This week on Winning In Business, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will be sharing with you whether your new patient form is undermining your marketing efforts?
“How Your New Patient Form is Undermining Your Marketing” and you’re thinking, “Well, how is that even possible?” Now, obviously, when a new client comes in, hopefully they fill in a new patient form. And for most dental practices, they are capturing people’s, you know, medical history and so on, but also it’s an excellent chance to catch some of their marketing background.
But today I want to talk to you about how this new patient form, if you’re not doing it right, can be undermining your marketing. The first thing I wanted to talk to you about here is something called “touch points” and touch points is basically the journey that your potential client goes on before they become a client.
Every time they see anything of yours, you can consider that to be a touch point. If they hear about you from a friend, if they see some signage, if they see you on the internet, if they see an ad or social media, whatever. All of those are touch points. Now, once upon a time, the number of touch points you needed for someone to become a client was around five to seven. I’m not saying a dental emergency so much, but you know, in other situations, but these days, the data shows that can be more like 10 to 20 because we’re being bombarded with messages all the time.
And so the way that your new patient form can undermine your marketing is if you’re not capturing all of those touch points. And then secondly, to make sure that you’re asking people to tick all, because it’s not one thing, you know. I was talking to a dentist yesterday and they’re like, “Well, you know, which are the best things?” And some things will turn up, no doubt, but often what happens is, your new patient form is really only measuring, if you don’t do it right, the last thing that they saw.
But that undermines all of your other marketing efforts ’cause we need those touch points. So make sure that you’ve list out all the different touch points and you get people to tick all. And then I wrote “aggregate,” but I couldn’t figure out how to spell it. I think it’s a “Aggregate,” which just means to add them up. Now, at that point, what you’re looking for is to see whether there’s any of the touch points listed, any of the different ways that people could have seen you.
And when you add all of those up for a whole bunch of patients over a period of time, then you go, “Oh, okay. “So there’s one, that’s not appearing much.” And sometimes that can be a way of saying, “All right, well, that’s one we can stop spending money on.” But it’s really getting people to tick all. And that aggregate that will help you understand what marketing’s working and what marketing’s not working.