the piece most susceptible to human error. Why? You might assume there's some software solution for this, everyone seems to think we're living in some kind of world where you can just ask a computer how many calls you got and where each one came from. No such program exists. You'll get scattered pieces of data from different sources, but nothing that collates it all into one place where you can actually evaluate what's generating response. Run an implant funnel, and you can track responses from that specific funnel. Run Google pay-per-click, and it'll show which ads got clicked and which ones generated a call, assuming the person clicked to call directly, if they didn't, it won't show up at all. So you can track certain things when a response happens directly through a trackable channel, but there's nothing to track a referral, and nothing to track a billboard or radio ad. That has to be tracked by an actual human being inside the practice. It has to be someone's specific job to pull all of this together into one central, accurate place.
We've discussed the idea of a call log before, and I've offered it as a download previously, I'll put it on the episode webpage again. A call log records the patient's name, the date they called, what they were calling about, their chief complaint, an emergency, wanting an exam, and so on, and the source of the call or response. Ideally it also tracks whether they were scheduled, whether they actually showed up, and any relevant notes about the patient. You can download a version of this yourself, and we also cover it thoroughly in the MGE New Patient Workshop, along with a full marketing course on our online platform, DDS Success, links to both on the episode webpage.
Here's exactly where the call log tends to fall apart. The name gets recorded fine, the date gets recorded fine, the chief complaint is usually captured easily enough by whoever answers the phone. Where it breaks down is the source. I've looked at a tremendous number of these call logs, and in the last three years, I could count on one hand how many were actually filled out consistently and correctly. The source field just says call in, as if the patient spontaneously remembered a phone number while walking down the street. Or it says internet, which tells you nothing, were they searching for you specifically, or did they see an ad? Or it just says postcard, with no indication of which postcard, if you're running three different ones simultaneously, how would you know which one is actually working?
Here's the real problem: the entire point of marketing analytics is figuring out what's actually working, what it costs, and which campaigns deserve more or less investment. If you could take any process and strip out every inefficiency, imagine the fastest route between two points takes ten minutes and the slowest takes thirty, taking the ten minute route means you've eliminated the inefficiencies, freeing up time for other things. The same principle applies to marketing. Failing to record the actual source of a response is one of the biggest inefficiencies you can have, it leaves you completely unable to determine what's genuinely working, and the whole thing collapses into pure opinion.
There's also a more basic problem worth checking for: whoever's recording calls might simply not be logging every one, meaning you think a campaign is only generating ten responses a month when it's actually generating thirty. That has to be fixed first. But assuming every call is genuinely being logged, the next issue is getting the source right. If your team actually knew what specific information you needed, and it had been clearly agreed upon in advance, you'd start getting genuinely useful data.
I'd recommend keeping this call log in a spreadsheet specifically, not because I'm an enormous fan of spreadsheets for their own sake, but because they let you filter data easily, how many responses did I get from this one specific source? If you're not comfortable building a spreadsheet yourself, we offer a downloadable version, and I promise you, someone on your own team knows how to filter one and can show you.
What you need is an agreed-upon, ideally written, policy on exactly how each type of marketing gets recorded. It should be posted at the front desk so everyone can see it and agree on it, and whenever you launch a new marketing effort, the whole team should be told about it in advance, including how you specifically want it logged. We do the same thing internally at MGE, whenever we launch something new, reception and anyone else likely to field related calls gets briefed on it, along with exactly how we want it recorded, otherwise you end up with a note that just says mailing responded, when you're actually running fifteen different mailings at once, which one?
Let me walk through a few concrete examples you can adapt for your own practice. Start with Google. A patient calls and you ask how they heard about you. I just Googled you and found you. If you want to dig a bit deeper: did you search for something specific? I typed in dentist near me and you came up first, or second on the list. You may not always be able to tell whether that was organic SEO, which you should be actively maintaining regardless, since it's something you have to continuously work on rather than build once and walk away from, or a paid ad, but you're at least getting a real sense of it. If it was a specific ad they clicked, ask what it actually said. I know that might sound like an odd thing to ask a patient, but it isn't, everyone understands roughly how this works. Great, you found us on Google, what did you click on? There was an ad about missing teeth, and I have missing teeth. Perfect, note it down: Google keyword, missing teeth. Or, I was searching for implants near me, note that specifically too. Over time, this tells you exactly what people are actually responding to, and which keywords or ad themes are worth running more of.
