Episode 567: Is Your Marketing Worth the Money?

When it comes to marketing, are you just spending money for the sake of spending money? This episode is all about realizing your marketing return on investment. Where are your patients coming from? What’s working and not working? Kiera shares what practices should be asking of their markets to get the most bang for their buck.

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Transcript:

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0:00:05.6 Kiera Dent: Hey everyone. Welcome to The Dental A Team Podcast. I'm your host, Kiera Dent. And I have this crazy idea that maybe I could combine a doctor and a team member's perspective, because let's face it, dentistry can be a challenging profession with those two perspectives. I've been a dental assistant, treatment coordinator, schedule filler, office manager, regional manager, practice owner, and I have a team of traveling consultants where we have traveled over 165 different offices coaching teams. Yep, we don't just understand you, we are you. Our mission is to positively impact the world of dental, and I believe that this podcast is the greatest way I can help elevate teams, grow VIP experiences, reduce stress and create A team. Welcome to The Dental A Team Podcast.

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0:00:51.6 KD: Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera, and I hope today is just an incredible day for you. I hope you're having so much fun. You guys know me and my podcasting today is podcasting day, so I'm always loving it. I hope that you guys are just having a fantastic day. Remember that life is happening for you and not to you. And guys, you are a solution master. I literally say that in our team. We have the way we talk, the way we speak, and one of those is "I am a solution master, I can figure things out no matter what is thrown my way." And guess what? You listeners are the exact same way. So today, I just want to quickly dive into, how do you hire different people for marketing ROI? Let's dive into what exactly is marketing ROI.

0:01:39.2 KD: Before I do that guys, as always, you guys know if you have yet to like our Facebook page, follow us on social media and leave us a review, five stars. Guys, that's how we're going to be able to do our mission of positively impacting the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible. So if this podcast has blessed your life in any way, shape or form, go send it to a friend, give those five stars, download this podcast. Guys, our goal is to break over a million and to help serve in more countries, more states, more offices. There are millions of dentists out there and our goal is to help all of them. So guys, help us out. It's up to you to help out. Please do that. And for those of you who have, thank you so much.

0:02:21.2 KD: Alright, so with marketing ROI, ROI stands for return on investment. So a return on investment, for example, the stock market right now is a junk return on investment this year. However, typically speaking, the stock market is a place that usually typically has a pretty good 7% to 8% return. So if I'm going to go give you $1 and you could promise me that I'm going to get back 7% of that, which again is not a lot. Guys, 7% on $1 is $0.7, okay. A 10% return is 10 cents. It's not very much on $1 guys. So 7% to 8%. You have to also look at inflation. If you're only getting a 5% return on your money and you're in inflation, you're losing money. So you have to look at what is that return on investment.

0:03:13.1 KD: So when we're talking about marketing ROI, What that means is, one, do you know the value of your patient? Do you know the lifetime value of a patient? Have you gone back and looked at all your patients? I mean, if you're a brand new start-up, you can look from day one. If you've purchased a practice, you can go back... I usually like to go back about five years. How much do those patients bring in in their revenue of the course of their life? Now guys, I'm 36. I'm probably going to be with my dentist not for five more years. I'm probably going to be with my dentist for the next 35 years. So a five-year window is not a great place to start.

0:03:48.8 KD: However, for me, it's a little bit easier 'cause I think in today's pretty transient world, if I can hold on to a patient for five years, I'm doing pretty good. Hopefully I have them longer than that, but five years is probably a pretty good time to start with. We go back and look to see, how much does that patient generate a revenue in five years? That way we can find out the value of this patient in a five-year window. You can of course, go bigger, you can go smaller, but that's just a kind of general idea. So let's say our patients, we do a lot of implants, a lot of crowns on average. Guys, I'm not your implant crown patient, I'm not. I could be your ortho crown or your ortho patient. I could be your botox patient. I could be your whitening patient.

0:04:31.4 KD: So all of us are going to bring in a different amount of revenue, which is why we need to average it. You guys know how to average, I'm not gonna teach you basic math. Once we know, Dental Intel does a great job of this, so if you don't wanna figure it out, you can also just pop in their software. But let's say for me, on average, I'm going to bring to the practice $6,000. Okay, let's just put that as an easy number out there. The way I determine my marketing ROI is I need to see what is the cost of acquisition of a patient, knowing the lifetime value of this patient. So if it's $6,000, like we gotta think they come in for their two cleanings, they're going to come in for probably a couple of fillings, they might come in for a crown once every three years.

