Dental Marketing ROI: How to Get the Most Bang for Your Buck
If you’re like most dentists, it can feel more difficult marketing your dental practice than it does practicing dentistry. Perhaps you’ve put forth what you consider to be a genius marketing strategy, only to discover a lackluster return on your investment. Worse, you may not even realize what the return on your investment is, you’re simply posting ad campaigns to the internet ether and hoping for the best.
Knowing your return on investment is vital to marketing your dental practice successfully. Armed with this information, you can craft marketing strategies that maximize your advertising investment. New areas to develop and branch into in order to get your practice in front of the patients who are looking for you can also be gauged.
What is Return on Investment?
Very simply, return on investment (ROI) is how much money you are making as a result of your marketing dollars. If you’ve spent $50 on a marketing campaign that only yielded $25 in business, your return on investment is not positive. By contrast, if you spend $50 and make $500 back, you have a good return on your investment.
You can use this formula to calculate your ROI:
(Total monthly revenue – monthly marketing expenditure) / monthly marketing expenditure * 100
Using the above example, where you make $500 and spend $50, your ROI calculation would be:
(500 – 50) / 50 * 100 = 900
This means a 900% return on investment!
How to Maximize Your Dental Marketing ROI
Dental marketing ROI has complexities that many people may not consider because of the nature of the business. New patients come from not only your marketing efforts, but also word-of-mouth. You want to bring in patients who will visit your practice over the long term, not once. Patients who stay bring in what is called patient lifetime value.
Discovering the source of your new patients is essential in maximizing your marketing ROI. It can also help you locate patients with a high lifetime value. This information allows you to invest more in successful methods while reworking marketing strategies that need more fine-tuning.
Additional Methods for Improving Your ROI
Break down your marketing expenses by channel. This means creating categories for expenditures on Google Ads, your website, and each of the separate marketing channels being utilized. This allows you to determine how many new patients come from each. Analyze the potential income for your dental practice from the patients gained through each category. For instance, if patients acquired through a Facebook ad visit your dentist’s office once and then leave, they have brought you business. However, if patients brought in through your website stay years and book multiple procedures, they inherently have more value to your business than those brought in through Facebook. You can use this information to refine your advertising so it reaches the patients with a greater lifetime value. Use strategic marketing tools to help you understand your marketing successes. Call tracking numbers can help you trace which ads are seeing the most success. Utilizing discount codes or other incentives unique to each advertising stream to trace your patient flow is also beneficial. Try new advertising channels. If you’re unhappy with the performance of your current marketing streams, consider expanding to other channels such as SEO and content marketing, video marketing, social media streams, and others.
Conclusion
Learning to interpret and act upon your marketing data can take time and energy away from your patients. Turning to a reliable and qualified professional can be very helpful in making a real IMPACT on your dental marketing ROI. Offering expertise, flexibility, and proven methods, see why IMPACT Digital Marketing is the premier choice for getting your dental practice noticed and converting, engaging, and retaining new patients!
