Ep. 261: The Hour a Week That’s Costing You Hundreds of Thousands
You could be spending thousands on marketing without actually knowing which campaigns are bringing in patients. In this week's episode, Jeff breaks down the simple feedback your team should be tracking and how it can help your campaigns bring in more new patients.
New Patient Call Log - https://www.mgeonline.com/np-call-log/
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Questions From This Episode
What's the one word Jeff says determines whether your marketing actually works?
Feedback. Conversion and case acceptance matter for overall practice income, but marketing itself only produces one thing, a lead, a phone call or inquiry from someone interested in your services, so the real question is whether you're actually tracking what happens to those leads well enough to know which specific campaigns are generating them.
In Jeff's postcard example, why does tracking specifically which postcard generated a response matter so much?
In the example, postcard A brought in 20 calls and $20,000, postcard B brought in 100 calls and $185,000, and postcard C brought in 15 calls and $12,000, all for the same mailing cost, an obvious signal to pour more budget into B. But if the new patient log only records the source as postcard without distinguishing which one, a practice running three different mailers at once has no way to actually act on that difference.
What's the simple fix Jeff recommends for tracking which specific postcard or mailer generated a given response?
Put a small code in the corner of the mailer itself, tied to the campaign and mailing date, and have whoever answers the phone ask the caller to read it back. It takes almost no extra time on the call and turns a vague postcard entry into something that actually tells you which specific campaign is working.
What are offline conversions and enhanced conversions for leads, and why does failing to log this data actively damage a campaign?
These are the mechanisms by which a practice reports back to Google or Facebook which leads actually booked, showed up, and accepted treatment, letting the platform's bidding algorithm adjust and spend more toward what's actually converting. If a practice never logs those outcomes, the platform and the marketing agency are both flying blind, and a genuinely high-performing campaign can quietly get deprioritized or even canceled for looking expensive, when it was actually working the whole time.
What are the two specific action items Jeff recommends every practice do this week?
Get, or start actually using, a new patient call log, downloadable from the episode webpage, tracking not just that a lead came in but its specific source, whether it booked, showed, and converted. And separately, contact your digital marketing provider to find out exactly what information their dashboard needs from your team, then make entering it a non-negotiable daily task rather than something that quietly gets skipped when the practice is busy.
Episode Transcript
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New patient marketing. In the dental space, this is unsurprisingly a hot subject. From a search perspective, it really only ranks below supplies and equipment. So you don't have to be a genius to infer that the large majority of dentists are intent, or at least interested, in getting more new patients.
If this is you, and it will be for the majority of people listening to this show, how are you actually measuring whether your marketing is working or not? And further, I'd imagine the majority of you listening have outsourced some or all of your practice's marketing. In other words, if you're doing postcards, flyers, SEO, pay-per-click on Google, Facebook marketing, and so on, you've contracted with a company or agency to do it for you. It's genuinely rare to find a practice these days running its own Google pay-per-click campaigns or mailing its own postcards.
With that in mind, are you completely clear on what your practice should actually be doing, not the company you hired, but what your own team should be doing to make sure that marketing is, and stays, effective? Full disclosure, that's a bit of a loaded question, because I talk to a lot of doctors, and to a person, they don't fully understand this. I've yet to find one who completely does everything their practice should be doing to maximize their marketing. That's what I want to talk about in this week's episode. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
Some of what I'm going to cover this week is a little technical, but it's nonetheless extremely important, especially if you're a doctor or an office manager. I'll give you my word on two things. First, everything I'm about to cover is something you genuinely need to know. You may not want to know it, and I understand that, but you absolutely need to, because ignorance of what I'm covering here is costing you both new patients and potentially tens of thousands of dollars right now. Second, if I bring up something technical, I'll explain it fully, hopefully in the least boring way possible, and stick to exactly what you actually need to know.
So, what should you be doing in your practice that determines whether your marketing is actually going to work? One word: feedback. What do I mean by that? You were probably expecting me to say receptionist conversion rates on incoming new patient calls, or treatment acceptance. And yes, those genuinely matter for overall practice income and marketing return on investment. But when we're talking about marketing specifically, what is marketing actually supposed to produce?
Why are you doing Google pay-per-click, Facebook ads, postcards, a billboard? You're doing all of it to generate phone calls or leads. That's essentially the goal. If you took this outside of healthcare, since we don't typically use the word leads in this industry, we call them opportunities or incoming calls, but in any other business, this is simply called a lead. If I send out a postcard, what do I get from it? A phone call. That's a lead, someone interested in my services. I advertise a discounted cleaning, they call to set an appointment, that's a lead. From there, obviously, it's on the receptionist to actually convert that lead into a patient. But all your marketing is ever going to produce is a lead. That's it.