0:05:15.7 KD: Of course, if I've got an older patient base, it's probably gonna be a lot more. If I've got a younger patient base, maybe not as much. So again, $6000, let's just say that that is their average lifetime value, okay. And then I look to see how much does it cost me in marketing. Now, what exactly is marketing? Is it going to be... It can be a myriad of things, guys. And what you quantify as marketing is very subjective. Because marketing isn't a 1:1 ratio. Guys, do you know how many times we have to see things before we act on it? It used to be seven times. Now I think it's up to like 15 to 21 times. You can thank social media for the number of ads that we are bombarded with. You have probably seen an ad on a product you've bought on the internet, probably at least 10 times without even realizing that you have seen it. That is the world we live in. Okay.

0:06:06.0 KD: So that's where marketing, I think it's a little skewed and it's a bit trickier to do your ROI. However, let's just make it as simple as possible. So what you wanna do is you wanna go through it and you wanna look for, "Alright, my marketing, I'm going to qualify as my Google ad spend. I'm going to do it... I've gotta add in the hours of my employees, how much time is it taking them to work on these projects." And then we also wanna figure out, "Alright, we have all of this. What is it then going to be for anything else we do? Do we wrap our cars? Do we have patient gifts? Are we paying for Google Reviews with Swell? Are we having any type of analytics on there?" All of that needs to be bundled into our marketing cost.

0:06:55.5 KD: Are you guys sick of trying to figure it out on your own? I know I am. When I'm trying to run a business, sometimes I just think like, "There's got to be a better way to do this." And so for me, my answer has been to find someone who's done it and does it really, really, really well. I'm talking the best of the best of the best. I want someone who's been in my shoes, somebody who understands what I'm going through. When I was looking for the consulting business, I found a coach who literally has run a consulting business. Well, that seemed like the perfect fit. So you guys, right now we have a few spaces open in our platinum consulting. That is in the consulting where we actually come to your practice. We help you get systems to implemented. We don't just tell you what system to implement, we actually implement them with you and for you.

0:07:43.9 KD: Guys, it is one of the best investments I've ever made is to hire a coach who understands the business I'm in, who's lived it, who's done it, and that's what we in the Dental A Team do. We literally physically fly to you. So if you're sick of trying to figure it out on your own. If you just want somebody who understands you, join our Platinum. I'd love to have you, I'd love to have our consulting team come out and see you, be in your office, be with your team, and truly help you get onto the easy path of dentistry. It doesn't have to be hard. So join us in the Platinum, we'd love to have you.

0:08:16.8 KD: You also might run a marketing campaign that's just very specific. So I like to know, what are my general marketing amounts, okay, so how much it costs me to pay people, what am I running for Google AdWords? What am I running for Google Reviews? That's just a general baseline, okay. That can help you determine your ROI and it should be added in there because those are dollars we're spending to get patients into our practice. Now, there are things that aren't that. Your team, if they wear any branded jackets, guess what, that's marketing for you, 'cause they're walking around with it, different things, your patients passing along referral cards, it's pretty minimal marketing cost. But if we decide to do a campaign such as a newspaper, or we decide to run a radio ad, or we do a billboard, or we run a Google AdWords campaign, or we run a Facebook campaign, we want to track all those patients. This is why guys, when I'm in an office, I harp on you guys of tracking every single new patient of where they're coming from 'cause we're trying to figure out our ROI. What is it costing to get this patient in, and that way I can know, should I spend more on my marketing, or should I spend less on my marketing? If it's costing me $100 to bring in a patient that's worth $6000, if you guys...

0:09:31.9 KD: You gotta think about this ROI. If I gave you $100 and in five years, it would make you $6000, would you pay me 100 bucks? The answer is probably yes. But what if I didn't know what it would make? What if I said give me $100, and it might make you $100, it might make you $200, it might make you $10,000, would you wanna give me $100? Maybe, maybe not, right? It depends on how much money you got. Maybe you're like, "Yeah, sure," throw 100 bucks in the pot. It doesn't matter. But what if I said, "Okay, I need to get 30 new patients a month," let's say it's costing $100 to get those 30 new patients, well, now it just got a lot more expensive. Now you're having to pay me $3000, hoping... Do you see why now we've gotta know what the ROI is, what's that return on investment? We need to know how much those patients will be worth, they're going to bring revenue to the practice, to see, is that marketing campaign worth the money we're spending? Most practices just spend money. Most practices don't care. Most practices don't track their referral base. But guess what, you podcast listeners are not most practices.

