This is a guest blog post by Dee Gerish of Clear Vision Accountancy.
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When Mark offered me the chance to write a blog for his followers, I knew what my message had to be…
Something which helps to improve the results you see from your marketing. Something which it is vital for every dentist to do…
Measure your numbers!
Now as a dental business consultant working for a firm of accountants, you’d expect me to say that.
But I’m not talking about regular turnover, revenue and cost figures here. These are the obligatory numbers most accountants help you prepare and then stop.
At Clear Vision we like to help dentists go further. In fact, we unashamedly bang on about additional numbers you won’t find in your accounts: Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.
Why?
Because it’s these numbers which influence your financial results. These are the underlying numbers which drive your financials and make them better. So you see more growth and more profits. And you can better achieve your business and personal goals.
When you improve your KPI results, your financial results improve. So you can see it makes sense to focus on them, doesn’t it?
In marketing terms, KPIs include where your new patients have come from, so you can be sure what forms of marketing are working for you. Plus you can work out what return on investment you are seeing from each of your marketing activities, do more of what works and stop paying for what doesn’t (or find a better way to do it). So measure this and you can minimise your marketing budget.
Also when you know how many new patients you currently generate per month via your website, you can test and measure the results of the on-page changes you make, for example, and how well these amendments perform in compelling more of your website visitors to choose your dental practice.
You can go further and measure the results of a particular online campaign. You can do this by setting it up to be monitored in your Google Analytics data – I’ll leave Mark to tell you more about this!
So you measure to improve.
You can also measure to compare.
Ever wondered how your numbers stack up against those of other UK dentists?
From the abundance of monthly KPI results we collect from dentists across the UK, we can tell you that around 10% of UK dentists succeed in getting some 225% more new patients from their websites every month than the rest.
As a friend of Mark Oborn, you’ll welcome to order your own copy of our 2012 Dental Business KPI report to find out what these dentists are doing differently to achieve this. You’ll see this report reveals other average results for dentists too, such as average UK recall figures and other new patient data.
Have a read and remember – look after your KPIs and better results will come.
Specialist dental accountants and dental business consultants Clear Vision Accountancy help make a difference to the lives of dentists across the UK. The team has been working with dentists every week since 2001 and you can read the insights and best advice they have to share in their blog for dentists.