Is Your Marketing Working As It Should?

When There is Abundant Opportunity for Practice Growth?

As an AACD member dentist, you have a significant differentiator which can be leveraged to maximize your popularity in your market area. If you’re not certain you are getting all you can from your dental marketing programs, this article will help you determine where you might uncover the gaps.

1. What might be making or breaking your results right now?
2. Is the marketing plan you have in place the right one?
3. What is needed to have a more successful outcome?

At Patient NEWS we’ll hear from a potential client that they’ll have ‘a feeling’ that they could be getting more from their marketing investments. Sometimes they’re investing huge budgets into Google Ads but are attracting low-value patients, doing it “because everyone is, right?” Recently a (smart) dental colleague said, “PPC is a race to the bottom; I’m telling all my clients to shift budgets to direct mail.” Or you hear you can win the day with low-cost social marketing, or your team wants you to stop doing what you’re doing because, anecdotally, they say it’s not working. With all these influences impacting your decisions, it can be tough to figure out what’s best for your practice.

Sometimes a gap analysis can help. What is the barrier to adding more new patients and increasing production? It’s usually not just your marketing that isn’t working – there are many factors that can make or break practice results.

Ensure Your Team Is Aware Of The Value Of A NEW Patient

For our average client, new patients contribute an average of $1,800 in production versus active patients that contribute $1,100. For cosmetic dentists, the average new patient can be much, much more valuable – and almost always contributes twice as much production as an average patient. Practice ZEBRA^® is a game changer the first time a practice sees its metrics in black and white. It’s the only dental marketing software that provides the actual value of NEW patients over existing active patients, allowing dentists to make good decisions with their marketing spend and strategic focus, and with the predictive analytics module, you can run your number to see the production impact of adding just a few more new patients. What would your team do if they knew that if you added just one more new patient each week you could add at least $100,000 in revenue? This metric is impactful.

Answer The Phone

 Every time the phone goes unanswered, it costs money. When you are investing in marketing to make the phone ring, answer it. Otherwise, marketing results are sacrificed. The average dental practice answers 75% of their calls, while top practices capture over 90%. This one metric dramatically improves marketing results. It’s often the result of office staff not understanding the value of new patients, and assuming voice mail will handle it and new patients will wait. But most new patients won’t leave a message, and they will move on to the next office. To convert more valuable new patients, provide the service they expect.

Wait – do you hear your phone ringing in the background? Go answer it!

Isn’t it nice when someone picks up the phone and helps you right away? This metric is one of the most important things a cosmetic, or any, practice can focus on to improve results.

Make Room For New Patients

I was on a call with a successful dentist who wanted to bring in new, higher-quality production. She felt that her active patients had had the treatment they were going to take, and she wasn’t going to grow without adding more new. When I asked her to look at her schedule and tell me – if I was a new patient on the phone – when I could have an appointment, it was two months away! Her team had overzealously scheduled lower-value active patients back for recall and she was not in a position to advertise and onboard a steady flow of new patients.

Script Your Team With Talking Points

Another client dropped all insurance – fast – and the practice team hasn’t yet become savvy on how to convert new patients using their membership plan, or on selling the benefits of the outstanding practice. Because of this, the team is only converting 25% of their inbound calls, dramatically hurting practice production. A team needs support to mitigate the impact of certain business decisions and find a way to become successful. Imagine how disheartening it is for the front office call handlers when they don’t know how to overcome objections. Offer help to your team.

Understand The Competitive Level

When your practice is up against 50 other dental offices in your market range, you can’t get away with hit-and-miss marketing or underinvest in digital and expect good results. To get the attention of a few thousand people around your practice that are ideal for you – when all the other businesses are also vying for their attention – you must invest in a consistent plan. People get thousands of ad messages daily and guess what … dental treatment is not high on the list for most. Breaking through the noise takes consistency. These days, marketing communications that are sent every other month or here and there just aren’t enough. That’s if you have higher expectations for your results. If you’re okay with lower results, great. If not, and you have 70 dentists competing for 30,000 families, you need to outspend the competition and be the practice consumers notice and recognize as the authority in your field.

