Ep. 69: Six Things Every Dentist Should Know About Marketing
There are a ton of options out there for advertising your practice (direct mail, SEO, Google ads, social media, implant funnels, etc), but what do YOU need to do from a business owner perspective to make sure your marketing is highly effective and doesn’t waste money? That’s what Jeff covers in this week’s episode!
Topics:
6:42 – Having the right expectations
9:23 – Setting your budget
10:47 – Tracking results
14:30 – Understanding the “production line” as it relates to new patients
18:59 – The two most important metrics you need to use
26:00 – Getting new patients on the schedule
29:05 – Making time to manage your marketing campaigns
Links:
New Patient Call Log - https://www.mgeonline.com/np-call-log
New Patient Intake Form - https://www.mgeonline.com/np-intake-form
Mystery Call - https://www.mgeonline.com/your-mystery-call
The MGE New Patient Workshop - https://www.newpatients.net
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Questions From This Episode
Why can't an owner doctor just fully hand marketing off to an outside company?
Outsourcing the work is fine, but it doesn't remove the owner's responsibility for the outcome. As the executive of the practice, the buck ultimately stops with the owner if new patient numbers fall short, the same way hiring a hygienist doesn't remove a doctor's responsibility for a patient's health. There are certain things about new patient marketing that have to stay under the owner's control no matter who's actually running the campaigns.
What response rate should you actually expect from postcard marketing?
Most people guess somewhere between one and four percent, but the real average for new patient mail marketing sent to a broad general area is about a quarter of a percent. That means it takes roughly 400 postcards to generate one phone call. Knowing that number ahead of time prevents the common reaction of assuming a campaign failed when it actually performed right around average.
Why is tracking response so critical, and who should actually be doing it?
A marketing piece doesn't get you a new patient directly, it gets you a response: a phone call, an email, a form fill. Whether that response actually turns into a new patient depends on what happens next in the practice. Tracking has to happen at the front desk, every single time, using something like a new patient call log, since without it there's no way to know which marketing channels are actually working and which ones just look active.
What are the two numbers that actually tell you whether marketing is working?
Acquisition cost and return on investment. Acquisition cost is simply total spend divided by new patients gained, and it varies a lot by case type, a higher acquisition cost is perfectly fine if the average case value is high enough. ROI compares total marketing spend in a given month against what those new patients actually paid the practice that month, and it needs to be tracked consistently, since a strong ROI early on can quietly start sagging over time if nobody's watching it.
Besides the marketing itself, what else can quietly tank new patient numbers?
Two things inside the practice: how well the phones are converted, since the national average for converting a new patient call into a scheduled appointment is only 23 percent, and how far out the schedule is booked. If a new patient calls and can't get an appointment for three weeks, most people without an existing loyalty to the practice will simply call somewhere else, no matter how good the marketing was that got them to call in the first place.
Episode Transcript
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If I asked you, or any other dentist on the planet, whether you'd like to get more new patients, I'm sure you'd say yes. There might be a few outliers, but I'd guess 99.99 percent of dentists would say yes, and it doesn't take much thought to figure out why. New patients drive growth, they expand the practice, and they keep it relevant and alive. The problem is that over the last fifteen years, the number of options for getting new patients has exploded, especially with internet marketing, social media, implant funnels, and so on, which makes it genuinely difficult to decide which path to choose. That's what I want to talk about this week, because no matter what you're doing, whether you're using an outside company or handling some of it yourself, there are six specific things every owner doctor has to know about their new patient marketing to make sure it's actually successful. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
I want to start with a mindset I see constantly in this industry. What usually happens is, you decide you need more new patients, you look around online or ask a friend, you find a company, and they'll send out postcards, run your pay per click, build you a funnel, whatever it is. They tell you their product can do X, Y, and Z, you agree to pay them a certain amount, and at that point you're completely hands off, they're going to take care of everything. In other words, you've outsourced it, which is fine, I'm not suggesting you should be doing your own pay per click or personally stamping postcards. But the mentality that develops is, I want someone else to do this and I don't want anything to do with it, meaning you have no responsibility for the outcome, only for paying the bill. That's a problem, because if you look at your practice, you really have three basic areas of responsibility: doctor, salesperson, and owner or executive by default. Each of those areas has an expected outcome. As the doctor, you're expected to successfully perform clinical procedures and restore function and aesthetics. As the salesperson, if a patient needs treatment, you're expected to actually close them on it, get them to commit and pay and show up for the service. And as the executive, you're expected to run a growing, profitable organization.
