The top 10 mistakes Australian dentists make with their marketing

This week on Marketing Monday with Angus Pryor, the founder of Dental Profit System, Angus will be sharing with you some typical mistakes that Aussie dentists make in their marketing.

Transcript:

Hi, ‘entredentists’.  Angus Pryor here, creator of the Dental Profits System and co-author of the Kindle crushing book, The Better Business Book, bring you this week’s Marketing Monday, the weekly video show designed to boost the marketing at your dental practice.

So, this week we’re going to look at the top 10 mistakes that Aussie dentists make in their marketing, and what I thought I’d do is, we’re going to do this over a number of weeks because first of all, 10 is quite a lot to cover in one session, so we’re going to do this over a number of weeks but before I do that, I wanted to tell you about something.

All right. Top 10 mistakes. Today we’re going to do three of them. The first mistake, The first mistake that I see dentists making is they don’t know the average value of their patients, and to demonstrate why that’s important. Now, right here, I have a $2 coin, hope you can see that. There we are, a $2 coin, and if you know the average value that your patients are going to spend with you in a 12 month period, it’s a bit like this. You get this $2 coin and you hold it up like this to the marketplace and you offer it to the marketplace and the marketplace says, “Thank you for your $2 coin, guess what you get back? Here’s 20 bucks.” Whack, and that’s what you get to take back, and the only reason you can do that is if you know the value of your clients.

That means, for example, if you know, on average, that a new patient is going to spend with you $500 in the first year that they’re with you, because you’ve looked at your own data, then you can afford to offer the market $50 to attract those new clients, because you know, I offer 50, I get back 500. It’s like offering $2, getting back $20, so that’s why that’s most important, and that’s the number one mistake I see. A lot of dentists don’t do that.

The second mistake that I see relates to measuring and tracking call conversions. I’ve written an article about this, appeared in one of the magazines that I write in, and the title of the article, A Bit Flippant, looked at the number one way to kill your dental marketing. Now, of course, nobody wants to do that, but if you know what the number one way to do that is then you know how to avoid that, and you could have world class marketing and kill it all in a minute or two by how your staff pick up the phone.

I did an audit recently where I called 10 dental practices, and I called them at about 10 to 15 minutes, and I can tell you, after making those calls, very quickly I had in my mind the group of practices that I’d be happy to deal with, a group of practices that were sort of sitting in the middle and a group of practices that I would never, ever want to deal with, so you can have world class marketing but then that very quick one to two minute interaction over the phone can kill the whole thing, and one of the ways to make sure you’re on top of that is to be tracking call conversions, so that every time a call comes in, you’ve got the staff filling in where the call came from et cetera, et cetera, and whether the inquiry was converted into an appointment, because if you don’t have visibility around that, they could be murdering your call conversions. Now, I’m not suggesting your staff are doing the wrong thing willfully but sometimes it can happen kind of unknowingly.

The third one, the third mistake that we’re going to look at is not measuring the call source at the time of the call, because, if you imagine, for your average business, 30, 40, 20% of calls are not turned into appointments, then that’s a range of marketing where people are actually picking up the phone and you don’t know what it is that’s triggered them to make that call.

Now, a good friend of mine, Toni, she introduced me to this brilliant question and, in fact, it’s such a great question, I use it in my own business and the question is, who do I thank for referring you to us? Now, that question does two things. First of all, it works out what marketing’s working and what’s not. The second thing that I really like about it is it gives the impression that your business is worth referring to.

To give you an idea, if you go to Dental Profit System and you register, we’ve got a free 60 minutes session where we will give some personalized feedback on your marketing situation and help you come up with a plan. That’s normally valued at 395, we’ve got a special offer at the moment, it’s actually free but only if you move quickly.

I started asking the same question there when you register to do that one hour together, one of the questions is ‘who do we thank for referring you to us?’, now I can tell you I got one of those today and the person said they received an email, so it helps me to know what marketing’s working and what marketing’s not.

All right, that’s three of the mistakes. In the coming weeks, I’m going to cover the other seven but I guess my encouragement to you is, if you hear one of those and your making that mistake, then just fix it. You don’t have to do all 10 at once, just try to get one and let’s improve and make things better.

Well, that’s it from me from this week, so next week we’re going to look at the next ones of those mistakes, but otherwise, if you need a hand with your marketing, head across to dentalprofitsystem.com. Otherwise, until next week on Marketing Monday, it’s Angus Pryor signing off. See you later.