Many offices have great teams. Others have killer marketing campaigns. When the two come together, they create an unstoppable force in practice growth.
Here are some ways that your team can create more opportunities for large cases and a full pipeline of new patient appointments.
Your Team is Invested in Getting Online Reviews
Your team has a tremendous impact on how many new rave reviews you get online. Even if your practice is automating online review requests, if your team talks to patients about their experience and cultivates an environment where patients volunteer feedback, it will lead to more patients following directions and actually responding to review requests.
If you use a more white-glove approach to patient interactions such that you’re sending out requests manually to the patients that make sense, it’s obviously even more critical that online reviews are a team priority. The best strategy for team investment in reviews is repeated measurement of progress as a team and publicly acknowledging when you score one. Periodic rewards for hitting milestones in review count won’t hurt either.
Your Team Participates in Social Media
Social media marketing is wonderful but without team involvement, your social media profiles will look generic and impersonal. Even corporate dental practices can do better than post after post of dental factoids. You need human involvement to get the best engagement on social media.
Engagement: Interaction on social media content initiated by the user in the form of a link click, a Like/♡, a comment, or a share.
Posts that feature your doctor(s) or teams will get more engagement than most other content. Of course, a mix of subjects and post types (ex video, photo, link share, etc) is ideal because it provides your audience with more variety and leaves them wondering how you manage to always surprise them with something new.
Equip and empower your team to snap photos and videos and to either post the content directly to social media platforms or to send it to your social media marketing team. You can use tools like the Pro Impressions Marketing social media content calendar or #staysocial to give your team ideas on what to post.
Your Team Answers the Phone and Books Appointments
There’s nothing worse than wasting money on marketing and advertising only to let the leads spoil because they go unanswered. When a team understands that the office’s success means their personal success moves forward, they will make answering the phone and booking appointments a top priority.
Phone trees are the worst enemy of marketing and advertising success.
Don’t relegate answering the phone to a robot. Why get in the patient’s way of booking an appointment? If your team is too busy to be bothered with answering the phone, then you have larger problems in staffing, time management, or office focus. Your next big case is calling. Why let an answering machine take that call?! The patient will simply hang up and dial the next office.
Your Team Has Mad Phone Skills
Answering the phone is the first step, but patients will love being part of your office if they love your team. Your phones provide that first impression. If you want to fill your new patient pipeline, start by making sure you have someone on the phone who exudes enthusiasm and caring. You should be able to hear him/her smiling on the other end of the line.
This person should also be an expert on what you do and how to handle calls that aren’t a good fit for your office. Calls shouldn’t be consults but they should be the patient’s first opportunity to explain their problem. Then, with empathy, the phone pro should explain how you’ve helped hundreds of other patients just like them and that the first step is a new patient appointment.
Take CE courses as a team to streamline the new patient process. Hire a consultant to help with phone and new patient consults if necessary. You may even have to make some changes to the team. If your front desk person is better at addressing insurance coverage questions than warming up a lead for your patient coordinator, perhaps they truly would be better off working at the insurance company.
Whatever it takes, get a rockstar on the phones.
Your Team and Your Marketing Company Work Well Together
If your marketing company doesn’t understand how to interface with your team, then it’s time to make a change. Pro Impressions Marketing has been working exclusively with dentists for over a decade and we know how to maximize team involvement. The dentist should be doing the dentistry. Call us now at (970) 672-1212 to learn more about our dental marketing services including website design, PPC, SEO, and social media management.
