Offices in over 150 DMAs scheduling tens of thousands of appointments every, single, day. It’s enough to make you clench your teeth. Aspen Dental turned to dentsu X to develop a data-driven solution to one of their largest marketing challenges: Maximizing the scale and efficiency of national media volume while executing hyper local planning and buying aimed at driving an optimal number of appointments scheduled per office. Previous strategies led to a wide variance leaving some locations with too much capacity (ie, open appointment slots) and not enough media support and others with an overflow of appointments, new patient signups and wasted advertising dollars.
Incredibly rich office-level data removed the guesswork and led to a system by which media could be strategically deployed to drive optimal demand generation. All 1,040 offices were categorized into a six-tier framework based on data inputs such as new patient volume, growth potential by location, and real-time scheduling capacity. The system was flexible and allowed for modifications based on a steady stream of data updates with some media channels optimized daily to address the everchanging needs of each office. The new framework (dubbed the “Busyness Metric”) informed hyper local decisioning of channel selection, media weight and messaging strategy where Aspen Dental had a right to win. A national TV campaign drove topline awareness of Aspen Dental while the highly customized local efforts did the heavy lifting of demand generation. Offices that were underperforming with business potential and capacity were prioritized with full funnel channel deployment and messaging aimed at driving a high volume of new patient signups. Overperforming offices with business potential and capacity received medium levels of support to drive incremental new appointments. Offices without capacity were given less media weight as they were able to stay busy. Capacity was closely monitored to ensure office busyness didn’t severely decline and messaging focused on a variety of dental services to promote cross-sell and up-sell. And finally, underperforming offices without business potential or capacity were completely deprioritized as other factors leading to low performance that marketing could not solve were identified.
Within just three months of implementing this data-driven methodology and maintaining the total media budget, overall busyness increased by 30% across the network of office locations with capacity (ie. open appointment slots) dropping to an all-time low. The positive ripple effects are still being felt as the program enters Year 2 and Aspen Dental leans on dentsu X to continually fine tune the system by utilizing additional data sets including visits and revenue-by-office. This framework is the first of many opportunities for dentsu X to leverage Aspen Dental’s first-party data to defy convention and design innovative media strategies to drive efficient and effective business outcomes.
