How do you know whether your marketing is a success? Is it soaring numbers of ad impressions, increasing traffic to your website, or ad clicks? Or none of the above? Marketing agencies use a number of techniques to generate demand, but what the practice really wants – and needs – is a tangible enquiry. A phone call, or a submitted message. Beyond that, nothing else really counts.

Of course, this is an extremely simplistic view. There’s so much more that goes into making a conversion happen, and this hard work and strategic thinking certainly deserves its moment in the sun. Brand building, awareness, familiarity, impressions, engagement… They’re all important, but they are not the final destination.

It’s the same when you visit a restaurant. The dish you sit down to eat is underpinned by hours of menu planning, stock control, and staff management, not to mention the slicing, dicing, and prep work that took place beforehand. Your chef could have been sweating it out in the kitchen since 5am, and while that’s admirable, if the dish itself is bland or overcooked, it doesn’t matter how hard everyone’s worked. Rightly or wrongly, you judge that single dish on its own merit. Likewise, if a marketing campaign doesn’t generate a lead, its careful planning or creative execution are irrelevant.

So, let’s imagine we’ve done all this groundwork, and a prospective patient decides they’re interested enough to get in touch with you. It might seem like success, but fundamentally it isn’t – yet. When the phone rings with a new enquiry, that’s exactly what it is: an enquiry, not a patient. As Tracy Stuart at NBS Coaching sagely says, ‘A lead is not a booking.’ The ringing phone represents potential. It’s a step in the right direction, but there are still many ways for a practice to step backwards again, even if this is unintentional.

To know if your marketing is really successful, across every stage of the buyer journey, there are four key metrics to track. Doing this will provide you with everything you need to create a full picture of what’s going on; and importantly, help you see where to focus your efforts in fixing issues.

1. Leads identified by your marketing agency

First, there are the leads your marketing agency tells you they’ve generated. These shouldn’t be impressions, but real actions – identifiable leads with a phone number or email address associated with them.

For the purposes of this explanation, we’ll imagine that 100 leads are identified by your marketing agency.

2. Leads identified by your front desk

Then there are the leads your front desk team says it’s received. Logically, these numbers should match – rather like two nightclub bouncers with hand counters, counting people through either side of a door – and you might imagine that it’s impossible for the numbers to be different. However, scarily, the front desk’s figure can be around one-sixth lower than the agency’s. This might be because of missed calls, unlogged calls, or duplicate leads slipping into the agency figures, but here we start to see the importance of tracking this seemingly obvious metric from both sides.

So, once we have ironed out our systems, we should still have our original 100 leads.

3. Patients arriving at your practice

The next metric is the number of people actually agreeing to come into your practice: bookings of potential new patients turning up for either a consultation or new patient checkup. Enquiries need to be handled swiftly and expertly to convert the potential patient into an attendee. You may hear objections on price at this stage if the patient only has previous experience of the NHS.

You may see, say, 60 of your leads booking or agreeing to attend.

4. Patients actually receiving dental treatment

The real conversion of your lead happens when this “monetisation event” occurs. For instance, joining your practice or agreeing to a treatment plan. In the past, when demand for dental care outstripped supply, dentists could fill their diaries while, quite frankly, stuffing up a lot in the patient journey. But oh, how times have changed.

This is where the overall patient experience becomes so important, because it’s the means by which you’ll get those prospective patients to say yes to joining you. But attending does not guarantee success yet – there are a whole range of reasons for a “no” occurring at this stage. These could be big reasons, like an unfriendly or unhelpful member of staff or poor chairside manner, or small ones, such as a dirty toilet.

But if we can cross the finishing line in this marathon, we have the “new patient”.

Today, sales and marketing are increasingly important, which means it’s also vital to understand the nuances of the entire patient journey. If prospective patients are dropping off your radar, you need to know where – and why.

I know that many dentists will read this and think it doesn’t apply to them. Imagine it as a sort of “inverse Carly Simon syndrome”: I bet you think this song ain’t about you. But in reality, I can almost guarantee I am talking to you. While lots of practices think they’re tracking all of these metrics, very few of them actually are. And although tracking one or two is helpful, the macro-economic climate this year so far tells us businesses have to be much better.

Ultimately, if you’re able to pin down those patient statistics every month, you’re probably doing ok. If not, you’ll never identify the root cause of any problems, and – unlike contestants on the classic TV show Bullseye – you’ll never know what you could have won.

If you’d like our help with lead management or marketing, just get in touch with our team.