So what should you actually be doing to affect the number of leads you're getting? This is exactly where feedback comes in. Let's start with non-digital marketing, postcards, referral programs, billboards, and so on. What kind of feedback should you be collecting that might affect your marketing? For these, it's fairly simple. First, I'd want to know how many leads I'm actually getting from it. Second, I'd want to know what happened to those leads, did they schedule, did they show up, did they accept treatment, and how much did they accept.
Why does this affect your marketing? Because this feedback is what lets you, or whoever's working with you on these campaigns, actually be responsive about what marketing you should keep doing. Let me give you a simple example. Say you're sending out three different postcards, all a little different from each other, different photos, slightly different copy and headlines, and you're mailing 10,000 of each, so they all cost exactly the same to send. We'll call them postcard A, B, and C.
Postcard A gets you 20 phone calls, resulting in 10 appointments that actually show up, and you made $20,000 off of it. Postcard B gets you 100 calls, 50 appointments, and $185,000. Postcard C gets you 15 calls, 5 appointments, and $12,000. So A made you $20,000, B made you $185,000, and C made you $12,000. Looking at that from a purely analytical perspective, which one do you want to do more of? This isn't rocket science, you're going to want to pile on with B.
But how would you actually know this? Only if you have real feedback, if you're actually tracking what's happening. And this is exactly the problem. Most offices either don't have a real mechanism to track this, or they have one and simply don't use it. I've seen this constantly, and I genuinely can't think of a better analogy for it, it's something so easy and so valuable that it's honestly shocking how often it just doesn't happen.
Say you have a new patient log, a simple sheet you fill in when new patient calls come in, I'll give you a downloadable example on the episode webpage. Most offices either don't keep one at all, or don't keep it up to date. But say you do have one, and you're filling out the names, Joe Schmo called about this, and so on. Then you look at the source of lead field, and it just says postcard. But you're sending out three different postcards. How would you know which one it actually was? Unless the patient physically brings it in and you happen to reconcile it against your log, you're never going to know.
So you know, broadly, that you're getting patients from postcards, but you don't know which specific one. If you actually knew they were all coming from postcard B, you could pile on and send out a lot more of B. But you don't know that, so you'll still get some new patients from postcards generally, assuming someone's even tracking that far, but you could have gotten considerably more if you knew specifically which card was working.
The fix here is genuinely simple. If you're sending out a postcard or any piece of mail, put a small code in the bottom right corner, tiny font, something like postcard and the month and year, PC 7 slash 26. When someone calls in and mentions they got a postcard, whoever's answering the phone can simply say, do me a favor, what does it say in that small print in the bottom right corner? Seven twenty-six PC. Great, now you know exactly which one that was, say that's postcard B, while postcard A was coded 0626 and postcard C was 0826.
You might also have a tracking phone number for each card. Most people don't, they just use one tracking number for all their mail combined, which usually plugs into some kind of dashboard showing you the calls coming in. If you're running pay-per-click, you likely already have something similar. But even then, if the data never actually gets entered, you'll never know what's really happening. I genuinely dislike building systems that rely purely on human data entry, since a button inevitably doesn't get clicked, or a form doesn't get filled out. It would be more ideal if this plugged directly into your practice software, and some people have tried building that, I've seen some genuinely poor attempts at it, since integrating with your software isn't nearly as simple as it sounds, and you still have to make sure that data actually makes it into whatever dashboard or sheet you're using. At this point, for a lot of practices, this still comes down to actual manual data entry.
So how hard is that data entry, really? Not hard at all, maybe an hour of work a week. But that single hour a week could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, because it's what actually gives you real feedback on which marketing is working and which isn't.
So if you've attempted this before, you have a new patient log or some kind of tracking system, and it isn't being used regularly, why not? I usually find it comes down to two reasons. First, people say they're busy, and because they can get away with it, it feels somewhat optional in their mind. We had twenty patients in the office today, so we forgot to log that. Fine, but now you have zero feedback.
Let me give you an analogy. Say you're prepping some teeth or crowns on me, and you give me anesthetic. What do you ask me before you start drilling? Do you feel anything, you might feel a poke, does that hurt? If I say yes, you'll give me more anesthetic. If I say no, you won't. Say you start working and I say, that's starting to feel hot, or that hurts, you'd give me more anesthetic. You're getting real feedback from me the whole time.
Now imagine you poke me to check whether the anesthetic's working, and I just stare at you and say absolutely nothing. Do you feel that, Jeff? Nothing. What do you actually do at that point? You can't do anything, because you genuinely don't know whether I'm numb or not, and that would be a genuinely awkward situation. No feedback on your marketing, or inaccurate feedback, is essentially the same thing, and most people don't fully realize that.
Half of marketing is exactly this, data gathering and data analysis. It isn't just sending things out or coming up with clever things to say, it's looking at what's actually working statistically, not what people feel. This funnel seems to be really working, or I like the patients we're getting from this postcard, those are just opinions. Real marketing data tells you, we got this many people, we made this much money, and lets you know definitively whether something was actually worthwhile. If you're not collecting that data in your practice, you genuinely have no idea. That same concept applies to any small business trying to make its marketing dollars actually count. I don't market without this information, it would be like driving with my windshield blacked out, I wouldn't know where I was going. I could have a campaign that looks genuinely great on the surface and turns out to be a complete dud, and I'd simply never know it.
