Thursday, March 12, 2015

March 11, 2015 - NPI Newsletter


Oh Google - You've Done It Again!

We've always wanted to channel Mr. Magoo to start our newsletter. We can now check this one off of our bucket list. 


At the end of this newsletter you can see a reference link with an excerpt from the link. We will use this newsletter space to help you determine what these new Google changes mean specifically to your dental practice.

First, let's go through some terminology.

A: Responsive Website = A website that "morphs" in size depending upon the device the viewer is using to look at your website.
B: Non-Responsive Websites = A website that does not "morph" in size depending upon the device the viewer is using to look at your website.
C: A Mobile Website = A website specifically built for smaller viewing devices (tablets & cell phones)

Let's see how easy we can make this. In general......
  • If you have A above - Google will not penalize you after April 21, 2015
  • If you have B above WITHOUT having C above - Google will penalize you after April 21,2015
  • If you have B&C above - Google will not penalize you after April 21, 2015
  • If you are an NPI internet client, there's a 90% chance you are perfectly fine with what you have. 
  • If you are an NPI internet client with an older website, it might be a good time to speak to your advisor about an upgrade.
What exactly does "penalize" mean?
In short, it means Google is now going to rank websites based on their mobile friendliness. You might imagine them bringing forward all mobile friendly websites first, ranking them, THEN ranking all mobile unfriendly websites AFTER the mobile friendly websites.
Many dental websites are going to lose competitive search positioning after April 21, IF they do not already have a mobile friendly internet solution. 

How do I see if my website is ok?
The fastest thing to do is just bring up your website at the following link. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ 

Let Google tell you if you are mobile friendly.
Is this all bad news?

No! If your website is mobile friendly, you are perfectly fine. Your local competition might not be! If you are all set to go and your competition is not, your website positioning will stabilize and improve. Their positioning will drop.

As always, if you have any questions at all - feel free to reach out to us.
Reference:

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html 

If any of you need us, just call 866.336.8237. We will be here for you.

Got questions? Want to learn more?
You can reach Mark & Howie at:
Howie: whh@newpatientsinc.com
Mark: markd@newpatientsinc.com



































Tuesday, March 10, 2015

New Patients Inc - March 2015 Newsletter


Effective promotion is a team sport
 
Most of you know, we (NPI) don't do ANYTHING with client marketing dollars until we test it, tweak it, retest it, and it proves to be worthwhile (good return) and perform consistently well, market to market.

We (New Patients, Inc.) are launching a new service soon. Conception of the new service came from three sources.
1.     A large statistical variance between client office call conversion rates. We have clients getting 200+ phone calls in a campaign year, converting over 50% of those phone calls. These clients are ridiculously happy. We have clients getting over 200+ phone calls in a campaign year, complaining they aren't getting enough new patients. Same number of inquiries - two different offices - two different outcomes.

2.     An enormous statistical variance in client calculated ROI values after the first year. Same number of phone calls. One office tracks sources and understands ROI well. Another office believes they are tracking well, but are not. Same volume. Two different outcomes.

3.     Our clients. We received request after request from both the dentist/owner and team members. We let them know we would test everything and get back in touch with them.

The objective is to bridge the gap from incoming phone call to good patient in the chair. In other words, increase conversion, increase compliance, & improve ROI outcomes.

While the data and some more subjective materials/findings/trends poured in during testing, it became fairly obvious (to us anyway), the starting point of the operational side of the business of dentistry - has quite a few challenges. Here are the highlights. We hope the following result data opens your eyes to take action and ultimately helps you.
 
·      Practice owners ignore the process of conversion

·      100% of practice owners refused to quantify or listen to incoming calls from advertising themselves, until a detrimental issue was identified and communicated.

·      30% of practice owners still refused to listen to incoming calls from advertising even AFTER a detrimental issue was identified and communicated.

·      10% of practice owners disengaged with the service after a detrimental issue was identified and communicated.  They blamed the service personnel who uncovered the problem.


·      Nearly one fifth of your potential return is being wasted

·      19% of calls from incoming advertising did not get answered by a representative from the office

·      About 80% of these missed calls were due to the office being closed on the day the call came in

·      About 20% of these missed calls were due to being closed at lunch time and not having the phones covered

·      Less than 50% of owners were willing to make changes to have the phones covered on their day off and during lunch

·      4% of the uncovered potential new patient calls left a message.  The rest (96%) just vanished.  0% of the teams took the initiative (initially) to look up the caller ID in their call tracking software to re-engage the potential new patient.

·      Almost 30% of the test practices had capacity issues.  They were booked too far        ahead and had too few openings for new patients, leading to poor conversion.

·      Virtually all of these practice owners understood the problem after it was presented to them

·      Slightly less than half were willing to do something concrete about it

·      0% of the offices (at the start) correlated the advertising source information collected from listening to the calls, to update their pm software properly

o   0% of the offices had a clue what their first level ROI was
 
Summary: If you want more bang for your buck from your advertising dollars (no matter what company does your marketing for you), start paying attention to conversion.    

The job of your advertising is to get a human being interested enough in your dental practice to pick up their phone and hit 7 numbers on the keypad. Good marketing doesn't stop when the phone is connected. 

I hope this helps some of you take a MUCH closer look at how things actually are working (or not) in your dental practices.  

Do you have a topic you would like covered in an upcoming newsletter? Ask here.

Just email either Howie Horrocks (whh@newpatientsinc.com) or Mark Dilatush (markd@newpatientsinc.com) with your topic. We will get them into the newsletter.
 

If any of you need us, just call 866.336.8237. We will be here for you.


Got questions? Want to learn more?   

You can reach Mark & Howie at:
Mark: markd@newpatientsinc.com