For postcards, here's what I'd recommend: put a small code directly on the mailer. Say you're sending a postcard this July, put a short code in the corner, on the non-mailing side, something like NP724 for a new patient postcard sent in July 2024. When a patient calls mentioning the $99 cleaning, exam, and x-ray offer, simply ask, that postcard has a small code in the bottom corner, do you happen to have it handy? Yeah, it says NP704. Perfect, now you know exactly which specific mailing generated that response.
Here's something worth knowing: people sometimes hold onto postcards for a long time, stuck on the fridge, sitting on a desk for a year. I've seen this happen, a postcard from a year earlier, long since forgotten, quietly still generating responses that get misattributed entirely to whatever's currently being mailed. A code prevents that confusion. If you don't have a code system in place, you can still ask what the postcard actually looks like, does it have a photo of the doctor on the front, or a family sitting in a park, and give it an internal nickname your team can use consistently to track it.
Same logic applies to Facebook, I found you on Facebook, was it an ad, or something a friend shared? Or a billboard, which one specifically, the one on Highway 75? The one wrinkle you may run into is that with sufficiently thorough marketing, the same person might be exposed to your practice through three different channels at once, a billboard, a postcard, and a Google ad, so your ad might stand out to them purely because they'd already seen the other two. That's going to happen occasionally, and it's genuinely the least of your concerns. The point is simply getting your front desk to naturally dig a little deeper on where someone actually came from, without turning it into an interrogation, you don't need to ask what font was on the billboard or where they were standing when they saw it, just enough specificity to actually be useful.
Same with implant funnels, if you're running one, or several at once, you're already getting a form lead with a clear source attached. Whoever's compiling this data might keep that on a separate sheet specifically for funnel performance, tracking funnel A against funnel B against funnel C, since if one funnel is consistently generating new patients and another isn't, you can either call that vendor directly and tell them it needs fixing, or shift more ad spend toward the funnel that's actually performing.
Everything I've just walked through is genuinely simple to implement, and none of it can be automated by software alone. So how do you actually use this data once you have it? Maybe it's a simple monthly spreadsheet, with return calculated monthly or quarterly, ideally prepared for the owner doctor once a month by the office manager, or a PR director if you have one, this has to be someone's actual, assigned job.
Once you have it, you can start making genuinely intelligent decisions and cutting waste. You might look at it and realize Facebook is genuinely performing well, a huge number of responses relative to spend, currently at $500 a month, why not increase that to $1,500? Meanwhile a coupon mailer service isn't generating much of anything, so you drop it and redirect that spend into Facebook instead. And if your conversion numbers specifically are weak despite strong response numbers, that tells you exactly where to focus next, likely your front desk's phone handling.
This essentially becomes your marketing dashboard, showing you what to do more of, what to cut, and where potential problems actually live, opening the door to genuinely improving your marketing's efficiency and effectiveness. If you're currently spending $5,000 a month to generate an additional $50,000 in return, wouldn't you rather find a way to generate $100,000 instead? Of course you would, and this is exactly how you get there, by actually drilling down into these specifics. It takes real discipline, both from you and from whoever's managing this for you, until it becomes a genuine, consistent habit.
The real linchpin of this entire system is the call log itself. When you first put one in place, expect some calls to get missed and some information to come in messy or incomplete. That's normal. Your manager, or you, will need to follow up on it repeatedly, again and again, until it becomes second nature to everyone involved. If it isn't maintained consistently and followed up on regularly, you end up with garbage in, garbage out, and you're right back to being unable to make any genuinely informed decision about your marketing.
Do this consistently, and you can genuinely hit your targets and see real wins as a result, which is really the whole point. So there you have it, a fairly focused episode on one specific piece of your practice, but I can't overstate how important this is. Keeping this properly in place can save you real time, effort, and frustration, and prevent a genuine amount of wasted money.
I hope this helps. Don't forget the call log download on the episode webpage, along with links to the New Patient Workshop and DDS Success. If you have any questions about anything covered in this episode, feel free to email me directly, I do read and respond to these, maybe not always as quickly as I'd like, but I get to them, at jeffb@mgeonline.com, I'll put that link on the episode webpage too. If you'd like to learn more about MGE, you can reach us at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. Folks, have a great week, and we'll see you at the next episode.