Think about this for a second: say you hired me to run a furniture company for you as general manager. I'm responsible for the whole operation, maybe I have someone handling HR, someone handling sales, someone handling marketing, but ultimately the buck stops with me. Now say we're not getting any new customers, and you ask me why, and I say, I don't know, I paid a marketing company to handle it and they're not delivering. You'd probably think that reflected pretty poorly on how I was doing my job, because hiring someone else to handle it doesn't absolve me of responsibility for the outcome. That's the core issue. The six things I'm about to cover apply no matter who's running your pay per click, your postcards, your newsletters, or your billboards, there's no way around knowing them. It's a bit like wanting to get in great shape without eating well or exercising, it just doesn't work that way. The clients I see doing best are the ones who understand these things well enough to stay on top of their marketing and keep a consistent flow of new patients. And if you can't manage this area, that's usually where all sorts of unusual workarounds start creeping in, joining PPOs you don't really want to join, because you've convinced yourself getting new patients any other way is impossible. I promise you it's possible, there are practices in your own city pulling it off, the same way there are practices that have found a hygienist even when you're convinced none exist. No matter what you outsource, you still carry ultimate responsibility, and these six things are what let you actually hold onto that control.
Point one: no matter what kind of marketing you're doing, or who's doing it, you have to understand what's actually happening, how it's supposed to work, and what the expectations are. If I hire a company to mail postcards for me, I want to know exactly who we're mailing to and what the selection criteria are, what the postcard actually looks like, what schedule it mails on, and what results we should expect. This last piece is where I see people get into trouble constantly. If I asked you what percentage response you'd expect from a postcard campaign, most people guess somewhere between one and four percent. That's wrong. For new patient marketing mailed broadly to your general area, not to your existing patients of record, the actual average response rate is about a quarter of a percent. That means you'd need to mail out 400 postcards to reasonably guarantee even one phone call. If the numbers are handled properly elsewhere in the practice, that can still produce a solid return, but you need to know that going in. Otherwise you'll mail out 10,000 postcards, get 25 phone calls, and immediately assume something's broken, when in fact that's roughly the expected result. You'll also want to know exactly what services you're paying for. One thing I personally do, and I'm not saying you have to, is stay hands-on enough to actually verify the work happened. If someone's mailing postcards for me through the post office, I ask to see the mailing receipt, since things occasionally get left sitting in a warehouse and never go out. That's part of taking real responsibility for the outcome.
Point two: you need a realistic budget. If you're planning to market at all, you shouldn't be planning for just one month, think in terms of a quarter at minimum. Decide on an amount you're comfortable spending every month, and make sure that amount actually matches the goal you're trying to hit. If I know I need 20 new patients a month, and the people running my marketing tell me it'll take a certain spend to get there, and I'm comfortable with that number, that's what I allocate. If I only spend a thousand dollars a month, I'm not going to get 40 new patients out of that, the math simply doesn't support it. Without a set ceiling, especially with something like a pay per click arrangement where you're paying both an agency fee and the actual ad spend to Google, costs can spiral out of control fast. Set the number, ideally on a quarterly basis broken down by month, and stay inside it.
