So you’ve hired a dental marketing agency to provide you with new patient leads, but it’s not turning out how you thought it would. The first impulse might be to place blame. It’s tempting to see the process as one-sided, but it doesn’t have to be. Marketing is really a partnership between the agency and the practice. In other words, your marketing experience should be about working in synergy with the agency you’ve hired, open communication on both sides, and getting to the root of the problem instead of looking for who’s at fault.
If your practice is growing that generally means your marketing campaign is working. Every lead your agency generates represents a potential new patient, but when converting leads to actual patients is not happening the way you’d like, it’s important to find out why rather than point fingers. This is where the partnership comes in. Your dental marketing agency can help you discover what’s not working and offer ideas for new approaches or strategies that may net your practice better results.
For instance, if the potential new patients being generated aren’t the quality or type of new patient your practice is looking for, the marketing agency can modify the strategy by changing the marketing channels or updating the messaging they are using into one that will produce a better quality patient for your practice. Or maybe the problem lies somewhere else in the process, like with follow-up or first impression from inside the practice. In that case, it may be necessary to reassess the process your team is using to reach out to appointment form requests or how calls are being handled by your team. By working together with your marketing agency, each of these issues can be resolved effectively to get the growth you are looking to achieve.
Additionally, soliciting input from your team as well as the marketing team helps everyone feel like they have a stake in the outcome and encourages more open communication. It enables everyone to feel a sense of pride that their contribution helped to achieve optimal results and also helps ensure that no one feels solely to blame for incidents that have less than desirable outcomes. A sense of joint ownership and partnership encourages creative problem solving and new ideas for correcting missteps. Working through problems and developing solutions jointly will result in a shared approach.
It’s important to track and share not just problems, but successes, too. Capturing and analyzing all results and sharing them is one of the best tools you can use to grow your practice. Be sure to keep both your marketing team and your staff aware of how many potential new patients are turning into appointments, the number of appointments that turn into patients, which treatments these patients are choosing and the revenue generated. This is essential to refining your marketing strategy, developing your team, and improving overall practice growth.
Communication is the most important part of developing a successful partnership with your marketing agency. Make sure to do it often and to involve your staff. Use it to turn the typical client-vendor relationship most businesses have with a marketing agency into a true joint venture. And keep in mind that if something doesn’t go as planned, conversation is the best approach for making appropriate adjustments. Strive for objectivity and precision in your communications with your dental marketing agency and let them know that you expect the same from them. A shared experience builds strong relationships which grow into partnerships that produce extraordinary results.
