ADVERTISING RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

I’m going to go out on a limb and state that you have no idea of your return on investment of your external marketing campaigns.  If you do, you are in the minority and should be congratulated for tracking your new patients from advertising and determining your ROI.  This is difficult to determine from your dental software without keeping a separate log or spreadsheet.

The definition of return on investment (ROI) is revenue generated by advertising divided by the cost of the advertising. In general, look for an ROI of 3 or greater for every marketing campaign. If your ROI is lower, you may explore alternative marketing options in the future. 

Practice Hawk was designed to calculate your ROI for every form of advertising you employ and allow you to make more educated decisions on how you make future allocations of your marketing budget.  Inputting your data takes minutes a day and your reward is valuable insight into what is working in your marketing and what is not. Visit www.practicehawkpro.com for more information.

Generally speaking, new patients generated from advertising will average a treatment plan acceptance rate of about half that of referral patients.  Referral patients already have an element of trust in you that transferred from their referral source. 

We refer to new patients generated by external marketing as first generation patients. Those new patients resulting from referral are second generation patients. In theory you could have a whole “family tree” of origin of your patients. Dentists that have practiced long term may have twentieth generation patients. Ideally you have sound internal marketing in place so that your practice is on a regular diet of referrals as opposed to continual high expenditure for advertising. 

If you are working with a marketing professional, you will increase their marketing effectiveness exponentially with accurate tracking of your ROI. 

We highly suggest that you rely on a dental marketing professional to handle your practice advertising campaigns.  For referrals to some of the best marketing companies, give us a call at (602)-702-1218 or email Mike@murraywarm.com  They rely on you to see what is working in your advertising and what is not.  With accurate tracking, you may discover that one marketing venue may attract a higher volume of patients, but lower per patient initial expenditure in your practice.  ROI measures quality, not quantity.