How to take control of your practice with MMG Fusion

There used to be a time when you brought patients into your practice via an ad in the local newspaper or the Yellow Pages. But things are different in 2017.

Now, when patients are seeking out a dentist, they turn to places like Google and Facebook to see who is around and what people think of the doctor.

But while the internet creates new marketing opportunities, it also presents new challenges. Not everyone in the office is savvy enough to know how to get the best out of their online presence, or even know what search engine optimization (SEO) is. And that is where a product like MMG Fusion can help.

MMG Fusion is a suite of tools, available all-in-one as a bundle or a la carte in customizable solutions that helps not only with marketing and social media interactions, but also serves as a communication method to help keep in touch with patients.

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The appeal

For Dr. Ali Sarkarzadeh, DDS, of Congressional Dental Care, in Rockville, Maryland, MMG Fusion provides an easy-to-use interface that brings all of his patient communication tools together.

“I could drop numerous vendors and move to one dashboard with one login,” Dr. Sarkarzadeh says. “The intuitive nature of the products means there is no steep learning curve or overly complex systems like you find in some products.”

MMG Fusion also has very tangible results for Dr. Sarkarzadeh, showing him the results of his marketing efforts.

“I am able to accurately track revenue from specific patients and marketing campaigns with Marketing Tracker,” he adds. “It lets me know what is working and what is not so I can do more of the good and less of the bad. As a dentist, it helps me increase my new patient numbers, which increases my revenue. That’s really the most important thing. On a daily basis, it automates and simplifies tasks that previously may have required separate products or staff time and energy to complete.”

Integration and centralization were the big attractors to Dr. Matthew Martin, DDS, of Martin Dentistry in Fishers, Indiana.

“I saw a need for a lot of processes in my office to not only be automated but to be integrated,” Dr. Martin says. “There’re a lot of things that I could’ve been doing and tracking manually, or through a variety of programs, but when I looked into this, I found that I could have one platform that could do it all. I could go to one dashboard, because, as you know, everyone’s trying to sell a dental office something so that they can get a nice reoccurring monthly revenue stream going, and you can easily fill up your front office desks with eight dashboards. MMG does it all and it’s all easy. It’s all reported at once, accessible at once and does it all for us at once.”

For Kathy Cole, office manager at Twin Dental in Cincinnati, Ohio, the decision to adopt MMG Fusion was the result of a practice consultant’s recommendation.

“They suggested we use it to do things like our local reports, SEO and confirmation phone calls,” Cole says. “It works with us as far as confirmation of our calls and texting our patients on their appointments. Also, they do the surveys after the patients’ appointments.”

MMG Fusion also allows targeted marketing of specific services. For instance, Twin Dental is a general dental practice, but they’ll also market for specific offerings, and they were able to promote those services directly.

“We do try to market for implants, Lumineers and Invisalign,” Cole says. “We do all phases of dentistry here, so we really market with keywords like ‘sedation’ or ‘Lumineers.’”

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Next: How MMG Fusion simplifies marketing-and what that means for customer interaction.

Marketing

Twin Dental uses Fusion to manage its Google Ads and Facebook postings.

“Working with MMG Fusion has been really great for educating us,” Cole says. “The program is great, because it gives us really detailed reports on how patients are getting referred, and then it helps us with our confirmation calls and sending emails. It also helps us with our Facebook page, our Google pages and our patients’ responses.”

MMG Fusion works in the background so that practices need not worry about it becoming another daily chore.

“One of the real benefits of MMG Fusion is that it is always on, always working for my practice, so with little or no effort I’m ‘using’ it every day,” Dr. Sarkarzadeh adds. “The application works without constant supervision, allowing marketing efforts to be made in advance and carried out on a specified timeline. The most useful part has been that I no longer have to assign staff to running and monitoring my social media. Out of the box, MMG Fusion posts once a week and on holidays for me.”

Dr. Martin likes MMG Fusion’s revenue tracking capabilities, showing him precisely which efforts worked – and which didn’t.

“Basically, when a new patient calls my office, it picks up on that, picks up on the call tracking number that we were given that’s tied to a specific advertisement,” Dr. Martin explains. “Then, it will burrow into Eaglesoft and record your patient number and will track and pull out all the revenue numbers associated with that. And if we use you as a further revenue referral source within that-let’s say you came and then brought your family- I’ll be able to go through and click on that and see, ‘This ad brought us in this much real revenue over this amount of time.’ You plug in how much you spent on the ad, it calculates your return on investment. So you can sit back and look and no longer deal with salespeople saying, ‘You’re in this neighborhood flyer magazine. You’ll have 10,000 homes. How would you like that?’ And I’m like, ‘I didn’t like it at all, because I already did that for six months and we got $400 worth of revenue out of it. I have no information to show me that it works.’”

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Customer interaction

Beyond bringing new customers in, MMG Fusion allows you to maintain that relationship.

“As we are looking to scale our offices, growing, getting bigger,” Dr. Martin says, “having the training capacity to be able to show my front office people how they’re answering phones, what we can improve on, I get that through the call tracking. You know where they’re coming from and how they found you. It’s being able to personalize it a little bit more. You know where they’re coming from. If it is something you did, sponsoring a sports team, it connects with that. You also know when they come back, this ties into how many people have they referred. How many have they sent to your office? So you can make specific acknowledgment of that, whether it’s letting them know when thanking them, or we send them Starbucks gift cards for their referrals, things like that.”

Customer interaction also occurs through social media and online reviews.

“Most important for new patient generation is probably the reputation management,” Dr. Sarkarzadeh says. “Being able to remove negative reviews and generate new positive reviews is great for my online image. MMG Fusion also increases and monitors my local SEO score every day so my practice shows up earlier in search results with a higher rating.”

“Being able to sit back and look at the reviews, and then working with my website, being able to post those reviews and go back into them and take them so they have a little bit more power on the search engine,” Dr. Martin adds. “As we advertise more, I’m able to track, specifically, rather than manually, rather than ask people how they heard of us.”

While online reviews can help a practice, negative ones can certainly hurt-and when those reviews are unsubstantiated, that can be especially worrisome.

“We’ve had a couple of, for lack of a better word, totally wrong and crazy people out there,” Dr. Martin says. “We’ve been able to use that to totally strike their reviews off of Yelp. And don’t forget-anybody with a mouthpiece counts. And they can scream and yell all they want.

“One was actually the wrong office,” Dr. Martin explains. “But we actually got it taken down and stricken from the record. Another person complained so specifically about something we were able to go through and show Yelp that we don’t even offer that. You can’t complain about something we don’t even offer, so they went ahead and took it off.”

Practices are finding MMG Fusion to improve their marketing, customer interactions and social media efforts all from one dashboard.

“Since I started using MMG Fusion, I have saved time and money by simplifying and automating processes,” Dr. Sarkarzadeh says. “I’ve generated more new patients, which has brought in more revenue. I have saved staff hours. I have been able to change some of my other marketing efforts, generating more new patients, due to really knowing what’s working and what’s not.”