Background
In 2015, Melbourne Dentists Aaron and Patrick Wong had achieved a life dream by purchasing a dental practice to work in together. The pair had worked extensively through Melbourne and had a strong record of quality dental care, but they'd never run a business before. To balance this risk, they put myself on a retainer for a number of years to take care of a few different areas:
Marketing & Branding
The previous owner had named the clinic after her name, had no website, weak signage, and did no marketing. To correct this, we established a new logo, brand and developed a story around their practice being the oldest dentist in Hawthorn. In fact that dental clinic hadn't moved from the same rooms since 1937.
After creating all the various print paraphernalia that come with a new logo, we then built a website. When marketing health practices I use an approach I call 'Patient-Centred Marketing'', it's borrowed from the work I did on People-Centred Care. It demonstrates that you don't build an enjoyable, successful, sustainable health practice running spiffy ads and discount offers, you achieve this by creating content that genuinely helps patients. To this end the website was packed with basic resources educating patients about a range of issues. Whilst this acted as a useful resource for existing patients, it also attracted users in the local area googling questions about such health conditions, this lead to increased patient numbers.
On top of this we undertook a number of extra marketing endeavours. We added signage, started a bi-annual patient newsletter, created a new patient referral system, designed new patient bags with a host of little goodies, tweaked the interior design, letter-dropped people who had just moved into the area, and of course did the regular obligatory social posts and blog articles.
Monitoring & Evaluating
It was awesome important to both the boys and I that patients were having a genuinely good patient experience. To evaluate this, I set up a sort of 'secret shopper program' that graded various aspects of a standard consult and included a number of prompts for feedback. This program revealed a host of insights that saved budget on unnecessary items, whilst focused attention on new areas. An unexpected by-product of this process was that as patients took time to reflect on the practice, they realised how much they loved it, and went out of their way to provide reviews on Google. This in turn increased new patients as high Google reviews for such services often correlate to new patients.
Outcomes
During my time supporting the guys, revenue and gross profit increased every year and I was able to triple the number of monthly new patients. I also saw them settle into being greater managers of staff, and more in sync with each other as partners in the practice. It was thoroughly enjoyable to work with them each week. I admire them both for their genuine commitment to being the best dentists they possibly can be. The heart they have for good patient care, and providing a great workplace for staff, is a real inspiration. I look forward to seeing their practice grow and develop as I know it will!
Creative Content
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