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Inside Dentistry
October 2011
Volume 7, Issue 9

New Patients Inc.

Marketing agency is dedicated exclusively to helping dentists grow their practice and elevating the public’s perception of the profession.

New Patients Inc. is a full-service marketing agency exclusively for dentists. The company’s stated purpose is to help individual dental practices attract high-quality new patients. Founded in 1989 by William Howard (Howie) Horrocks, it has expanded to include partners Eddie Facey and Mark Dilatush and a large support team of graphic artists, web design and programming personnel, and a client support team. NPI has grown its client base continually each year. Their wide range of offerings for dentists include professional marketing in all available mediums, such as Internet, direct mail, radio, internal marketing, web video, all print mediums, search engine optimization, and social media marketing.

According to Mr. Horrocks, the company’s goal is to provide professional marketing for dental practices that not only helps their clients attract quality new patients into their practices, but also elevates the public’s perception of the dental profession. To meet this goal, the company is committed to promoting client practices based on the benefits of dentistry, and to avoid promoting dentistry on price or discounts.

The company provides several ways a dentist can benefit from their offerings. The first is their series of books called Unlimited New Patients. The company recently released the third in the series. The company maintains that with these books dentists can learn how to properly and effectively promote their practices themselves or how to properly guide any marketing firm they might employ.

Another benefit offered is NPI’s Marketing Summit educational seminars. These are described as intense 2-day events in a classroom setting where the principals of New Patients Inc. (Horrocks and Dilatush) personally teach participating doctors how to promote their practices based on data and result-gathering the company has done for more than 20 years. Another option dentists may choose is to have the NPI team do all or parts of the practice’s marketing.

How Do People Choose a Dentist?

Dedicated to helping practices attract high-quality patients, New Patients is interested in the decision process a potential patient goes through that will ultimately determine which practice they choose. The firm commissioned an independent research study from a major business university for the purpose of exploring and analyzing this patient decision-making process. process. What it revealed, according to Dilatush, NPI’s vice president, was that the “dental IQ” of the general public was very low. This wasn’t a surprise to the company. What was surprising was the depth of the ignorance.

The study also made it very clear that technology in the dental practice can have a profound effect on a person’s choice of dental practices, but only if the benefits of the technology are properly explained in patient-friendly language. If that is accomplished, a very high percentage of the general public will react positively to the practice’s offerings.

The company uses their own experiential track in the dental marketing field along with the results of independent consumer research to guide their clients marketing campaigns. NPI maintains that this lowers the risk to the dentist’s marketing budget.

Marketing Mediums—Lowering Risk

NPI operates in all available mediums for their clients. However, due to years of result tracking, the company has learned which mediums pose the most or least risk. Figure 1 shows the least-risk, moderate-risk, and high-risk marketing mediums along with the projected revenues and budget ranges through 9 years of practice.

Internal marketing efforts aimed at the existing patient base, such as recall efforts, patient newsletters (either print or electronic), electronic appointment reminders, in-office signage, and others are aimed toward an audience who is already familiar with the practice and, therefore, present the least risk according to NPI’s result-tracking data. Also among the lower-risk marketing initiatives are any public relation actions, having a functional website, and a properly designed and deployed direct mail program.

NPI maintains that as the year’s progress and revenue grows, the marketing budget also grows so a practice can take a bit more risk. The next level of promotional activity is any print medium. Examples are magazines, newspaper inserts, small community newspapers, housing development newsletters, etc.

According to the company’s tracking, mass mediums such as radio, TV, and billboards pose the highest risk and should only be attempted after the previous foundational marketing efforts have been underway for 1 to 3 years.

Finally, NPI strongly advises dentists to track the results of any marketing effort so a return-on-investment can be calculated. They recommend a unique call number be attached to any promotional piece to remove any doubt as to whether or not a particular marketing initiative is returning a positive or negative result.

For more information, contact:

New Patients Inc.
Phone: 866-336-8237
Web: www.newpatientsinc.com

Disclaimer

The preceding material was provided by the manufacturer. The statements and opinions contained therein are solely those of the manufacturer and not of the editors, publisher, or the Editorial Board of Inside Dentistry.

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