Developing your marketing plan on data you’ve collected ensures you’ll target patients where they are online–and reveals new opportunities to reach patients and reallocate resources.

At Whiteboard Marketing, we build each client’s plan based on data, analytics and tracking. Today, we share the basics of tracking your marketing–and how crucial this is for success.

Benefits of Tracking Your Marketing Analytics

Investing in a strong digital marketing plan is essential for the success of your practice. Don’t just use strategies–track analytics to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Efficiently Spend Your Marketing Investment

Nobody wants to waste money–especially when they’re running a business and have other expenses. 

Tracking the success of your strategies provides assurance that what you’re doing is truly driving new patients to your practice and thus growing your revenue. You also can see what isn’t working and modify as needed.

Make Decisions Based on Proven Data

You wouldn’t make a major purchasing decision without first reading reviews, evaluating your finances and consulting with people you trust. However, we often see dentists making an eyeball guess of what they need for marketing–instead of making data-driven decisions.

Don’t settle for a somewhat-educated guess. Use data to see what strategies drive patient flow to your business.

Adjust Your Strategies and Goals to Reach the Patients You Want

Goals change as your business grows and develops. Maybe when you first started off you wanted to grow your base by 10 new patients a month, but now that you’re established, you want to promote certain services to target demographics.

The changing scope of your goals will influence your marketing decisions and what you need to meet said goals.

How Do I Start Tracking My Marketing ROI? 

If you’re not paying attention to the results of your marketing, you won’t get the level of payoff like a practice who does. 

Commit to Converting Patients

Start thinking strategically about all facets involved in getting a patient to schedule an appointment with you. Every touchpoint with a patient should be conversion-focused. This includes:

• Tracking where your calls and interest forms are coming from
• Training your front desk to answer common questions from patients
• Add instant conversion features to your website like online scheduling and live chat 

Commit to Tracking Your ROI

Follow where your new patients are coming from–both in terms of physical location and marketing-wise. This will show you how to adjust and leverage your budget.

Your Staff and Data Tracking

Keep your Front Desk Team in the loop on your tracking plan. Have them ask each new patient “How did you hear about us?” and add the response to the patient’s chart. This way, you can see where you’re hitting patients the most with your brand.

Set a Stable, Sustainable Marketing Budget

The dental industry average for marketing budget is three to six percent of your annual collections. How much you choose to spend should be based on your patient and revenue growth goals.

Run a Patient Referral Tracking Report

Track patients’ treatment plans and how much they’re spending with your practice to get a full picture of your return on investment per patient.

Set Business Goals for Your Practice

This includes setting a monthly new patient goal with a yearly overall total, and identifying where those new patients should come from each month.

Equally important is having a clear system in place to support you meeting these goals. Whether or not you achieve your goals ultimately depends on your commitment to this process. Working with a marketing partner will help you develop a clear, sustainable process for goal completion.

What Individual Marketing Metrics Should I Measure?

Along with following overarching patterns, work with your agency partner to also follow analytics from individual components and strategies.

Website

Installing the necessary analytic tracking tools on your dental practice website provides invaluable data including:

• How many new and returning site visitors you get each month
• Where site visitors are coming from across the internet, such as Google Ads
• Top pages viewed on your site
• How often visitors convert and schedule an appointment

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization helps your website come up first when a patient searches for a new dentist. See how well your efforts are doing by tracking:

• How many visitors your page gets from organic, or unpaid, search results
• The speed of your page
• Your bounce rate, or how long patients stay on each page of your website before leaving
• How your website ranks for highly-searched keywords, like “dental implants” or “dentist for kids”

Call Recording and Listening

Listening to your recorded phone calls from your call tracking system helps you learn:

• What your front desk is doing right to convert new patients
• What they can improve on 
• What questions patients ask the most.

Local SEO 

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) gives patients an informative snapshot of your practice when they search for a “dentist near me.” Tracking your GBP analytics helps you see statistics like:

• The number of calls made via your GBP, and how many calls you’re missing
• How often patients search for you on Google Maps
• Demographics of searching patients

Social Media

More patients than ever are finding their new dentist on social media–particularly Facebook. On your profiles, make sure to keep track of:

• How many followers you have
• How many people your posts reach
• How often people click your online scheduling links
• How many calls you receive from your profiles
• How much engagement you get on each post

Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Do you pay for Google advertisements so you can show up first when patients search? To maximize ad spend, keep track of the following:

• How many clicks you get
• How much each click costs you
• How many people see your ads
• How many new patients you get from each ad

Reviews

Reviews from your patients have tremendous value for both Search Engine Optimization and your reputation. As such, it’s critical to generate, track and reply to reviews–along with monitoring:

• Average review score
• How many reviews you have

Now That I’m Tracking Data, Where Do I Go From Here?

You’ve got all the necessary tools and integrations in place to track your data. Now, it’s time to:

• Analyze where your new patients are coming from and the value of their treatment plans
• Work with your marketing partner to set patient and revenue goals, monitor the progress of current campaigns and determine your ROI on current investments
• Revise your strategy as needed to reach patients, efficiently spend your money and maximize your returns

At Whiteboard Marketing, we specialize exclusively in digital dental marketing solutions for dentists across the nation. No matter what stage you’re in as a practice, we can meet you where you are and take you where you want to go by growing both your patient base and practice revenue. Schedule a consultation call with our team to learn more today.

Written by Anna L. Davies, Digital Marketing Specialist at Whiteboard Marketing, with assistance from Brady Stagg and Jason Garcia, Senior Account Managers.