That covers the non-digital side. What about digital marketing? Many of you listening are likely doing some form of it, Google pay-per-click, local ads, Facebook marketing, maybe an implant funnel. Here, a lack of feedback isn't just an inconvenience, it can genuinely damage your campaign. I can't stress this enough.
If you're running Google ads, you're most likely working through a marketing agency or provider, and they've likely given you a dashboard to log into. You may or may not have actually looked at it. The software most of these companies use for this is called GoHighLevel, often abbreviated GHL. Agencies use it because it's easy to customize and can be made to look like their own proprietary dashboard, letting each company brand it with its own specific look, and it isn't especially expensive to run.
What do these dashboards actually show? Generally, the calls that came in, with ways to mark whether the person actually booked, or whether it was a bad call, wrong number, called for a different practice, not a valid lead. It'll typically show whether they booked and whether they converted for treatment, and in a lot of cases, you can actually listen to the recorded calls directly. You'd have to check with your specific provider, but this was very likely covered during your onboarding, even if you don't fully remember it now.
A lot has changed with Google advertising over time, and many pay-per-click campaigns run through an agency now use something called offline conversions and enhanced conversions for leads. The offline part refers to your dashboard, Google is running the ads, but you're collecting real outcome data back in your office, and that data has to be fed back into Google, which then adjusts your ad campaign accordingly. Facebook has an equivalent version of this called conversions, or offline events. In plain terms, by entering this information into your dashboard, you're telling the platform when a click or a lead actually became a real call, appointment, or patient. Here's this person, they called off this number, that was Jane Jones, Jane Jones booked, Jane Jones showed up, Jane Jones accepted this much treatment.
You might wonder what actually happens with this information beyond simply checking whether your marketing is working. There's genuinely more to it. If you're running enhanced conversions, which most Google campaigns are, this information you're entering gets fed back to Google or Facebook, depending on where you're advertising. Once those results go back to Google, its bidding, and we all know roughly what a keyword is, implants, emergency dentist, specific terms people search for, now has a significant AI component built in. Google's bidding can adjust using real outcomes instead of pure guesswork. It sees that a particular campaign is genuinely producing appointments and revenue, and it adjusts to do more of exactly that, to generate more patients like it. Your agency can see the same thing and adjust the campaign accordingly.
But if the office never actually logs those outcomes, if someone glances at the dashboard once and never touches it again, there's simply nothing to send back to Google or Facebook, and both the platform and the agency end up flying blind. You could have a pay-per-click campaign genuinely performing well, bringing in a steady stream of patients, and it gets changed or dropped entirely purely because your practice never provided any feedback. The AI adjusting your bids is only working with the information it's actually given. Or worse, the campaign is genuinely working, but you look at the ad spend, decide it's too expensive, and cancel it, when it was actually generating real new patients the whole time, something that would have been easily avoided just by clicking a few buttons and entering a little information.
Again, how much time does this actually take? Not much at all, I've done it myself. What we're really looking at here is a small amount of time with a genuinely massive potential payoff for your practice. It also makes your marketing company considerably more capable of actually doing what's best for your office. And look, I understand people get busy. But weighing the time against the outcome here, this is genuinely one of the higher return-on-investment actions you could be taking in your practice. That single hour a week could be worth tens of thousands of dollars and a considerable number of new patients. Looked at that way, its real importance becomes obvious.
Getting this data isn't hard, and it shouldn't be something that quietly falls through the cracks because someone got busy, especially given the real dollars you're actually spending on marketing. I'd genuinely bet that if whoever's responsible for this at the front of your practice truly understood how this information gets used, and what not having it actually costs, you'd start seeing it logged regularly and accurately. It shouldn't be optional, and getting it right would be a genuinely significant win for your entire practice.
So, a shorter episode this week. I'll leave you with two action items, and I'd genuinely encourage you to actually do both, since they can have real, meaningful effects on your business. First, if you don't already have a new patient call log, get one, you can download an example on the episode webpage. If you already have one, make sure it's actually being kept regularly and accurately, and look at it often enough to actually steer your marketing decisions. That covers anything not already tracked through a dashboard.
Second, talk with your digital marketing provider and find out exactly what information they need entered into whatever dashboard they've set up for you, then make sure it actually gets provided. Don't treat it as optional, make sure that data stays current every single day, because you'll genuinely find your ads start performing better and hitting harder as a result. And trust me, your life and your practice will become considerably easier once you're actually operating with real feedback instead of guessing.
So, a shorter episode this week, but I can't overstate how important this is. Please, genuinely, put this into practice. I've got that new patient log available as a download if you'd like it for your own office. If you'd like to learn more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. Folks, have a great week, and I'll see you at the next episode.