8 Steps to Practice Marketing Success in 2023

As you plan your marketing strategy for 2023, it's important to review the past year and consider where your efforts & resources should be focused in the coming months. Here are 8 steps you should take before finalizing your marketing plan:

1. Review all the advertising, marketing events, promotional activities, patient contests, etc. that your practice conducted in the past year, month by month.

2. Chart the expenses associated with each marketing strategy and event, including referral doctor marketing, Google ads, patient events, and other marketing activities.

3. Analyze the referral sources for all your new patient exams and see how each marketing strategy contributed to growth.

4. Calculate the number of new patient inquiries that each marketing strategy brought to your practice. Divide this number by the total marketing dollars spent. That is our lead capture cost per patient. If you don’t track this metric, make sure you start doing this immediately. Sometimes an activity generates patient interest but does not end up becoming a consult or a start due to poor new patient intake systems. It’s important to recognize the leaks in our new patient bucket.

5. Understand the importance of responding to new patient queries immediately with the best scripting possible. Practice and service-oriented responses maximize the chances of converting these leads into patients.

6. Calculate the production that each referral source brought to the practice against the marketing expense involved. By production I mean the total treatment fee of the cases started that cited the corresponding activities as referral sources. Divide the production dollar amount by the cost of conducting that marketing activity. This gives you your ROI or Return on Investment

7. Focus on marketing strategies that have a high ROI and consider replacing those with low ROI that require a lot of effort from your team. Lean into high ROI marketing activities in the coming year.

8. Use the insights gained from your past marketing efforts to develop an effective and profitable marketing strategy for the coming year.

By following these steps, you can create a marketing plan that will drive growth and success for your orthodontic practice in 2023.