The Marketing Funnel

How data becomes new patients

One challenge we’ve come to expect and love about bringing performance marketing and story-driven creative together is when to trust the vibes and when to respect the data. Those of us who work more with marketing and data are adopting a new fondness for the compelling power of good storytelling and design. Meanwhile, those of us who are creative-minded are mustering up the courage to look at a few numbers without saying, “None of my business.”

If you’re someone, like me, who might be allergic to integers or get hives around fractions, first let me tell you: you are so brave for being a practice owner and getting into the marketing game. In this article, I’m going to help translate those numbers into words so you can look at your campaign analytics without crashing out. Instead, you’ll develop some new confidence as you rest in the cold, hard facts. We’ve got this.

The Funnel: Impressions → Clicks → Contacts → Conversion → New Patients

If you’re looking at Google Analytics or your S8E8 dashboard, you’ll see different charts and graphs illustrating your tracked data. For ad campaigns specifically, this is usually shown as a funnel. It may look simpler than this version, but it illustrates the same thing: how impr (someone seeing your information online) become new patients at your practice.

It’s pretty easy to understand when simplified into impressions, clicks, contacts, and conversions, but all the nuance lives in between these stages of a new patient’s journey. As you can see from the funnel, impressions are just the beginning. After that…

• Someone may see your business multiple times before clicking (many impressions become one click).
• Someone may see your sponsored ad on Google, search for you later, and actually click on your Google Business Profile. They saw your ad first, but this click gets counted as an organic search event.
• An existing patient could search your practice and click the Sponsored listing instead of the organic one. This means a few of your ad dollars went to someone who was already a patient — an unavoidable side effect of having a sponsored listing.
• Someone could even go as far as contacting you by accident, because your keywords matched their search for another office.

This is all part of how real people behave online, which is to say: full of nuance and unpredictability.

An important thing to note is how all the different aspects of marketing — SEO, digital ads, social media, and a website — support each other. Many impressions on Instagram (social media) might prompt someone to click on your website when it pops up later in a Google search (organic SEO). Seeing your business on a map (local SEO) might lead someone back to Google, where they click on your sponsored listing (Google ads).

Let’s go through a few more scenarios:

IMPRESSIONS to CLICKS

What are some reasons someone would click on your website, ad, or profile once they’ve seen it?

• Repetition: You’re running an ad campaign and they’ve seen your information come up several times
• Connection: Something in your social media profile or your Google Business Profile is compelling, like a photo or an amenity
• Convenience: Your location, hours, and services are a perfect fit for their needs

CLICKS to CONTACTS

Once they’ve clicked on your profile or website, what makes them likely to call or request an appointment?

It can often take time, and multiple visits to your profile or website, for someone to actually reach out. At this point they’re getting to know you online, and many of the same decision-making factors apply:

• Trust: People want to feel they’ll be in good hands, so it’s important your website communicates trust, and that your information is consistent across the digital landscape
• Familiarity: They’ve seen your brand out in the community, or heard about you from a trusted word-of-mouth source
• Commitment: They’ve been thinking about getting treatment for a long time and are finally ready to take the next step.

CONTACTS to CONVERSIONS

How do they reach the turning point?

The truest answer is that conversion is just as nuanced as everything else: it’s a mix of someone’s experience and decisions leading up to this point.

• Was your practice convenient to find?
• Did your website feel welcoming?
• Was it simple to call or request an appointment?

The real turning point often comes from that first human interaction: the phone call or email response. Having good phone skills and the team capacity to answer as many calls as possible (Studies estimate dental practices lose between $4,200 and $7,000 in revenue every month simply due to missed phone calls) can make a huge difference in how many leads actually end up walking through your doors.

Calculating ROI

All of this nuance brings us back to where we started: the data. Let’s not forget that the only reason we care about data at all is the one undying question: Is my marketing working? The only real way we can calculate your marketing strategy’s effectiveness is through the numbers. Here’s some to keep handy as you follow along with more math-filled content with us!

The numbers you need to know:

• Your marketing spend
• Number of new patients
  • To know if these are actally new patients from marketing efforts, you’ll need (you guessed it) more data. As we’ve covered here, new patients can come from multiple sources, but things like call tracking and your analytics dashboard will help narrow down those figures by showing where key events (clicks, contacts) happen most.
• Average patient revenue
  • Total annual production ÷ Number of patients served

Throughout the year, we’ll be providing you with more insight about tracking and understanding your data and analytics, and how story and strategy combine to bring you the right kind of patients. We’ll talk about how stories cut through noise, how to make a pivot in your marketing strategy, and bring out the math in measuring visibility and conversions. Make sure you’re subscribed to JunkMail so you don’t miss a thing!