Yearly Dental Practice and Dental Marketing Roundup
What do you think of when you think of the fiscal year end? Taxes! What else? That’s why for businesses, year end is the perfect time to do your business planning and budgeting for the following year. Since you’re already dealing with the books why not do some analysis and make some decisions to ensure that your dental practice prospers over the coming year? End of year is a critical time to sit down and review your practice including its dental marketing efforts and spending from top to bottom.
Checking the metrics- don’t forget the most important ones
As you go about checking the numbers from this years production, billing, patient flow etc it’s easy to miss one of the most important metrics; goals. Once you know where your practice stands financially, it’s time to take a look at how it got here. Pull out your business plan, dental marketing plan and any other planning documents such as last year’s action plan and review last year’s goals. Did your business accomplish what you set out to do? Why or why not? Make some notes on your thoughts about your successful accomplishment of your goals (or lack of it). These will be handy when you do your business planning for the current year.
Key Dental Marketing Metrics
Marketing Spend by Medium
– this is the real dollars your practice spent for external marketing and advertising efforts. You should be able to track money spent on each marketing medium and hopefully you have been keeping track of patients by medium as well. This will help determine a yearly ROI for each given medium. Breaking this down within categories as well is essential. In other words, don’t just list ‘online’… break online down to your dental website, search engine marketing, dental facebook pages, etc.
for 2013:
It might be hard to spot where your practice’s dental marketing plan is lacking or where it could benefit the most. Dental marketing strategies and best practices are constantly changing. Call to speak with our dental marketing consultants for free to see where we can help your practice. 800.522.0800
Marketing Resources Spent by Medium
– this is more internal resource costs in human manpower as well as dental supplies and equipment. Again, be sure to break each medium down to the lowest common denominator. When you’re looking to grow revenue year over year, this is a great place to start.
for 2013: 
Cutting costs for dental supplies is an easy way to save big year over year. SmartPractice dental supplies makes it easy to compare dental supply prices you have been paying. SmartPractice carries all the top manufacturers and the best brands at everyday low prices. Don’t be tricked or fooled into thinking there is a difference in quality or service. The only difference is price, and you’re paying too much.
New Patient Acquisition by Medium
– this is both a count and revenue amount accumulated by medium… include both referrals and word of mouth. Understanding how many customers, as well as the value of those customers, is essential to planning for next year. Some mediums may bring smaller counts… but much larger production. Plan and budget according to your practice goals.
for 2013:
Every practice should goal on getting as many new patients with the least amount of dental marketing effort on their part. Dental recall is typically the answer for most practices. An existing patient is much cheaper to reactive than to acquire a new one. Dental recall and automated recall solutions from PracticeMojo reduce the amount of time your practice and office manager is spending trying to reactive and recall past due and really past due patients.
Patient Retention by Medium
– this may take some additional effort, but understand what your practice is doing that is impacting your patients’ retention. Remember a loyal patient is a repeat patient, happy to buy again because they know your products and services are excellent, they are happy with the way they are treated and they feel a special relationship exists between the themselves and your practice.
for 2013:
PracticeMojo has automated patient loyalty programs that provide valuable feedback for your practice, encourage patients referrals, and expose your practice to a whole new patient base. Did I mention it was all automated? PracticeMojo will save your practice countless hours, it will bolster your dental marketing plan, and surpass your yearly goals.
Year over Year Comparisons
– how did your dental marketing strategies perform compared to last year? You can absolutely bet that it’s going to change again next year! Changing your media mix, resources and strategies will increase your marketing return on investment. 
for 2013:
If you haven’t yet moved to PracticeMojo automated recall then I recommend this as a starting point for your practice. PracticeMojo is only $179 a month – much less than DemandForce or SmileReminders, and has no contract or setup fees. PracticeMojo guarantees you’ll be completely satisfied every month! It is the quickest, simplest solution to dental marketing today.
Dental Marketing Plan for the coming year.
For the majority of practices you are looking at growing your practice, and making more money this coming year. If you pick up any basic business book one of the first things you’ll learn is that it is cheaper, easier, and more effective to retain current patients than it is to acquire new ones. In fact on average, if your practice can retain all of its patients by just one additional month, you can achieve an additional 3 percent of annual growth. If you can retain your patient base for four additional months, you can create double-digit growth–without adding a single new patient! What are you doing to retain the 40% of paying patients that are walking out of your practice each month?
By focusing its efforts on your existing patient base with their effective and proven dental marketing recall strategies, within days of starting PracticeMojo you’ll notice that your patients stop falling through the cracks, costs go down and revenue goes up. A simple guaranteed solution to help your practice meet and surpass it’s goals for the coming year. Give PracticeMojo a call for a short 10 minute demo to see for yourself how PracticeMojo save your practice time, while helping it surpass it’s goals.
