How much is your dental practice spending on marketing? Do you run a Yellow Pages ad? Those usually cost $5,000 to $10,000 per year. Did you run a radio or TV ad? These run closer to $10,000 to $35,000 per year.

This is a chunk of money invested to gain new patients. In fact, one of the major factors in how your practice performs financially is how many new patients come through your doors. For many dentists, this is the most important measure in the practice.

To improve your dental practice's financial picture, the best thing you can do is to do a thorough evaluation of your new patients — so you can build on your strengths and look for new opportunities for marketing.

To do this thorough evaluation, you start with finding out how many new patients came to you. You can run this report in your dental practice management software and then you can paste the data into Excel.

Your new patient evaluation should include:

• How many new patients do you have so far this year? Now that you have this report, you can quickly run the same report for 2013 and 2012. It's nice to see three years of data to find out if you are trending up or down with your new patients.
• What ages are your new patients? Now, if you're a pediatric dentist, this is self-evident. But if you're a general dentist, it is helpful to see what ages of new patients are coming to you. If you are bringing in a majority of new patients over age 60, then you can continue to target this successful market.
• Who are your primary referrals? This may be a combination of physicians or schools or specific marketing programs. Find out the top 10 ways you are gaining new patients — and then invest in the ones that are working.
• Which insurance plans are sending you new patients? Perhaps there is one plan that is really doing well for you in terms of new patients. Depending on their reimbursement level, you may want to invest some time marketing to the companies who have this insurance plan.

The key to making good decisions about your marketing is having solid data upon which to base your decisions. When you run your new patient referrals report, you may find that the referral cell is empty. This means that your team isn't documenting the referral source in your dental practice management software.

So this becomes your No. 1 priority — document the referral for all new patients. Now, add this task to your end-of-month routine to make sure you are capturing every single referral.

When you run this report at year end, you'll now have accurate data and you'll know which marketing programs were the most successful.