Marketing in the dental space is highly fragmented and specialized, especially when compared to other industries. There aren’t yet an industry-wide set of universal best practices for digital marketing in this arena, so many dentists have to take a piecemeal approach to advertising: They’ll hire one firm to handle their web design, another for direct mail, and another to manage their social and digital ad buys.
Wonderist Agency co-founders Laura Maly and Michael Anderson recognized this unmet gap in the market. “It started with a single client, and we’ve had that same story repeat itself over and over since then,” Anderson said. “They’re frustrated with their marketing, spending a lot of money without knowing what’s working because no one’s tracking their results.“
Maly and Anderson saw an opportunity to provide exceptional service and value for dental customers by centralizing these operations into a full-service firm, and using advanced analytics and call tracking to guide their marketing efforts. In the five short years since their founding, the San-Diego-based firm’s data-savvy approach has seen them grow to more than 80 dentists and practices across the U.S., and there’s no sign they’re slowing down.
Finding the right tools for the job
Wonderist’s success is due in large part to their being one of the few firms in the dental space that specializes in data-focused marketing. As they started out, they quickly realized that in order for their holistic, full-service approach to thrive, they needed the right analytics tools to determine which channels are the most successful at driving new patients and appointments.
They found that despite the growing popularity of landing page forms and online scheduling software, phone calls are still the best source of new and returning business for dental practices. “The average person… only has a limited amount of time at the end of the day to call and schedule medical or dental appointments,” Anderson explained. “The place that actually picks up the phone is going to be the one that gets that person scheduled and secures a new or returning client.”
After surveying the various call tracking programs out there, they landed on CallRail: “Calls are still far and away the channel that’s most likely to result in good leads, so how do we track them better? From the start, CallRail seemed like the best choice for us based on our needs.”
Data transparency drives results and brings peace of mind
CallRail provided Wonderist with something invaluable in their line of work: Full transparency about how their clients’ advertising budgets are being put to use.
“We have always had a strong emphasis on tying the spend of marketing campaigns we manage to hard, verifiable results,” Anderson says. “The analytics provided by CallRail are a big part of that visibility, of allowing us to quickly understand what’s working and what isn’t. And this visibility makes us so much more agile, flexible, and able to react quickly when need be, so we can deliver results.”
For both Wonderist and their clients, the transparent and straightforward reporting provided by CallRail brings both peace of mind and a sense of confidence to their marketing efforts. On the analytics side of things, Wonderist has plenty of hard data to help them determine the catalysts for their best-performing campaigns — something that’s especially important for industries like dentistry that lean heavily on local advertising.
And for their clients, CallRail also provides plenty of bottom-line numbers to keep marketing accountable and boost confidence in their campaigns: “With CallRail, we bring them understandable and clear numbers, like showing how the number of calls being driven by organic search is increasing year-on-year. That’s a tangible way to demonstrate the work we’re doing for our clients.”
Machine intelligence makes life easier for humans
With more than 80 clients on the books, Wonderist’s call tracking system processes a huge volume of calls every single day. This meant they needed a way to quickly and efficiently grade a large number of calls, and determine which leads were likely to convert to patients and schedule an appointment. When CallRail released the CallScore feature in late 2016, they knew they’d found an excellent new tool for their arsenal.
CallScore allows them to flag every conversation that passes the 2-minute mark — calls shorter than this are far less likely to result in an appointment. This 2-minute cutoff was something they’d long suspected before using CallScore, and now they had hard data to back up their convictions.
“By setting an automatic baseline for a good call, and letting us review the conversation later if need be, CallScore helps us judge these leads so much more efficiently than before,” Anderson says. “The results provided by CallScore give us a better idea of what kinds of calls produce the most solid leads and customers — measured in factors like call length and the amount of back-and-forth in a conversation.“
This, in turn, lets them be more efficient with their human review of their recorded calls, and zero in on the calls that are most likely to result in an appointment: “Not only do we have an automatic solution in place now for grading lead quality, but it’s also helping us make more effective decisions around lead generation, ultimately saving us a lot of time and money. CallScore doesn’t completely eliminate the human element, but it’s made the whole process so much more efficient for us.”
Smart tech, big results
The results of Wonderist’s data-first approach speak for themselves — their clients regularly see big growth in business and new clients, thanks to Wonderist’s centralized and holistic methodology for full-service dental advertising.
A client based in Pittsburgh is an illustrative example of the success they’ve had with this approach. Before signing on with Wonderist, he was averaging about 13 new patients per month. “One year later, after using call tracking to fine-tune our marketing and really focus on driving new customers, he was seeing 70 new patients a month,” Anderson says.
Thanks to CallRail’s advanced analytics, they were able to show that a majority of these new patients were directly attributable to a Google Ads (formerly AdWords) campaign that Wonderist had run for the practice. And even better, CallRail’s keyword-tracking features allowed them to dig deeper and pick out the search keywords that were most effective at driving calls and new patients.
“Most importantly for us as an agency, the data from CallRail meant we didn’t have to sit on our hands and say, ‘Gee, I sure hope we were part of helping him drive all those new patients,'” Anderson laughs. “We can bring that call tracking data to our client and demonstrate the direct role our advertising had in their success.”
Wonderist is a CallRail Gold Agency Partner. Agencies that join the Partner Program are eligible for co-marketing benefits like this, along with webinars and guest posts. Interested in joining the Partner Program? Sign up here.