One of the best ways to waste money is by paying someone like me to generate leads for you. Unless those leads are looked after properly, there’s no point. We can measure how well they’re being looked after by looking at contact rates.
The contact rate is how quickly your team is following up enquiries. The customer should be hearing back from you within two hours, while the lead is hot. We can see, using the lead management platform DenGro, the average time until contact, average contact attempts per lead as well the conversion journey for treatments.
This is powerful information because it helps us understand how effective the team is at every stage of the conversion process and work with you to improve the process. In the absence of this information people might make excuses or blame each other. The TCO or front of house might say the leads are no good. When we look at the platform and see they are not responding in time or making multiple attempts to establish contact, though, it’s simple.
We can also see where the leads are coming from — paid ads, organic search, referrals and so on — and how likely they are to convert. This tells us where to invest time and budget. It might be that a channel like social media is bringing in lots of leads but hardly any convert. If another channel is bringing in fewer leads of higher quality, with higher average treatment value, you’d probably want to invest in it.
I get that this all sounds boring and pedestrian, but it’s really a dream for dental practice owners. People are bad at measuring their own performance, which is why this information is going to transform your business with minimum effort from you. It’s going to do that by opening up your ability to talk about marketing and sales performance with your team in a transparent way. That will create more buy in from them as they begin to understand that this is how they can help to grow the business, to their benefit.
Where there are plenty of leads but very few conversions, no one can deny that something is wrong and something has to change. This is the perfect basis from which to build and evolve your marketing plan. Our reports will tell you what’s happening all the way along, and we can then offer you marketing recommendations based on this information.
Once this becomes routine you’ll see a behaviour shift among staff because you will automatically start benchmarking, noticing what’s working and what’s not, and making better decisions as you go along. We usually partner up with dental teams through this process, so that we avoid the tension that used to be quite common when marketing agencies would nag their clients. There’s no need to nag with this approach because the mission is understood and owned collectively.
From a reporting point of view, you have everything you need at your fingertips. You don’t have to rely on spreadsheets, and you have task management duties that automatically flag up to remind you of what to do next. All of this improves our co-working relationship because it takes the emotion out of it. In fact, if effective marketing could be summed up in a sentence, I’d say it’s “people buy on emotion, businesses sell on information”.
We are in the business of taking the ego and emotion out of your marketing funnel and relying on the data. The better we get at that, the more you sell. You never know what works until you get the data back, and often it’s the things we expect to work best that don’t. Yet we can get attached to those ideas. This is why emotion is best left at the door.
Give me a call if you’d like to set up a DenGro platform in your business and we’ll be able to offer you a sub-retail price as part of our package.
