What is Pay Per Lead Dental Marketing?
Pay per lead marketing is a type of performance marketing where the client pays for qualified leads delivered to their business. The client then takes these leads and attempts to convert them into customers (in this case patients) for their practice.
What exactly is a lead?
A lead is somebody that is interested in the product or service your business sells. In the case of a dental practice, a lead may be someone who is interested in dental implants, porcelain veneers, or maybe is just looking for a family dental office to visit regularly. In many industries, a lead is typically a text form that a prospective customer submits with their contact information, but in the dental industry a lead can often take the form of an inbound call.
Leads are further broken down into qualified leads and unqualified leads. Typically, a pay per lead program will only charge lead buyers on qualified leads, and unqualified leads will not be charged. For this reason, it is extremely important that both buyer and seller agree on what will be a qualified lead before starting the engagement. Being the most restrictive in terms of criteria for what a qualified lead will be is not always the best strategy, as this will not only reduce the volume of leads, but will also likely increase the price per lead that will be paid.
A typical set of criteria for a qualified lead may be the following:
- In the case of inbound phone calls, only calls greater than 90 seconds will be considered a qualified lead. This recognizes that if a patient calls and there are no appointments available or if the dentist does not accept his or her insurance, then the call will end quite rapidly, not reach the 90 second threshold, and therefore the lead buyer will not be charged.
- In the case of form leads, typical requirements for a qualified lead can include that the prospective patient have private insurance, not Medicaid, and they are actively looking for a dental appointment.
What are the pros of pay per lead marketing?
The pros of pay per lead marketing are that you ensure that your marketing dollars are being well spent and you know exactly what you are getting. This allows you to measure your return on investment, which in turn allows you to effectively expand your investments and grow profitably.
What are the cons of pay per lead marketing?
Pay per lead marketing can work extremely well, but it can be disastrous if you do not have the following two things in place:
- A very clear definition of what is a qualified lead. For example if your office has a fee for service model, you don’t want leads that are looking for in network providers for their insurance, as most of those are unlikely to convert.
- A solid sales process. The key with lead buying is you need to have a repeatable process for converting those leads into paying customers, so that you can optimize at the end of the day for patient acquisition cost, not for cost per lead. This means having staff that can answer the phone quickly, and have a script for bringing the patients in the door. Sometimes this also means having a low dollar or free special to bring patients in, knowing that once they’re in the chair you’ll have a much better chance at converting them.
Do I have to pay adspend separately with a pay per lead marketing program?
This depends entirely on the agreement between the lead selling agency and the lead buyer. Some lead sellers do charge separately for the adspend, sometimes splitting the cost with the client. In our case, we never charge for adspend separately on our performance marketing programs, we always incur the full risk of it and charge only a flat fee per qualified lead.
Is there anything special about pay per lead in the dental industry specifically?
Pay per lead in the dental industry is similar to pay per lead in almost any industry. A couple of things to note are that calls are much more common than form submissions in this market, and also, due to the wide ownership of the dental industry, it is uncommon to have lead buyers at a national level. Instead, the industry is made up of independently owned lead buyers across the nation. If you own an independent dental practice, this is good news for you because it means you are not at a disadvantage and can compete confidently in your market.
Is pay per lead different from pay per show?
Yes, while pay per lead and pay per show may seem quite similar in the fact that both are performance marketing arrangements, they have significant differences. In pay per lead, the lead buyer retains some of the risk as they must have a solid process for closing the leads in order to maintain reasonable patient acquisition costs on the back end. In pay per show, on the other hand, the agency retains all of the risk, and for this reason an agency could be much more selective in who they choose to enter into a pay per show arrangement with, whereas they will happily sign any client into a pay per lead program.