What office stats can reveal about marketing

What office stats can reveal about marketing

What office stats can reveal about marketing

Knowing your office and marketing stats will help you measure the success of your marketing efforts.  As a business owner, I want to know how every client comes to my business.  You should want to know why every new patient decided to pick you for a free consultation!  This is what I love about a doctor just starting out, they want to know as much as they can about their new patients.  They are still excited when someone selects their practice!  These doctors don’t need to glance at reports to tell me how their new patients learn about them – they know it by heart.  What I can tell you with 100% certainty is I’ve never consulted with a high volume practice that does not have a finger on the pulse of their new patient stats.  It’s that important!  We all gauge success in a different way.  You may not desire as high of a volume as some other offices, but we can all agree that getting the most return on your marketing investment is a top priority.  Without properly tracking and analyzing your practice stats you will never know the success of your marketing plan.

It’s not enough to only look at production numbers, or how many new starts. You need to know the referral source for the new patient.  Most offices know the specific amount of dental referrals, patient referrals, family referrals, schools, community, internet, social media, insurance, etc. Some offices only track totals for dental referrals but I believe that you should know which dentists are referring to you, and how many patients.  Not all practices receive the majority of their new patients from dental referrals, but many do.  If your practice relies heavily on this type of referral you really should treat each individual doctor as an individual referral source and marketing opportunity.  This advice would have been different many years ago when most orthodontists received all of their new patients from dental referrals – but today so many come from other sources.  Offices that were primarily fed from dentists are seeing a slow decline in the percentage of their new patients coming from dentists.  You need to be able to accurately track and measure the success and outcomes of your marketing efforts in all categories. 

In addition to tracking new patients, it is valuable to track your website and social media analytics.  You can’t always track the direct return from all marketing efforts, some items are building brand awareness.  However, you should try to track as much as possible.  The data year after year will be extremely valuable as you create a plan for your marketing budget.

Just a reminder on stats, you want to know how many people took action and called your office.  This is the most accurate measure of your marketing efforts.  Take it a step further and analyze how many new patients call and don’t schedule or no show/cancel their exam.  This data could share a tremendous amount of information.  Perhaps you have numerous calls for patients seeking a cleaning instead of orthodontics, this could indicate a problem with your marketing message.  Perhaps you have many that schedule but never show up, this could indicate a problem with your administrative team, scripting or the wait time for an exam.  The deeper you dive into your stats the more tools you’ll have to accurately plan your marketing strategy.

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