The crucial role of the reception team in your dental marketing campaigns.

The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to secure new business; so for dentists the bottom line is acquiring new patients who want the type of treatments you offer.

The role of the dental marketer is relatively easy to define in this, i.e. setting up the tools and techniques needed to bring new enquiries to the practice. The ways to achieve this objective are broad and varied, ranging from the traditional promotional literature campaigns to state-of-art re-marketing via social media, SEO and everything in-between.

As we’ve noted elsewhere in our marketing blog for dentists, a good agency will not only be able to deliver the results you need, but also be able to do it transparently through the provision of regular, clear reporting. However, whilst it’s reasonably straightforward to identify new leads, how these are actually dealt with and followed-up at the practice is much harder for the marketer to determine. Unfortunately there are too many cases where good leads are not handled correctly and in some cases, not followed up at all locally. This nullifies all of the upfront work done by your marketing team and wastes money from your hard-earned budget.

What can go wrong?

There are a few notable points of weakness at the practice level which we’ve encountered over the years. The first and perhaps most important and prevalent is a lack of systems designed to capture and nurture leads. This may be done to the principle “expecting” someone to get on with it rather than ensuring that the correct training, systems and auditing are in place. This is still way too common unfortunately. Another common occurrence is where the reception team has systems in place but is insufficiently proactive to make best use of them. Sadly we see this quite regularly too, and often where the principal dentist is so immersed in clinical work that he/she doesn’t realise what is happening.

We’ve seen technical failures too – for example the dentist who quit his marketing campaign on the back of “limited” results. Our reporting, linked directly to online analytics, showed a substantial number of new enquiries each month, but this was not translating into sufficient new patients and treatments. Only when he quit (to our surprise) did we finally establish that his reception team was not monitoring the email address which had been requested and set up specifically to handle new web enquiries (really!)

In another case where the success of the campaign came under question, it transpired that the receptionist had been recording all new enquiries as “word-of-mouth” simply because it was easiest and on the top of the record sheet. This may sound extreme, but it’s worth taking a look at what’s happening in your own team.

So the front-desk team or whoever is tasked to receive and handle new enquiries, really is critical to your success (or failure).

What needs to be done?

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Don’t allow your website to show an insecure warning – get an SSL certificate now!

Back in February this year we wrote to over 300 of our dental clients to remind them of the impending GDPR regulations and what needed to be done with their websites to aid compliance.
One of these recommendations was the implementation of a secure website certificate to allow their web pages to be served under https protocol i.e. encrypted and secure. This is particularly important where information is being submitted via website contact forms.

Together with the GDPR https recommendations, we also mentioned how Google is becoming increasingly keen to see all websites published under https, not just those which process ecommerce transactions. Indeed Google has been encouraging this by offering “light” search ranking benefits for the last couple of years – i.e. a boost for SEO.

However as of this month, July 2018, Google is really starting to hammer home the point by not only increasing the SEO advantage for encrypted sites, but also marking non-encrypted sites as “not secure” in the Google Chrome browser. Version 68 of Chrome will show any users the “not secure” warning when they view websites without SSL certificates.

So why does this matter?

Actually it matters a lot and here’s why. First it pays to imagine what your potential new patient will think when they land on your website for the first time and an insecure warning pops up. There is a very high chance that they will go elsewhere very quickly!

Secondly, it’s very important to understand the statistics around the Chrome browser in that it is the most popular browser by a long way – approximately 60% of all users now use Chrome as their browser of choice. Incidentally, most other major browsers are expected to follow suit, indeed some have already.

What should you do?

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Guideline figures to help with your practice budgeting

Budgeting for dental practice marketing is a hot topic and one where business principals often struggle to know where to start. Unfortunately there is no easy formula to calculate this as each situation is unique, but hopefully the following insights which are distilled from many years of experience, will provide a solid starting point. We will also take a quick look at some of the key marketing channels and what you might expect to budget for those.

Average expenditure

First let’s take a look at business in general and the average spend on marketing activities. Then we’ll take a closer look at the dental business, remembering of course that there is no universally accepted formula for this.

Small businesses in the UK typically allocate anything between 5% and 11% of their total sales turnover i.e. before running costs are taken out. So a business turning over £500,000 would be spending £25,000 pa at the lower end up to around £55,000 pa at the top end. This will vary based on where you are located, level of competition, maturity etc. But at least we now have an idea of where to start. But even at the low end, that sounds like quite a lot right? Indeed, this is a comment we regularly hear back from dentists who become rather concerned when we suggest that marketing budgets will likely not be in the hundreds of pounds per month, but potentially into the thousands (but don’t panic just yet!)

Do new start-ups need to allocate more budget?

The answer to this is quite often “yes”. As new kids on the block, you are starting from nothing and need to work harder to get your brand and services out there. We’ll look at some of the mechanisms you can use a little later on. For more established companies, expect to spend a little less (notwithstanding a general increase in competition) and for long-established companies with exceptional word-of-mouth referrals, possibly less again.

So there is a key challenge here – those without mature revenue streams typically need to budget more than businesses who are already well-established. The key thing here is to make sure that your overall start-up budget does have enough cash to cover your dental marketing requirements. If not you could end up with a lovely new or refurbished practice that no-one knows about!

I’m on a tight budget – what are the basic “must haves”?

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