Point three: you have to track response, and I can't stress this one enough, it's genuinely one of the weakest areas in dentistry. Here's the key distinction: a postcard or a Google ad doesn't get you a new patient directly, it gets you a response, a phone call, an email, a form fill. What happens after that response determines whether it ever becomes a new patient. Say you're running some kind of implant funnel and forty people express interest through an email or form submission, if nobody calls those people back, none of them become new patients, no matter how well the funnel itself performed. So the real question is whether your marketing is generating incoming flow, and that flow has to be tracked, not as a nice-to-have, as a non-negotiable. The person tracking it won't be you, it'll be whoever's answering the phones or checking the inbox, which means it can't be something that gets forgotten or skipped because someone was busy. Tracking phone numbers on specific promotions help, but it still has to be logged manually at the front desk every time. We have a new patient call log and a sample new patient intake form with these exact questions built in, both available on the episode webpage. If you're running four or five different types of marketing at once and you're not tracking which patients came from where, you'll have no way to know what's actually working and what just looks like it's working, which means you won't know where to invest more or where to pull back.
Point four: you have to understand the entire new patient process inside your own practice, the full production line, not just the marketing piece, for two reasons: so you know exactly what to fix when something breaks, and so you can actually calculate your real return on investment. Marketing's job is to generate a response, a phone call or an email. From there, my receptionist has to actually schedule that person. If reception isn't great at that, it shows up immediately in the numbers, the national average conversion rate for new patient phone calls into scheduled, kept appointments is only 23 percent. That means out of a hundred calls, only about 23 people actually show up, which is a significant leak in the process. If we improve that to 50 percent, we've effectively doubled our new patients from the exact same marketing spend, without changing the marketing at all. Once the patient actually shows up, the sales process takes over, and if that's not handled well, treatment plans don't convert into scheduled treatment, which shows up as a weak return on investment even though the marketing itself may have performed fine. In a lot of cases, the marketing isn't actually the problem, it's what's happening inside the practice. I remember one marketing company with three doctor clients I knew personally, one was thriving with tons of new patients, another thought the same company was doing a terrible job. When we compared the numbers, both offices were getting a similar volume of phone calls, the difference was that the first office's front desk was excellent at converting those calls, and the other one wasn't. This is exactly why you need a new patient call log, and why, if your software records incoming calls, you should actually be listening to them. We also offer a mystery call service where we grade your receptionist's phone handling on a zero to one hundred scale with specific feedback, there's a link on the episode webpage. Otherwise it's a bit like spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a vitamin supplement while your digestion simply isn't absorbing any of it, you're spending the money to generate the calls, but not taking care of the people once they call in. Understanding the full process is the only way to know where it's actually breaking down, and without that, you can't fix it or accurately track your return.
Point five, which is really two related metrics: acquisition cost and return on investment. Not every type of marketing needs to generate the same volume of response, some campaigns target a narrow list or niche and won't produce many responses but can still be financially excellent, while others cast a wide net across your whole area. Either way, you need to track both of these numbers for every type of marketing you're running. Acquisition cost is simply how much it costs to get one new patient. Say I spend $10,000 on postcards and get 50 new patients out of it, that's $200 per new patient. If I later identify that reception was the bottleneck and fix it, that same $10,000 spend might now generate 100 new patients, dropping acquisition cost to $100 per patient. Acquisition cost also needs to be judged against case value, not just compared flatly across channels. If I'm marketing for large full mouth reconstruction cases, all-on-four or all-on-six procedures that might run $30,000 to $60,000 per case, spending $1,000 to $2,000 to acquire one of those patients is an excellent return even though the acquisition cost looks high in isolation. Where acquisition cost really matters is comparing two channels targeting the same type of patient, say a general new patient offer for a discounted cleaning and exam. If that costs $200 per patient through postcards but $300 to $400 through Google pay per click, that tells you something's off, maybe the pay per click campaign is poorly targeted, running at the wrong hours, or reaching people too far away to realistically drive in, and it's worth tightening up or reallocating that spend toward the better performing channel.
