In this episode, you’ll discover…
- How to get 2 or 3 times as many patients out of your existing marketing campaigns, without any additional spend
- When people buy (and it’s not exactly when you think)
- The secret weapon to maximizing your ROI on marketing
Join us on the Dental Marketing Secrets Podcast!
Full Transcript
What do you get when you combine simplified practice marketing, proven ROI strategy, and Vans skate shoes? You get Mark Thackeray, of course. So lace up, grab your green smoothie and get ready because this is Dental Marketing Secrets and this is Mark.
Hello and welcome my friends to episode number five of the Dental Marketing Secrets Podcast. This is all about providing actionable tips and tricks that you can apply immediately to grow your practice so you can serve more patients and leave a greater impact. That is what it’s all about.
My friends, my name is Mark Thackeray and as always I am honored to be here with you in this very moment, wherever and however you may be listening. Thank you for spending your time on Dental Marketing Secrets. I promise you it will be time well spent.
So today’s topic is centered around converting more of the leads that you generate into high quality patients for your practice. And essentially it’s the ability to multiply patient flow without having to multiply your marketing investment. Now, this concept radically altered my way of thinking when I was first introduced to it. It helped me become much more strategic in my approach as well as increase my profitability geometrically.
We’ve talked about how to attract more of your ideal patients in prior episodes through clearly defining who constitutes an ideal client, truly understanding their desires, their wants, their frustrations, their goals. And we’ve talked about using all that information on your ideal patients, that target audience that you’re trying to attract by crafting a message that is specific to them. Not using some generic vague, one size fits all solution.
And today we’re going to drill down into how you can make your marketing efforts go much farther and how you can generate even more patients out of your existing marketing efforts. Okay?
But let’s start off with defining the term lead conversion. Okay. And the way I define lead conversion is simply getting your prospect to take the next step in the sales process of becoming a patient. Now a lot of people define lead conversion as only occurring when money exchanges hands or when someone becomes a client or a patient. Now that may be the end result we are looking for. But the path to get there involves multiple steps along the way. Remember how we talked about in episode number three about the steps involved in a dating relationship and how that is similar to the steps involved in becoming a patient?
For me, I like to start out with looking at the high level, the big picture, and identify what’s the next and easiest step that a patient needs to take along that path to take along that sales path to get where I ultimately want them to go. Okay, so for your practice, that would mean having a patient in your chair while you’re providing care and treatment to them and they’re paying you to do that. That would be a converted lead.
But a lot of doctors and a lot of marketers frankly miss a lot of the along the way. They’re too focused on that end result and attaining that as quickly as possible. And as a result, they neglect those important in between steps and end up forfeiting the sale. Missing out on that patient. And as you may have known from personal experience, when you skip too many steps, you stumbled down the stairs, you’re not gonna make it.
Selling and marketing is really a process. It’s not an event. It’s a process with many steps to it. And you see this all the time in our industry, there are doctors that will disregard that process of building trust and go straight for the sale and then wonder why on earth they aren’t getting more patients from their marketing efforts. Every ingredient, every step is necessary. Don’t expect the bread to rise if you leave out the yeast.
So really in the end, your whole goal is to simply get your prospect to take that next step in the sales process of becoming a patient. And when you do this, you remove so much of the pressure from your marketing. You’re now not expecting or putting as much pressure on one individual step. You’re not expecting that that step to carry all the weight. You’re simply following the natural process that occurs when someone decides to come in for treatment.
So let’s take an example, and I’ve used this example in earlier episodes about the educational resource on dental implants that we created. Okay, so look at that process first. Offering some type of valuable information that helps educate the patient on dental implants, things like you know, when to consider them, what to look for, what to avoid, things of that nature. Then the next step after that is to offer them the chance to come in for a free consultation and to receive information that’s specific to their situation. You see how there’s a systematic process to it all.
Now, I used to do something very similar with my photography company years ago where I created a free is a free educational guide about choosing a wedding photographer. And at the end of the guide, I included an offer for a free 30 minute engagement shoot so that they could come try me out with no strings attached, no pressure, no risk, and make sure that they were totally comfortable and that I delivered the goods, so they actually knew what I was doing.
