When building an implant practice, dental implant lead quality is critical. Spending time scheduling low-quality dental implant leads is costly. From no-shows to patients who spend an hour in the practice and can’t qualify for financing, low-quality leads can cost thousands of dollars.
Improving dental implant lead quality is easier today than it has ever been. But it takes a very specific process to do so. Here’s exactly how to do that.
1. Match implant marketing campaigns to the implant-buying process.
Way too many marketing companies don’t understand the implant patient buying process. They place a few ads to generate some leads but the ads they place don’t say whether a lead is high- or low-quality. At best, they can tell that someone searched the internet for dental implants.
A marketing campaign needs to do more than just attract people who searched Google for dental implants. The leads will be expensive and many of them will be unlikely to move forward with treatment. If you schedule them for an appointment, you’ll likely get many no-shows or waste hours of chair time on patients who won’t qualify for financing. They couldn’t move forward if they wanted to.
Matching your marketing campaign to the full implant patient buying pattern, lower-quality leads will filter out and higher-quality leads will self-select.
2. Communicate, connect, and educate with empathy.
When dental implant leads learn about your practice, even the highest quality leads won’t often be ready to move forward right away. They might be ready for the procedure right away but they need to feel a connection to the practice before moving forward with a provider. Dental implant patients are not like typical dental patients. Implants are invasive, surgical, and costly. Choosing to move forward with implants requires much more trust and connection than with other procedures.
With dental implant marketing, practices must ensure that their team members communicate, connect with, and educate leads to let the leads know they have found a provider who cares about them. This is especially true with high-value implant cases. The practices that do a good job at this will be much better at identifying higher-quality leads than practices that don’t demonstrate the needed empathy.
After forming a meaningful connection with leads, the only step left to identify the leads who are ready to move forward is to prescreen and prequalify the leads. Prescreening and prequalifying the leads will identify those who have both the willingness and the financial ability to move forward with the care they need.
3. Prescreen and prequalify implant patient leads before scheduling them to improve dental implant lead quality.
After a connection is built but before scheduling an in-person visit, practices should prescreen and prequalify patients. This helps avoid unproductive chair time. Unfortunately, building connection with leads and prescreening and prequalifying patients takes a lot of time. Practices that do these two steps themselves take a lot of resources away from patient care.
A better plan would be for dental marketing companies to take over these two steps for the practice. That way, only prescreened and prequalified patients who are ready to move forward get sent to the practice. This requires marketing companies to care as much about their dental practice clients as the practice owners do. Unfortunately, hardly any marketing companies can do this. Of the ones that do, it’s hard to know who will be representing the dental practice to leads so practice owners have a hard time trusting the marketing companies to communicate on behalf of their practices.
Until now. Driven Dental Implant Marketing has spent years helping practices generate a consistent flow of high-quality dental implant leads. We have also hired and trained a team of dental industry veterans to launch our Virtual Patient Advocate, or VPA program. Our VPA program sends only prescreened and prequalified leads to our clients. Our VPAs are professional, empathetic, and educated about dental implants. They learn everything about our clients’ practices to act as a true extension of the team. And they are located across the United States so they can be available at all hours of the day and over the weekend to build connection with and prequalify dental implant leads for our clients.
To learn more about how our VPA program can help deliver a steady flow of prequalified and prescreened dental implant patients for your practice, book a strategy call today.