What do Most Dentists Want From Their Dental Marketing Company?

Enough new patient phone calls and appointments made online to fill their current capacity. The first thing dentists want is to fill any open capacity in their schedule. This makes sense since this is what every business owner wants. A smooth steady stream of new customers. This is typically the first milestone in a healthy dentist–dental marketing company relationship. Here at New Patients Inc, we look at filling capacity as step 1 in the journey – not the final step.

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Higher Quality New Patients to Drive Revenues

Once a practice fills capacity, is that the end to a truly successful marketing of a dental practice? No! Not by a long shot! Now it is time to shift from filling capacity, to acquiring the very highest quality new patients in the surrounding dental market. Ultimately, that’s what dentists REALLY want. They want a practice filled with the very best new patients, not just any patient. One could say this is “advanced level” dental marketing. This is indeed where the return-on-investment skyrockets.

Less Need to Participate With Insurance Plans

Dentists participate with insurance plans primarily because they lack the marketing expertise to avoid having to write off 30% to 35% of their fees! Other than maybe a startup, no dentist anywhere is excited about the prospect of participating with more insurance plans. Proper marketing for dentists helps the practice avoid having to sign on with more insurance plans. As a matter of fact, hundreds of dentists have systematically weaned their practices completely off insurance participation. If this is of interest to you, we encourage you to go to NPI Education and take our Fee for Service Journey courses.

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Minimal Participation in The Marketing Design Process

Can you imagine hiring a dental marketing agency that supposedly specializes in marketing for dentists, then hearing; “how do you want this designed?”, “would you write copy for this page on your dental website?”, or “we must have an offer, what do you want it to be? “. The reality is the dentist should have very little involvement in the design and copy of their marketing IF the dental marketing agency has tested designs and wording for decades. You are a dentist. Being a dentist is stressful enough. If you hire the right dental marketing firm, you shouldn’t have to design and write anything. If you like to design and write, that’s fine. But it would be best if you weren’t forced to do any of that to set up your dental marketing plan for success. The same can be said for the project management process, you shouldn’t have to remember the dozens or even hundreds of details involved with completing your marketing projects, getting them deployed, and tracking them. This is the responsibility of the best dental marketing companies.

Seeing is Believing. With the Tools to See And Measure The Results of Your Dental Marketing Dollars in Real Time

If you have never had a truly organized, orchestrated, consistent marketing effort in the past, the very next question you will ask yourself is “I wonder how my marketing is working?” Which of course you would, every business owner wants to know the same thing, marketing is an expensive investment. A World Class full-service dental marketing agency, like us, should provide you with the technology platform and human assistance that allows you to see, hear and measure the impact of your marketing budget whenever you feel like checking in on it.

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Once per month our World-Class Customer Success Team Will Go Over Your Results and Future Marketing Plans

Now that you can see, hear, and measure the results of your marketing spend across all channels, do you want to spend a bunch of time running and pouring through spreadsheets, graphs, and reports? No! No business owner wants to do that or has the time for it! So, what you should expect from the best dental companies is a once-per-month check-in to review the results with an improvement action plan for the following month. That way, as the market changes and evolves, so does your dental marketing plan!

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A Dental Marketing Group that handles it all!

Would you prefer 20 monthly meetings, relationships, and contacts or just one? It’s an obvious choice, you have one company that has the skills, know-how, and over 30 years of experience to handle all aspects of promoting your dental practice. There is NO benefit to having a designer, website builder, SEO person, someone else handling your Google ads, and a different person handling your mail. Having ONE dental marketing company to handle everything is without question the only choice. Your branding will be consistent, your messaging will be on point, and only one business relationship to maintain

A Dental Marketing Firm You Can Stay with for Your Whole Career

You are on our website reading this right now. Choosing your next dental marketing agency just adds business tasks to your day and stress to your life. How would you like to choose your LAST dental marketing firm today? Wouldn’t that be a load off your shoulders? We have been helping relieve dental marketing stresses for over 30 years

Some Frequently Asked Questions Dentists Might Have About Dental Marketing and The Services New Patients Inc Has to Offer!

Dental marketing is a little different than other forms of marketing because the industry is divided into two segments. There are two halves of the US dental market. The bottom half of people who WILL choose a healthcare provider for their family based on a reduced price of some kind. The top half of the US dental market are people who will NOT choose a healthcare provider for their family based on a reduced price of some kind.

Many dentists use Google Ads to drive new patient phone calls and inquiries. We should know we manage millions of dollars of dental Google Ad campaigns. Online marketing also includes a properly built website, local SEO, and organic SEO. Many dentists find online responders are shopping for better pricing. This makes sense. You likely use your phone all the time for the availability & price of products and services with your phone and a Google search. These strategies tend to drive a high number of phone calls with manageable long-term return on investment.

What many dentists do not understand is that properly executed dental direct mail will generate lower call volume than online campaigns, but MUCH greater lifetime return on investment. When we say direct mail, we do not mean the cheesy postcards with deals all over them. We are talking about properly targeted, properly messaged, truly professional presentations of your most valuable marketable attributes. They work. And those patients will be with your practice for life.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. NEVER expect one thing (other than patient referrals) to be the dental marketing panacea. Panacea is created with the proper combination of online, offline, and internal promotion of your dental practice.

