Almost every day a new digital marketing trend appears. And you spend some time trying to figure out if these up-and-coming tactics will work for your dental practice, incorporate a few, and cross your fingers that they’ll actually make a difference.

But do you really know whether you’re getting a return on your digital marketing efforts?

Like any other critical component of your strategic planning, it’s important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for your digital marketing initiatives. Your digital marketing strategy should have clear goals and a plan for how to accomplish those goals, as well as the metrics that will let you measure success against your plan and the overall ROI your plan delivers.

Here are a few tips you can use to help you start measuring the success of your digital marketing efforts.

1. Track Your New Patient Leads

Do you know where your dental practice’s new leads come from?

This is a simple question most dental practice owners should be able to confidently answer. Easier said than done though, right? With so much on your plate every day, you might not be keeping up with your lead management. But without understanding who’s visiting your website, calling your phones, and filling out your contact forms, you won’t be able to determine why they’re visiting.

Understanding what’s generating leads for your practice helps you refine your digital marketing strategy to more efficiently reach your ideal prospective patients. Take the time to map out each new lead’s journey, where they came from, and whether or not they actually convert from lead to new patient. 

With this data, you’ll better understand the performance of your marketing efforts. Then, decide which parts of your digital marketing strategy have the highest ROI. If you identify a part of your strategy that’s underperforming, take a hard look at the data and determine whether you should try to improve your methods or just scrap that particular initiative altogether.

2. Assess Your Website’s Performance

There’s a lot of different factors that go into evaluating your website’s performance, and a lot of different metrics you can use to measure whether it’s successfully supporting your strategic marketing goals.

While you can look at any one of the many metrics individually, the best way to assess the overall performance of your website is to look at a group of metrics. Taken together, they can paint a picture to reveal if your website is meeting your performance expectations—or not. 

Here’s what you should be looking for during your website assessment:

• Website visits and page views: The more potential patients who are visiting your dental practice’s website and consuming your content, the more will convert.
• Load time: Ideally, your website loads in 2.4 seconds or less.¹ Conversions drop by about 0.5% for every added millisecond your page takes to load.
• Calls to Action (CTAs): Include a CTA button on your homepage, with clear, easy to follow language. An engaging, clear TA increases your conversions by 28%.²

These are just a few of the different metrics to consider when evaluating your website’s performance. The right performance metrics to assess your dental practice’s website are the ones that tell you how well your digital marketing initiatives are supporting your practice’s goals.

3. Measure Yourself Against the Competition

How do you know whether your marketing results are “good enough?” For example, your analytics are showing a 50% conversion rate. Great, you think, your digital marketing strategy is working—now you just need to maintain that forward momentum. 

But wait! You discover your greatest competitor is experiencing a 60% conversion rate. And now you’re probably asking yourself what the other dental practice is doing that your team isn’t to realize a better conversion rate. Is it just luck? Or is it something specific they did that you didn’t—and if it is, what can you do to increase your conversion rate and stay competitive?

Evaluating yourself against your competitors by conducting a competitive analysis³ is an important step to gauging the success of your digital marketing strategy. Here are some things to consider when evaluating the competition:

• Where and how they generate their website traffic
• The packages and specials they offer
• What type of patients they target
• The success of their SEO vs PPC strategy
• How well their posts perform on social media

Let your knowledge of what’s working for your competitors inform and improve your own dental practice’s digital marketing strategy.

Time to step up your game? Or are you ready for someone else to do the heavy lifting? Dreamscape Marketing can help. Call us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session today.

 

For a list of references, please contact us.