The Future of Dentistry: Working Together to Solve the Black Hole of Marketing

Gary Bird

Most dentists I talk to want to grow their practices. Many spend thousands on marketing trying to do it.

And over and over again, I hear dentists tell me “I’m just not getting the results I want to see.”

Now, sometimes, the problem is bad marketing. If your ads aren’t targeted right, your SEO sucks, or your website doesn’t speak to your audience, then you’re going to struggle to grow.

But I want to let you in on a secret — one that could be costing you 80% of your marketing budget each month. However, once I tell you, it will change how you think about marketing forever.

And you’ll be prepared to start growing in a major way. Ready for it?

The biggest reason that most dental practices fail to generate new patients isn’t bad marketing. I can tell you firsthand that it isn’t that hard to make your phone ring. There are a million marketing agencies out there that can do it.

No, the reason dentists struggle to grow is because most dental practices don’t know how to convert leads into patients.

I call this problem the Black Hole of Marketing — because while it’s a giant drain on your revenue, you probably don’t even know it exists. Unless you rigorously track your new patient journey from start to finish, you may have no idea that you’re leaking new patient opportunities like a sieve.

Solving the Black Hole is often the single most powerful action you can take to get more bang for your marketing buck. I don’t mean small, incremental improvements, either. I’m talking about doubling your new patient count without increasing your marketing spend.

And I’m also going to go out on a limb and say that the future of our industry will belong to the dentists who are willing to work with partners to tackle the Black Hole together.

Allow me to explain.

WHAT IS THE BLACK HOLE OF MARKETING?

The Black Hole of Marketing is all of the hinge points on your new patient journey where you lose opportunities due to poor conversion. Here are the biggest problem areas:

1. Unanswered calls. Astonishingly, the average dental practice flat out misses 35% of new patient phone calls during working hours.

2. Phone conversion and scheduling. Even if they do pick up the phone, most practices schedule less than 50% of potential marketing patients who call.

3. Delayed new patient visits. Many practices make new patients wait well over two weeks for their first appointment, despite evidence that no-show rates jump to almost 30% if you can’t see a new patient within 72 business hours of their call.

Here’s an example to show you why this is such a big deal.

Let’s say you spend $10,000 a month on marketing. Your practice misses 35% of phone calls, right around the national average. Boom! That’s $3500 worth of marketing gone.

Then you schedule only 50% of the marketing patients you do talk to on the phone. Oops, that’s another $3750 from your marketing budget poured on the ground.

And finally, of the remaining patients you do schedule, you’re going to lose 30% to no-shows or same-day cancellations because you made them wait too long for their appointment. That’s $825 more marketing dollars lost.

Of that $10,000 you invested in marketing, you’ve wasted $8,075 due to poor conversion. Or to put it in terms of new patients: If you paid $10,000 to generate 100 leads, only 19 of them would actually show up in your waiting room.

That’s a failure rate of almost 81%.

Ouch.

FINDING THE BLACK HOLE

Now, you may be thinking, “Gary, I can’t possibly be losing this many patients to the Black Hole.” And you might be right! Some practices are better at conversion than others.

But you won’t know for sure until you have a system in place to track your new patient journey so you can actually measure your conversion rates at each of the key hinge points.

The most effective way to do that is to use a CRM. A CRM (which stands for client relationship management) is an app that allows you to track everything that happens after a potential new patient enters your funnel by contacting your practice for the first time.

You need one that integrates with your PMS to give you end-toend visibility over your patient journey.

Ideally, here’s what you want to use your CRM to track:

1. Cost per lead. This is how much you are paying to generate a single new patient marketing lead.

2. Cost per acquisition. This is your cost to use marketing to generate an actual new patient who shows up in your office for their first visit.

3. Missed call rate. How often are you picking up?

4. Phone conversion rate. When you pick up a call from a marketing lead, how often do you schedule them for a new patient appointment?

5. Average time to appointment. How many days do your new marketing patients have to wait for their first appointment?

6. No-show rate. How many marketing patients schedule and then don’t show up?

Points 1 and 2 measure the overall performance of your new patient journey. And 3-6 are individual opportunities for you to make a conversion — to move a patient along to the next step on your patient journey — or lose them.

If you’re tracking each of these points, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Notice that I keep talking about “marketing patients” rather than simply “patients.” Marketing patients are the ones you’re using marketing to create. They are pickier than referrals, less loyal to your practice, and quicker to no-show.

These are the patients you’re losing to the Black Hole, so these are the ones you need to follow with your CRM.

SMC uses Trackable.io as our CRM for every client. We won’t help a practice with their marketing unless Trackable is in place.

Fixing The Black Hole

Once you have a CRM in place and you’re tracking your new ad patient funnel, you can begin to see how the Black Hole is blocking your growth so you can fix it.

As we’ve already explored, this can have huge rewards for your bottom line. For example, if you’re converting 40% of your answered new patient calls into scheduled appointments (within the average range for practices) and you can get that number up to 70%, all of a sudden you’ve almost doubled the number of new patients making it through your funnel. version issues. They’re data-driven, possess operational expertise, and know that good marketing and sales equals growth.

Now imagine what happens if you patch several of your leaks.

However, once you have good data and understand where you could improve your conversions, you’re going to run smack into another problem. Your team probably doesn’t have the internal capacity to solve the Black Hole without help.

Sure, you can figure out how to answer more phone calls, but do you know how to lead a caller to book an appointment? What about which scheduling tactics cut down on appointment wait times or how to bring down your cost to acquire each individual new patient?

Odds are, you’ll struggle to tackle that alone. And your regular old marketing agency isn’t going to get it done for you, either.

This is where you need to bring in a growth partner. A growth partner is the next step in the evolution of dental marketing agencies.

Rather than simply creating leads, a growth partner combines marketing with a deep understanding of practice operations and sales. As a result, you’ll be able to stop losing opportunities (and dollars!) to the Black Hole by converting more of your new patients at each step of your patient journey.

WHY THIS MATTERS (BESIDES THE MONEY YOU’RE LOSING)

We’ve already explored how the Black Hole costs you money. But there’s a big-picture element here, too.

You know who is already beating the Black Hole? Big DSOs.

Many DSOs have the internal capacity to track and optimize their patient journeys to avoid losing so many patients to con-

Plus they’ve got the private equity backing to invest heavily in the latter, gobbling up market share and opportunities from traditional practices… unless you beat them at their game.

But you can’t do it alone. This is why I see the future of dentistry as doctor-owned, debtfunded practices or dental groups joining with growth partners to level the playing field against the largest DSOs.

In this new era for dental, your practice will not only survive, but thrive, if you’re willing to bring in the outside expertise you need to get the same level of visibility and optimization that DSOs enjoy.

You’ll be able to reach more people who need dental care and turn more of them into patients, all while offering the kind of patient care and clinical outcomes that DSOs will always struggle to match.

And you’ll become more profitable to boot.

I’m excited and energized by this future. Are you?

Gary Bird is the founder of SMC National, a growth partner that helps entrepreneurial dentists generate new patients and close more cases by turbocharging marketing, operations, and sales. You can find him on social media @thegarybird