How to Track Your Dental Marketing

Do you know what kind of success you’re having with the various marketing tools you’re using to acquire new patients? Assembling a top-shelf marketing campaign is great, but if you’re not tracking and measuring the results it can be the equivalent of yelling into the void, or worse – throwing money into the wind.

Depending on the region, size, and overall goals of a dental practice, there are a number of traditional and digital marketing tools today’s dentist may implement, including:

• Newspaper and magazine advertising
• Pay-per-click marketing
• Website retargeting
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Direct mail postcards

The best methods of tracking your marketing success may vary based on the tools and platforms you or your marketing team are managing.

Tools and Technology

In today’s internet-driven world, the majority of new patients will visit your website before calling. This is why it’s never been more important to add digital marketing to traditional efforts and take advantage of the tracking technology within each application or platform.

The website software itself will have analytics telling you who, when, and where your visitors are coming from, whether monitored in-house or by the website creator. Google Analytics provides free tools to help you measure website data as well. Likewise, the major social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all have built-in insights for tracking traffic.

Email marketing providers, including customer relationship management (CRM) software, will provide detailed results from each email campaign and evaluate information on current and prospective patients.

Hands-on Tracking

While many of the digital marketing tools incorporate technology for tracking results, there are also some common sense, hands-on methods for your dental team to integrate. Most dentists may already have their front desk ask how new patients heard about the practice when they call to make an appointment, but it’s also a good idea to add a detailed section to new patient intake forms for advanced tracking.

You’re probably employing multiple marketing tools such as direct mail, website retargeting, or maybe radio and news advertising. However, that new patient is likely to say they saw you on the web because that’s where they landed in their research after they saw your other messaging. In other words, they’re probably responding based on the last place they saw you – not where they originally heard about you.

RAMP recommends listing multiple types of media – radio, internet, television, direct mail, yellow pages, website – even methods you’re not even using, then ask people to check off all the places they’ve heard or seen your practice. They may automatically check off website before recalling, “Oh yeah, I received a postcard and I heard the radio ad.”

This kind of breakdown can tell you and your team how each one of your advertising mechanisms is performing.

Pro Tips

While digital marketing tools such as pay-per-click, website retargeting, geofencing, and others have response tracking inherently built-in, there is an additional and simple way to source your marketing efforts. By using unique URLs – also called vanity URLs – or special landing pages you can more easily identify how new patients are finding you.

With traditional advertising like newspapers or postcards, try using a unique phone number that pinpoints which ad or campaign they’re responding to.

In the business of dental marketing, it’s important to know how many people called from your advertising, but also how many made appointments, how many were presented, and of course, how much treatment was accepted. Once marketing is put into place, it must be monitored, evaluated, and adjusted according to those results.

If your primary objective is to treat patients and build a successful practice – not chase down website analytics – then it may be time to enlist the help of a marketing company that can. At RAMP, we specialize in dental practices and have the digital and traditional marketing experience that will produce measurable results. Give us a call today for a free consultation.