Understand The Practice Demographic

At Patient NEWS^®, we work with the top dentists in dentistry. On average, our clients produce $1.8 million annually – that’s just the average. These are successful dental offices that want to stand out in their communities, and they understand the value of patient education. You can get a postcard anywhere; you can get a low-cost website. But that’s often not the ticket to attracting the quality new patients you want. Instead of postcards, consider that newsletters drive 170% higher response, and a high-functioning, quality-rich website will outrank the competition. But that aside, just consider how little dental education consumers have access to. There isn’t an oral health article or interview on the weekly news. Your marketing partner must understand your patient demographic and help you target like-minded people with the content required to break through and stand out from competitors. Content marketing that tells your story and highlights your competitive advantages delivers greater results.

The Mix

An omnichannel approach is critical for overall practice awareness and growth, and it starts by considering the patient journey. We hear it all the time: Digital is the place to be because who reads mail anymore… Guess what? It’s likely that your ideal patient does. We aren’t bashing digital – we are an exclusively dental omnichannel marketing agency, and we have hundreds of clients running successful website and PPC campaigns with us. A great online presence is absolutely critical to converting quality new patients. However, what is ground zero to drive search? Consumers need to be triggered to want to search. Direct mail is the biggest driver of new patients because it is where awareness, interest, and prioritization are triggered on the patient journey. Direct mail is proactive, and it works.

Some people perceive that print marketing is a thing of the past and old-fashioned. Who reads it, they ask. The thing is, most people read their mail – every day. And neuroscience proves that direct mail has incredible, motivating, response-driving power. In fact, when you combine the power of print and digital ads, you boost response by 400%. Over 80% of consumers trust PRINT ads the most when making a buying decision, 80% act on direct mail ads, and 70% of households with an income above $100k are newspaper readers.

Direct mail is proven to drive significantly higher levels of brand recall (77% vs. 46%), and that’s such an important metric for dental offices to consider. As a consumer yourself, think about receiving something tangible that you handle, like mail. You feel it, you smell it, and you engage with it. It impacts.

A well-executed dental marketing “program” that includes a full marketing mix and is backed by a practice that has covered their gaps will have a more successful campaign. Speaking as an agency that builds awesome websites for dentists, it’s proven that direct mail provides a level of credibility, authority, and trustworthiness that digital channels cannot. The thing is, direct mail is easier to understand, is tangible, and triggers emotion. And this type of impact is especially important for cosmetic dentists to consider when crafting their overall marketing strategy when there isn’t as much awareness and brand recognition vs. larger companies that can invest in digital ads. And consider Google, Amazon, and Wayfair … these massive online companies have massive print marketing budgets!

So, wherever you’re at right now, there is abundant opportunity to attract more quality new patients into your practice. You just need the right partner with the right understanding, commitment, and dedication to help steer you toward better results and not just a bigger budget to get more clicks.



I encourage you to schedule a free consultation to discuss your current situation and goals. Why not explore your options and ensure you have the right plan in place to achieve your goals, help improve the visibility of your brand and services, and gain a competitive edge in your market area?

As the rock stars of dentistry, AACD members are an exclusive group with abundant opportunities for practice growth. We are so proud to have worked with many of your colleagues over the past 30 years, great AACD dentists like Dr. Bill Dorfman, Dr. Tom Trinkner, Dr. Guy Lewis, Dr. Mike Malone, and many more, and today new rockstars like Dr. Ben Winters, (AKA The Bentist with 20 Million SM followers) who says “Patient NEWS allowed me to have a system that captures prospective patients, gets them in the office, and gives us the necessary data to navigate our growth into the future. Highly recommend.”

If you want to attract high-quality patients, increase awareness among targeted households, stand out amongst the array of other dental offices, and differentiate from the 10,000 ads those households each get hit with per day – call us and we’ll help you with a plan that will help your practice stand out and grow! We answer the phone!

Joanne Bishop