0:10:37.7 KD: You don't throw money away. You guys, one of my biggest pet peeves, if you wanna tick me off, spend money and throw money. Like when we run Indeed ads, I ask, "What's our ad spend? How many candidates did we get for it, and how are we going to improve it?" My team knows they better not just run those ads without telling me those stats, because I LOATHE guys, with a capital L-O-A-T-H-E, loathe wasting money. I hate paying more for things that I don't need to. And in marketing, we often have this weird mindset of, "Oh, if I shut off the pump, we're not gonna have any more patients." But how do you know which pump you should shut off? Is it from Google AdWords? Is it from the radio ads? Is it from our targeted ads? Is it from our TikTok that costs us virtually nothing? What is actually bringing these patients there? And again, it's not a perfect science because there are impressions like TikTok, social media post stories that might be influencing somebody that's not directly correlated. I get that. That's where marketing is a little grey. However, if you're running campaigns and you're paying money for a marketing company, you need to be tracking the ROI and you need to know the value of your patient.

0:11:50.4 KD: So if you have a marketing company, I would ask some of these questions. Guys when I read Tony Robbins' MONEY Master the Game, I asked my CPA, my financial people, I pulled up Tony's book and I was like, "Okay, are you a fiduciary?" and I just went down the checklist of things Tony said. I don't even know what the heck I was asking and they're like "Oh I can tell you've been reading Tony Robbins' book," and I was like, "I have been." 'Cause I don't know what I'm asking. You guys can use this podcast. Ask them, "What is the lifetime value of my patient?" If your marketer doesn't know, guess what, they're just wasting your money. If you ask them, "What is the ROI? So how much money have we spent on marketing and what are the actual transactions, AKA new patients that we're converting? What things have worked and what things have not worked?" If your marketing company can't tell you that, it's time to find a new marketer.

0:12:39.0 KD: If you're not asking these questions, it's time for you to start asking these questions. Doctors, in your office manager meeting, you should be asking these questions, and office managers, you should know this information. We should be able to go and look through, "Alright, of the 30, 40, 50 new patients we had last month, this is the percentage of how many came from Google, this is how many came from referrals, this is how many came from outside sources such as the radio or the billboards or whatever you're choosing to use, if you don't know that information, guess what, 'tis the season, now is the time for you to make your life look different and actually start tracking that. Guys, all of you, if you were to give me $1 and I only gave you $0.6 back, you might be like, in a year, you might be like, "Hm, I don't really wanna give you that $1," if you could go spend it somewhere else.

0:13:25.1 KD: But if you gave me $1 and I would give you back $3 in two months, "Hm, I would probably give you $1." That's how we have to track what's the return on investment, the money we're putting out there. And guys, with practices, you have to realize your doctors are spending money on marketing so we can get more new patients in there and help them to have a better experience. It is our job as team members, like we are obligated guys to be good stewards of that money that our doctors are spending to help us serve more patients. So we need to be tracking this information. We need to educate ourselves to know. I didn't know these things, but guess what, I got educated. I started listening to Marketing Podcast. I started listening to podcasts like this one where I'm like, "Okay, I don't know this information, so I'm going to go study it and become a master of marketing and marketing ROI." This is how you figure out... These are the questions you can ask when you're interviewing marketing companies.

0:14:15.7 KD: "How are you gonna show us our ROI? How many new patients should we get? How many impressions does it take before a patient will take action? What are you finding for most practices? How do you do this?" That way you can make sure the investment... 'Cause guys, ROI, anytime we spend $1, it should be looked at as an investment, whether it's an investment in happiness, an investment to get money back, but we need to especially make sure with our marketing, that we're not just spending money just for the sake of spending money. Guys, my personal opinion on marketing is no dollar should be spent just for the sake of marketing. Every marketing dollar should be returning back patients, and if it's not, we need to change it and we need to do something different. Don't get in the illusion of just because I'm doing my marketing means I'm doing something, and it's a false facade that you are safe, protected and having an ROI on that money. Be a good steward of it. If you guys want help, you know you can always email us, [email protected].

0:15:07.4 KD: This is something we look at with our clients. They're gonna sign up with new marketing people. You better believe we're watching it like a hawk, 'cause we wanna make sure their investments are protected. Things you can do... Go back, guys. I can't even recap this one. Main things that really are standing out is check to find out the lifetime value of your patients, look to see, "Are we tracking all of our referral sources?" and if not, we need to do so, and third, we need to make sure we know how much money is being spent to bring in a new patient, what is our average cost per acquisition, so we know where it is. And then what are the best ways that we're getting our patients in? What marketing effort should we enhance and which ones should we dump because they didn't work?

0:15:45.6 KD: Try that out, guys. Let me know. I'm always happy to help you. [email protected]. You guys, you get to be the stewards over your finances and I recommend that you pay attention to this and become a master of business, a master of marketing, a master of truly running an elite practice, because that's where it's fun, that's where you get to then know how to fine-tune and make small changes with massive results. It's easy, but that doesn't mean all of you are going to do it. I hope you're one of the few that chooses to do so. Alright, guys, as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time on The Dental A Team Podcast.

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0:16:19.5 KD: And that wraps it up for another episode of The Dental A Team Podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.

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