And if you look at that process, can you see how, I’m just trying to get them to take that next step and how I made it very easy and natural to take. When you remove as much of the risk as possible, you will convert more patients, plain and simple. And the point here is that each step along the way is strategically engineered to move the prospect to the next stage in the process. You’re not simply running an ad and then hoping for the best; you know exactly where they are headed and what their final destination is.
And an important note to make is that there needs to be a clear offer or a clear call to action at each stage in order to encourage the prospect to move to the next step in the process. Too often I see people in businesses that are afraid to ask their prospect to take that next step because they’re worried about a, you know, seen as too pushy or too high pressure. So we simply say very generic things like “visit our website” or “if you have any questions, let me know.”
But all that does is put the onus on your prospect to do the work, which is the last thing that you want. Don’t make your prospect prospect have to exert all this mental energy and trying to figure out what the next step is. No, make it very clear, very easy. Spell it out in plain English if you have to. They need to know exactly what you want them to do.
Another distinction I want to make is making ourselves available is very different than making an offer. Like I mentioned before, far too many people, and I totally admit I was guilty of this myself for years, but far too many people get into the habit of making ourselves available by saying things like, “Hey, if there’s anything you need, just let me know. I’m available to help.”
But if you think of it this way, it should help if, let’s, let’s use an example, that will really land this, this point for you. Imagine for a minute, I invite you into my home, into my living room and I tell you, “Jeff, I’m so glad you’re here. If there’s anything you want to eat or drink, help yourself. There’s plenty in the kitchen and if you need anything, I’ll be in the other room. Okay?” So that’s one example of this making-yourself-available approach that we’ve just talked about.
Now contrast that example with this alternative approach. So same scenario. I invite you into my home, into the living room, and then I go into the kitchen and come back out with a plate of freshly baked cookies. I walk right up to you and I say, “Hey Jeff, want a cookie?” Now I’m making an offer to you. I’ve got these delicious cookies that right here, and it would be really hard for you not to take a cookie at that point because I’ve clearly gone out of my way for you.
Would you not agree that it would be extremely difficult not to take that cookie even if they weren’t your favorite cookie? That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the difference between an offer versus making yourself available. Okay.
Let’s switch gears for a moment and talk about the value of leads. Okay? And it can help to look at your leads as a group or, or a bundle of leads. So let’s say we’ve got a bundle of a hundred leads and it helps to look at it this way instead of just zeroing in on one lead and hoping and putting all this pressure on that one lead to convert. But if we take a look at this bundle of leads, we know three things, okay, there’s going to be three possible outcomes. We know that they’re either going to buy now or they will buy later, or they’re not going to buy it. Those are the three outcomes available to these leads.
And there’s a really neat study that’s done by the, the inquiry handling service. And these are the guys that handle millions of leads for a wide variety of industries. They’re tasked with following up with all those leads to determine, you know, did they end up purchasing that dishwasher or did they buy that refrigerator or did they get their roof repaired? Like I said, they handle leads for almost every industry, literally millions of leads. And what they found is super fascinating and it’s extremely relevant and valuable to anyone looking to maximize their return on marketing. They found that 50% of those people that inquired about a specific product or service ended up purchasing that product or service within the next 18 months.
So in our industry that that means 50% of the people who inquired about braces or Invisalign will receive that treatment in the next 18 months. And this is all data that they’ve gathered through this followup system as they’ve tracked these leads. And you know, they’d ask them at different intervals, three months, six months, 12 months after they initially inquired, “Hey, did you end up purchasing that?” That’s how they gathered and aggregated, aggregated all this data.
So 50% of those that inquired will in fact make the purchase within 18 months. But what’s really interesting is that of those 50% that buy, only 15% do so within the first 90 days. This means that 85% of those that are going to buy will buy after 90 days and sometime between three and 18 months. That means the vast majority of those leads that will go onto buy will do so between months three and 18. In other words, the majority of the value that you just generated with that bundle of leads lies in your ability to extend that relationship beyond 90 days and ideally out to 18 months.
Again, these are leads that you’ve already paid for. Imagine if you had the ability to capture let’s say twice or three times as many patients with the same marketing spend simply through a more comprehensive, a more robust followup system. Imagine the effect that would have on your practice. Fascinating and very powerful.
