Does Advertising Work? Part 1
Dr. Richard Drake, Co-Founder of DS3
You’ve screened all of your patients of record and treated dozens, hundreds, THOUSANDS of patients with Oral Appliance Therapy. You’re getting some physician referrals, but that can be inconsistent. Ten in one week and then none for two weeks. So what do you do? I’ve recently begun a pretty extensive external D2P (Doctor 2 Patient; I think I’ll coin that one) marketing campaign. Has it worked? I don’t know. It’s still in progress, but guess what? I’m going to bring you along the journey with me.
We spent time interviewing media buyers and marketing gurus to finally come up with “the plan” last fall. Two themes, we thought: one for PAP failures, and one for snoring and tired all the time. That about covers it, doesn’t it? The 10%, and the 90%, respectively, of the 400,000 plus sleep apnea candidates I estimate reside in San Antonio, Texas. We hired an actor, an actress, and a camera crew. We set up the bedroom scene in the media buyers home, and before you can even write the $10,000 check it took to make three thirty second commercials, I heard someone say “Lights, camera, action!”
Concurrently, we held staff meeting after staff meeting trying to distill our current systems to better handle and route the calls we soon expected. Phone scripts. Updated job descriptions. How long do we schedule for an undiagnosed patient? For a diagnosed, in network patient? For a diagnosed, out of network patient? Expected time to capture VOB info, sleep studies, and the dreaded LOMN’s.
The TV commercials start tomorrow night on the 10 o’clock news, she said, excitedly. I hope you are prepared for the calls. You betcha! We’ve been working on this for months!
Fast forward 60 days from the day the first commercial aired. What’s happened? Did we get the calls? How many? How much did we spend on the advertising? Did we also do radio? What type of patients did you get? Did they show up? Were you able to convert them to a dental device? What percent? ROI? I know. You have a thousand questions.
March, 2017: 178 calls. 45 appointments scheduled. 22 showed. 11 dental devices made from media leads alone. Yikes! I thought we were prepared, but we were far from it. ROI after the first month would have been break even IF we could have averaged $4,113 per dental device, which we did not, of course.
We ever UNDER-PREPARED for what happened. You see the numbers, and I hope that you’re saying to yourself “We could have done better than that!” Back to the drawing board. I hired a business consultant, someone outside the realm of dentistry and medicine, and we started over again. Updated job descriptions. New hire for a New Patient Coordinator. What worked, what did not? Tweak. Tweak.
April, 2017: 155 calls. 90 appointments scheduled. 60 showed. 34 dental devices made from media leads alone. Better. ROI after month two is break even if we just average $1059 per dental device (we did better!) More meetings. Now the business coach is holding kaizen events for the staff. Things are looking up, and we’re getting better.
