As a dentist/dental practice owner, you trust your dental marketing company to have your best interests at heart and be just as invested in your business’s growth and success as you are. They should be direct and transparent at every step of the process of working with you. They should make it as easy as possible for you to evaluate your practice’s performance, and they should be able (and willing) to show you what data you need to be focusing on to get better results.
Unfortunately, some marketing firms won’t be completely up-front with their clients, or touch base regularly to make sure their clients know how their practice is performing, and whether there are a few things they could be doing better to boost their growth.
Ideally, you should have a proactive, communicative relationship with your dental marketing company. They should be excited to reach out to you and help you understand the purpose and value of your marketing strategy, and be clear about what is driving your results. Below, we explore some of the key pieces of information that your dental marketing company should be sharing with you frequently and in detail.
Metrics
Metrics help you track and measure the performance of different aspects of your business. These typically include:
- # of appointments made
- # of forms on your website filled out
- Calls tracked
- Traffic from your Google My Business page, your website, and your social media channels (and whether that traffic has increased or decreased)
These metrics will give you a sense of security about what your practice is currently doing, but they don’t necessarily guide future actions. For comparative insights that do, you’ll want to look at your key performance indicators.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs help you measure your business’s progress towards its ultimate objective.
Practice Production
Practice production is the granddaddy of KPIs. This includes everything your team is producing at your dental practice with their own two hands, from checkups, exams, and procedures to crowns, extractions, and cleaning/hygiene. If production at your practice isn’t growing, your business is, unfortunately, fizzling. Growth is essential and needs to be tracked daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. To see how you’re doing, you need to compare your practice’s production to the KPI goal or target you’ve established.
Monitoring production is important because it shows how much your dentists, and practice overall, are doing in volume. Clearly, if their production is going up and you’re seeing a significant increase overall compared to the previous month, quarter, or year, then your marketing efforts are paying off.
Percentage of Active Patients Currently Scheduled
According to Roger P. Levin, DDS, the percentage of active patients currently scheduled at your dental practice should be around 98%, but for most practices, the percentage is 85% or less. Having a high percentage of active patients currently scheduled is important because any patient that is not currently scheduled is potentially a “lost” patient.
Average Production Per Patient
Your average production per patient should be increasing each year. If it isn’t, your dental marketing company needs to be looking into this with you and working to create a strategy or strategies to help improve your performance.
Average Production Per New Patient
Your average production per new patient should be 2-3 times higher than your average production per patient. This is because new patients tend to come with more problems that need to be addressed, which means they’re going to spend more money than an established patient.
Number of New Patients
If you’re a specialty practice, your new patients may account for about 90% of all your revenue. This percentage may be lower for general dental practices, but whatever percentage goal you’ve set, you should know whether or not your practice is meeting that goal. If you’re not pulling in enough new patients, you’re simply not going to grow.
Is the Dental Marketing Company You’re Working with Impacting Your Success?
To determine how well your marketing firm’s efforts are working, you need to match them to your business’s gains. The data needs to correlate with what’s happening inside your practice.
Your dental marketing partner should be able to help you answer these questions:
Are you hitting your appointment percentage goals?
Are you maintaining a certain level of revenue (or increasing it)?
What’s really generating the growth? Did your marketing play a role, or were the increases going to happen regardless?
Access Your Real-Time Data
Your dental marketing company should be working with you to make all your data as accessible and easy to follow as possible.
If you have a basic understanding of SEO and a fervent growth mindset, a dashboard can prove highly useful for helping you achieve your goals. At InTouch, our clients have their own real-time, customizable dashboards to view their SEO reports.
These reports are available 24/7 on demand and are updated on a daily basis, so you’re always in step with your data, which includes:
- # of visitors to your website
- # of phone calls you’ve gotten over a certain period
- Your conversions, and where they come from
- # of form completions you’ve received
The dashboard provided by InTouch is intuitive and easy to use. If you have questions about anything you see in your report, you can contact our team and speak directly with an expert who can help you make sense of it all. We view your metrics over time to discern patterns and build a strategy off of those patterns to further improve your performance.
Want to see how your dental practice is really doing? Want 24/7 access to your data? At InTouch, we make it easy for you. Call (877) 493-9003 for a free digital analysis, and we’ll be more than happy to answer all your questions.