And the challenge is when you’re looking at these bundle of leads is being able to tell which ones are going to buy and which ones won’t. Okay, put simply, you can’t, there’s just no way. You can’t look at these leads and say, Oh yeah, this person’s gonna buy. This person will not. You don’t know which people will accept treatment and turn into patients and which ones won’t. Therefore, it’s absolutely critical that you treat everyone like buyers until they prove otherwise.
How many of you have had that happen in your office? When someone comes in needing a lot of treatment and based on maybe their appearance or the way they’re acting, you have totally written that person off as someone who is not going to pay for that and low and behold, all of a sudden the heavens opened the sun beams down on you and they pull out their credit card. Who has had that happen to them?
I just had a client tell me yesterday an example of this same scenario play out. He had a 21 year old who needed major cosmetic work and it was like a $16,000 plan and she didn’t seem like a person who had the ability to afford it, so he would kind of written her off but was totally surprised and blown away and frankly ecstatic when he found out that she had, she’d actually been saving this for years, she’d saved up all our money for years to be able to do this and was ready to get started. And now she’s in temps and she’s on her way to a life changing smile. You simply never know and that’s why it’s so important to treat all your patients like they are buyers until they prove otherwise.
Now as we’ve just discussed, if you can extend that relationship with your prospects up to 18 months and continually stay in communication with them during that time by providing value and helpful content, you are going to see more and more of those prospects turn into patients. Again, we simply don’t know when people are ready to buy -they are ready when they feel that they are ready, not when we feel they are ready.
And whenever I teach this approach to clients, I naturally get some people who start to worry and they start to say things like, you know, Mark, I just don’t want to be giving away all this free stuff to these tire kickers. I don’t want to have to send out all this free information. It’s not going to turn into anything. And maybe if some of you are thinking the same thing, you might’ve had the thought, “Hey, that is a ton of work. That seems like a massive amount of work to do to create a followup system like that.” And my response is simple. I always say, “absolutely it is. There is no success without the requisite work.” Or a Zig Ziglar put it: “There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs.”
“There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs.”
Zig Ziglar
If you want to build a great, tremendous practice that’s growing month after month, you’re going to have to put in the effort. Another common objection I hear when people are getting into this is that they stress about communicating too frequently with their prospects. They don’t want to come across as too pushy, for fear that their people are going to unsubscribe or are they sending too many emails and so instead what they do is nothing. They don’t send anything out. They’re paralyzed by fear.
But you cannot be worried about that. Remember, you are trying to attract those five star prospects, those that are eager to learn how you can help them, they’re easy to work with (they’re not a big pain in the backside) and have the desire to work with a professional. Those are the ones you’re trying to attract. The others, all those ones that are causing 80% of the headaches, let’s say the bottom 20% those are the ones who are trying to repel. It’s not worth your time to generate more of those patients.
Be done with those already! This process can help you do that. It’s very polarizing and that is a good thing. It’s designed to sift out those that aren’t qualified to work with you, saving you time and resources and frankly your sanity in the future.
So a quick recap. If you truly want to maximize your ROI on your marketing campaigns, if you want to double even triple the amount of patients you’re getting from your current campaigns without investing any more money than you currently are, then you need to focus on creating an educational value rich followup system that consistently communicates with those prospects and gives them the chance to take the next step in the process to becoming a loyal patient.
Remember, 50% of people that inquire about your services will end up receiving treatment within the next 18 months. But of those 50% of buyers, only 15% will do so within the first three months. So in order to capture the lion’s share of the value that you just generated on those leads, you need to maintain contact with them, providing them value for several months, ideally 18 months after their initial contact.
Yes, it is an initial investment in time. Yes, it is in his initial initial investment in effort to set this up, but it will allow you to generate more patients out of the same marketing investment and build the practice you’ve always wanted.
That is it my friends. Thank you for joining us today on Dental Marketing Secrets. This is such an important topic that most doctors don’t even think about and I love sharing this strategy because of the monumental effects it can have on your practice.
If you have specific questions about this topic, simply email me at markthack@gmail.com.
And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review for this podcast podcast podcast. I’m starting to talk with an accent, apparently 🙂 That would be a huge help. I could use your help on this and please share it with your friends, your peers, and your team.
All right, until next time, my friends!
Did you enjoy this episode of the Dental Marketing Secrets Podcast? Head on over to iTunes to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And for more proven marketing strategies to grow your practice, visit practicerocket.net.