Dental marketing plans are provided on a complimentary basis. We must diagnose your open capacity (how many new patients do you really need), your offline market, and your online market. We always start by assessing your current online and offline marketing assets and liabilities. Marketing priorities are built on a combination of your budget and a list of liabilities. Our objective is not to have you be a client for one campaign. We start clients with the long-range goal of you being a client for the rest of your career.

We are a team of dental marketing data nerds. Consumer search patterns and data tell us how to design a client website. Our team of dental marketing experts has the knowledge and experience to create a consistent effective web presence. We will work with you to determine your target audience, then create a dental website that accurately reflects who they are and what they want from your dental practice.

Our experienced designers use a speed-focused WordPress theme for your practice. This allows us to make changes quickly, so we can keep up with any local consumer search trends that might emerge in the future. In addition, the messaging on your website will get new patients to ask you different questions during the initial phone call. Something other than “do you take my insurance?”, and/or, “how much will it be for my first visit?”, would be a nice change for the better. The tone and outcome of the initial conversation are quite different when the new patient asks; “I want to see if I am a candidate for X”. Proper website design can make new patients ask different (better) questions about your services.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results. The major search engines often modify their algorithms to penalize websites that they feel are not providing the best user experience. The next step is to make sure that your dental website ranks well with all major search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo!

Poorly optimized websites can have low conversion rates for first-time visitors because they are unable to find what they were looking for on the site. A dentist’s internet marketing strategy could start with increasing patient traffic from natural (organic) searches. If the dentist needs more new patients faster, paid advertising such as Google AdWords might be a good starting point. Either way, local and organic SEO for dentists has proven over the years to be rock solid investments with a portion of an overall dental marketing budget.

We understand you might wonder about our sanity, but direct mail dental marketing is one of the most effective and predictable ways to get new patients into your practice. By leveraging print and digital advertising, you can drive traffic to your website, where prospects can learn more about what makes your practice unique. When they’re ready to schedule an appointment, they’ll be able to do so online in minutes—or over their phone!

You need a dental marketing firm that can help you reach your target audience, deliver proper messaging, and give you the results you want. A reputable dental marketing agency should be able to provide a list of current clients who mail. They should have a good reputation in the industry, with few complaints from their clients or those who have worked with them in the past. You should also look for a company that offers a range of services and has been around for some time.

New Patients Inc offers three distinctly different types of dental direct mail. All are designed to resonate with the different segments of dental consumers. You should NEVER mail a promotion to everyone in your area. You run the risk of (at best) boring half your audience or (at worst) branding yourself as the “deals dentist” to the segment of the dental market who would be turned off by a healthcare provider using price promotions.

Pay-per-click advertising is a way for you to pay for online ads that appear on the search engine results pages when people search for keywords related to your business. (Think “dentist near me” or “general dentistry.”) The idea is that if someone searches for those keywords and sees your ad at the top of their results, they’ll click on it, and you’ll get a new patient! But there’s an art to writing PPC ads that makes them stand out and attract clicks.

But Google ad campaigns are not just about digital dental ads. According to iSpionage it is estimated that up to 76% of Google ad spend is wasted. Wrong numbers, competitors, solicitors, and patients on plans you don’t take will also click on your ad and waste some of your ad spend.

The REAL advantage we provide is a combination of technical and human. Our technology platform knows EXACTLY which consumer search resulted in an ad seen. Each ad set has two competing ads. The result of the consumer seeing the ad is also tracked. Did they call? Book online? Did they abandon the ad and do nothing? Literally, EVERY step in the process is measured and tracked.
An AI platform then constantly reads the outcome of thousands of clicks, millions of impressions, and thousands of calls. Then our humans take over. They listen to the calls and categorize what happened. Categories are things like missed call, voice mail, bad lead, good lead, and new patient.

Here’s the beautiful part: If you know what they searched for, know where they landed, know what they did next, and you know if the outcome was negative or positive – you can direct your budget toward positive and away from negative! This is the purest definition of optimization there is! As a client, you will NOT waste 76% of your ad spend.

Getting reviews is an important part of your reputation management strategy. It can help you get new patients, and it also helps to build trust with existing patients. A study by Brightlocal showed that in 2021 77% ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ read reviews when browsing for local businesses (up from 60% in 2020). Most consumers say they trust online reviews as much as they would like personal recommendations from friends and family (see footnote below). Patients are more likely to choose a dentist or business that has positive reviews, so having a large number of positive reviews on Google, Facebook and (in certain markets) Yelp will put your dental practice ahead of the competition!

No other dental marketing firm has been integrating the best online scheduling app within overall marketing strategies longer than New Patients Inc. We were the original dental marketing firm shouting its value from the rooftops. Online scheduling is here to stay. It is not a fad. It works. It converts MORE new patients from the same dental marketing spend. If you don’t have it because it makes you nervous, spend 30 minutes over lunch to see how it ACTUALLY works. Your pre-conceived assumptions might be standing in your way of improving all your future marketing.

Now that you have a new patient on your website or your online scheduling app, are you really going to ask them to come in 20 minutes before their first appointment, hand them a clipboard, and ask them a gazillion questions in a crowded reception area, what is this 1989 again? In 2022 Good dental marketing is about every patient touch point. Reducing the “friction” at each touch point increases satisfaction among your patients. Satisfied patients refer patients just like them. And so on, and so on. If you would like to get rid of ALL your patient intake forms forever and have the data show up in your practice management software, spend 15 minutes looking at our digital dental forms platform.

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