Return on investment is calculated by comparing total marketing spend against what the practice actually made from the new patients that campaign generated, measured over a reasonable window of time, I'd recommend monthly rather than week to week, since a patient who comes in for an initial exam this week likely isn't returning to accept treatment until the following week or later. Say in January I spent $5,500 on a particular marketing channel, it doesn't matter which one, a billboard, a postcard, a funnel, and I pull up every new patient that came from that campaign that month and total what they actually spent in the practice. If they spent $40,000, that's roughly $7.27 returned for every dollar spent, which is a strong return. But if I spent $5,500 and only generated $5,500 in production, that's break-even, which is a poor result, and if it's less than that, I'd have been better off not running the campaign at all. Over a longer time horizon, the average new patient is worth somewhere in the range of $1,200 to $1,500 in that first year, so a weak first month doesn't necessarily doom a campaign long term, but you still need to track month over month performance, because if it starts sagging and nobody's watching, that's exactly when marketing starts to feel like it's not working and clients start blaming the marketing company, when the real issue may be something entirely different.
Two things inside the practice tend to be the biggest drags on acquisition cost and ROI beyond the marketing itself: weak reception handling, which I've already covered, and how far out your schedule is booked. I've seen this play out directly: a doctor tells me he desperately needs more new patients, so I ask him, if I called your practice today saying I just moved to the area and want my teeth cleaned, when's your first opening? Three weeks out. Unless I have some existing loyalty to that practice, a spouse or friend who already goes there, I'm probably not waiting three weeks, I'm calling another office. If the delay is because I personally can't make an earlier slot work, that's on me and it's fine. But if the practice genuinely has zero availability for three weeks because the schedule is packed solid, that's an organizational problem that will tank new patient growth regardless of how good the marketing is. That's not a reason to stop marketing, it's a reason to fix the schedule, carve out one or two dedicated new patient blocks a day if needed, because an unattached new patient with no built-in loyalty is going to keep calling around until someone can actually see them.
Point six, and it's less something you need to know and more something you need to actually do: pay regular attention to all of this. It should be built directly into your management routine. Most practices already have certain regular processes in place, meetings, bill paying schedules, whatever they may be, and a regular marketing review should be one of them. I'd review it monthly at minimum, weekly is even better if you can manage it. Look at your ROI, your acquisition cost, and what's working versus what isn't, since that's often where real opportunities hide, either scaling up something that's working well or fixing something that's quietly underperforming. One other thing worth watching for: marketing gets tired over time. Think about your own junk mail, the first time you see a new piece you might actually look at it, by the third or fourth time the exact same piece arrives, you're not even glancing at it before it hits the trash. The same thing happens with pay per click ads and social campaigns, response can start tailing off gradually, and if you're not watching closely, you won't catch it until it's a real problem. Sometimes the fix is small, changing the color or font on a postcard, swapping the photo, tweaking the headline or a bit of copy on a pay per click ad, while keeping the actual offer the same. I've personally seen this happen more times than I can count over more than twenty years, running the exact same seminar and simply changing the headline and image, and suddenly response picks back up. You won't catch any of this without paying regular attention, this isn't a light switch you flip on and walk away from, you have to keep checking that the light is actually still on.
That covers all six points. As I said earlier, you own a business, which makes you an executive whether you like it or not, and no matter who's actually doing the work for you, that doesn't change. The same way having a hygienist clean your patients' teeth doesn't remove your responsibility for that patient's health, subcontracting a marketing company doesn't remove your responsibility as the executive of your business to make sure you're bringing in an adequate number of new patients. We cover a lot of what I went over today, and a lot more, at the MGE New Patient Workshop, which teaches owner doctors exactly what they need to know to stay in control of new patient flow no matter what marketing methods they're using, I'll put a link on the episode webpage. If you want to keep this area genuinely under control, learn these six things and stay on top of them, otherwise you'll end up making decisions you don't really want to make, like joining or staying in insurance plans simply because you can't find another way out. I hope this helped. If you have any questions about MGE, you can visit us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. If you want to reach me personally, there's a Contact Jeff button on dentalbusinessrx.com, or you can email me directly at jeffb@mgeonline.com. Folks, I wish you a great year, let's make it a great 2023, and I'll see you at the next episode.