Dentist Practice Management: How To Get More Patients Into Your Practice

When I talk to a lot of doctors regarding the management of their dentist practice, one of the things that they say a lot is that their website is under construction, or that their whole marketing strategy needs a complete makeover and further management so that there will be more patients coming into their dentist practice. In this article, I want to show you how to sort out things in your practice, and get new patients to come in to your dentist practice as well! And this is something we focus specifically at our dentist practice management website!

Now, I want to talk to you about how we can take you and really give you a home to makeover, and get you beyond that point of being under construction all the time. One of the things that I spend a lot of time on is when I'm doing my advertising, consulting or marketing, is I challenge myself, my managers, my sales people, my marketing department, and more importantly my clients, to really look at what's working and what's not working, what's producing results for you and what's not producing results for you... and start getting rid of the “nots”... the things that just aren't fit and working for your business. I want to share to you a couple of core principles to think about. When you're really, really busy, you really got to drill down and identify what's going to make you the most amount of money; and I'm going to share with you a couple of secrets. I always hear my doctors tell me they're busy; they're overwhelmed; they have staff issues and money issues, etc. Now, what I want you to think about is that when you take on the role and idea of becoming a business owner, the first thing you got to realize is that's kind of a part of the deal! In your dentist practice, you're going to have staff issues and capacity issues (well, hopefully because you're going to have patients coming in to your door; and then you are constantly improving the quality of the patients that you have within your practice.. and if you're not, you need to start thinking about that for the management of your dentist practice!). Now if you don't have a ton of referrals, and if you're not having higher case sizes with every patient, then you got to ask yourself these 4 important questions:

1. Are we delivering the services that we're offering in a high level of care and treatment so that people would want to refer to us?

In your dentist practice, you have to make sure that you will be taking good care of your patients by offering the best service, care and treatment to them so that they would want to refer to you, and that they'd also stay always in your practice!

2. Are we giving the population of people out there nowadays what they really want and precisely what they're looking for?

Now, people don't want to go to a dental office, a dentist website, or get a direct mail that doesn't make sense to them! And the same thing is that when they go to the Internet and type in the keywords “dental implant” and then “your town”; or “cosmetic dentist” and then “your town”; they're looking for precisely what those keywords will give them... and they're searching for websites that they don't have to look much further on where they're at! Now Google's number one responsibility (as they continue to grow and evolve) is to allow our customers easier use, you know, so easier use for customers. Now who are their customers? Is it me and you? Well, the fact that we're being in a business, we're utilizing Google that way! But the customers are the people who search; because the better the searches are, the more people will use it, then they can charge their advertisers... and it's a positive cycle. Now think about this: is the website that you have up giving people what they want when they find it? Is it answering their questions? Is it an educational tool that also sells dentistry? You see, just having a website up there doesn't mean anything, especially if it's out there and it's not a good sales tool. A good example is that if in your dentist practice you have hygienists or assistants that can't sell dentistry, one quick and easy way that instantly improve your income is to teach them how. So if you have a website that doesn't have those tools, you're not going to get patients up there!

3. Are you getting traffic to your site?

Now the thing is that most people are going to say: “No, we're not getting traffic to our site!” And that's a problem. It is because if you don't have traffic, how can you get patients from it? So if it is out there just collecting “cyber dust”, then you don't have a true traffic-generating, patient-converting, and direct-response oriented website! You just have this thing out there that is just not working for you!

4. What are your plans to completely dominate and get to the top of the search engines over the next year, or two years, or three years, etc.?

The fact of the matter here is that 70% of the patients go to the Internet. So, what are we doing to position ourselves? Set yourself in a position that will get your site to the top of Google, and make that you stay in that position for a very long time, so that all the traffic will lead to your site... and then get more patients into your dentist practice!

Now, the last thing here is when you're so busy and you're so overwhelmed, you would ask yourself: " How sure am I that my marketing is working?". I'll tell you one secret for this. For me, what I do is that I make sure that I have prospects and clients coming to my business on a daily basis, and we call that “traffic”. Whether it's through the Internet, direct mail, trade magazines, word of mouth, or through tele-seminars that we're doing, any of that kind of stuff, it doesn't matter! We are constantly looking at traffic so that we can consistently have a flow on the percentage of people that are going to be converting on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Now, if you can get it up to the point where you know that for every 20 leads you get, you convert 2 to 3 patients out of it. You need to have a mathematical formula that all you need to do is get more traffic. So if you can get 20 leads, with 2 to 3 patients, imagine what you would do if you'd have 10% conversion ratio! Now, if you have a hundred leads, and you get a 10% conversion ratio, then that's 10 patients! And how much more for 200 leads? So it's really just math at this point! And for us, we segment our practice from Cosmetic, Implant, Sedation, Sleep Apnea, and TMJ. This is because, for example, we have head ache sufferers, and if they type in "TMJ" and look for dentistry in their town they don't want to go to a website that talks about Implants, or talks about Cosmetic Dentistry. They're looking to solve their pain! Seniors who are searching for a website about dentures, or about solving their frustrations, or their dental problems and their looking for dental implants, they want to go to a website that can help them! Always remember that you're patients don't want to be going through a long route and maze to find the answer. So, in the management of your dentist practice, always make sure that you have what your patients want... and that you can give them the best service that you have all the time!

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