The 6 Questions Every Dental Marketer Needs to Answer

Guest Blog Post by Call Box

It’s the start of a new year, and you have a brand new promotion you know is going to have patients flocking to your dental practice.

You place paid advertisements on various media sources, send out a mailer, post on social media, hang a banner outside your office, and wait for the phone to ring off the hook.

After two weeks, you’re shocked to see only a handful of patients have taken advantage of the new promotion.

So, what gives?

Why didn’t this promotion take off as you expected?
Was it your ads?
Your audience?
Your staff’s phone skills?
Your calendar availability?
Your cancellation rate?

This critical gap in insight is a challenge faced by all dental organizations at some point. In order to make educated, proactive decisions when it comes to your marketing, you need to have transparent reporting to determine what’s working, what’s not working, and where new patients are falling through the cracks.

Jarvis Analytics with Call Box integration enables you to fill in the gaps and gain in-depth insight to understand the true outcome of your marketing efforts. The seamless integration between these two cloud solutions allows you to confidently answer the following six questions and ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing dollars.

1) Are your marketing campaigns bringing in phone calls?

Starting with the fundamentals, you need to understand if your campaigns are generating phone calls. As a simple call count, this metric allows you to determine if your marketing efforts are successful in building interest among an audience.

Furthermore, it’s essential to know if one source is outperforming another source — for example, if your mailer is driving 100 phone calls and your newspaper ad is only driving 30, you may want to invest more marketing dollars in your mail campaign. While every phone call might not be a valid appointment opportunity, this basic insight is necessary to get an initial scope of how your campaigns are performing.

2) Are those phone calls connecting to a qualified staff member?

The next metric you need to know is if patient callers are even having the opportunity to speak to your staff when they call your office. All too often, patients will call a practice just to be placed on a painfully long hold, hung up on, or sent to a voicemail. In fact, in 2020, an average of 37% of all calls to a dental practice never reached a qualified individual who could help the patient calling in.

You spend a significant amount of time and money on your marketing efforts, and it’s important to make the most of every new patient opportunity calling into your practice. For many patients, this is their first interaction with your organization — you don’t want it to be their last. It’s important to put your best foot forward and help every caller in a timely manner.

3) Are those phone calls presenting appointment opportunities?

Once you’re able to connect the patient calling into a qualified staff member, it’s important to know if that caller presents a true opportunity to book an appointment. You know your mailer generated 100 phone calls and your newspaper ad generated 30, but what percentage of those calls were truly new patient opportunities? If your mailer only generated 15 new patient opportunities, but your newspaper ad drove 25, you may want to rethink where you’re continuing to invest your marketing spend. With call volume higher than ever in dentistry due to COVID-19 precautions, understanding caller intent instead of just relying on call counts is critical in determining the ROI of your marketing efforts.

In Jarvis’ Marketing Matchback, you’re able to see how many leads came in from each campaign and ad source. With Call Box’s integration layered on top, you’re able to gain the additional insight to understand whether a caller presented an appointment opportunity to better determine the value of that marketing campaign in driving true leads to your practice.

4) Is your staff converting those opportunities into booked appointments?

The fourth question you need to understand is whether or not your staff is converting the opportunities you worked so hard to generate into booked appointments. Answering this question allows you to determine whether there’s a gap in phone skills, limited calendar availability, confusion in procedure or service offering, pricing concerns, or other challenges preventing your team from converting opportunities. Once you determine why patients are falling through the cracks, you’re able to proactively adjust your processes or ads to ensure you’re capturing every valid opportunity.

5) Are those patients showing up for their appointments?

You booked the new patient for an appointment — hooray! However, that’s only half the battle; you need to ensure the patient shows up for his or her appointment and drives additional revenue for your practice. The most successful practices we work with have what we like to call a “show-up sequence” that starts with setting expectations for the visit on the initial phone call. First, set expectations with the patient regarding how early to arrive, what to bring with him or her, where to park, how long the appointment is expected to take, and any other relevant details. With COVID-19 precautions in place, there are likely new procedures being followed such as parking lot waiting rooms and temperature checks that are important to review beforehand with the patient. Additionally, confirm all contact information and let the patient know how and when he or she will receive appointment reminders.

Furthermore, be sure to inform the patient of your cancellation policy and how to go about rescheduling his or her appointment if anything comes up. Finally, before hanging up, repeat the appointment date and time and ensure the patient has written it down or marked it on his or her calendar. Setting these clear expectations eases patients’ minds, ensures they are well-informed leading up to the visit, and reduces last-minute cancellations.

With Jarvis Analytics’ Marketing Matchback, you’re able to integrate with your practice management system to determine whether a patient showed up for his or her appointment and the production value associated. With Call Box’s integration, you have the insight to ensure your team set proper expectations for the appointment on the initial call, as well as see where any breakdown may have occurred that prevented the patient from showing for his or her appointment.

6) Are your ads driving the overall patient production and ROI you hoped for?

The last question you need to answer as a dental marketer is whether or not your marketing campaigns are driving the overall patient production you were looking to achieve. Get in the habit of bi-weekly reviews to understand which campaigns are driving the ROI you hoped for and which need to be tweaked or ended altogether. Doing so allows you to stay well-informed as to what’s working and what’s not working when it comes to targeting potential patients.

In Jarvis’ Marketing Matchback, you’re able to tie an appointment back to the production value and ROI of each lead. With Call Box’s integration working alongside, you’re also able to understand where opportunities are leaking and where ​missed​ production is occurring. In doing so, you’re able to proactively make adjustments to your processes and recapture otherwise lost revenue.

As you look ahead to 2021, it’s important to have the right tools to assist you in answering these six questions and generating the outcomes you’re looking to achieve when it comes to your marketing campaigns. The integration between Call Box and Jarvis Analytics assists in boosting dental marketing performance and production. Jarvis Analytics’ Marketing Matchback module tracks your patient journey from lead to production, and Call Box’s integration presents transparent insights that fill in the gaps of precisely what happened on every appointment opportunity phone call.

To learn more about how Call Box is providing thousands of dental practices and DSOs transparent insight into their patient calls to help grow their organizations, visit https://www.callbox.com/dental.

To learn more about how Jarvis Analytics is helping dental marketers track their most important metrics and stay on track with their goals as their dental practice and/or DSO grows and expands, book your live demo to see Jarvis in action.