24 Effective Dental Office Marketing Ideas Drive Your Business to Success
More and more dental offices are founded to meet the patient’s need. It makes competition between the dental offices becoming severe. However, to bridge over the difficulties in this potential market, dental offices need suitable marketing strategies. The contents below are dental office marketing ideas to attract patients and promote the development of your dental office.
1. Start a dental blog
Society is more and more developing, people must update their knowledge consistently. Most of them look up information on the internet. By which, there are your current or potential patients who are searching for the answers to everything about the dental problem. By the way, you should approach them for the purpose of your brand identity by building a blog to answer their questions. If there was no blog, you would miss out on a whole lot of website traffic that could turn into new patients.
2. Offer a pre-pay bookkeeping discount
Discount programs always attract patients so that they should be involved prepayment. This kills two birds with one stone. Firstly, patients will save allowances and secondly, patients will be more likely to keep an appointment if they’ve prepaid.
3. Collect and manage reviews of patient
When patients search for a new dental clinic in their area, they are affected by reviews easily. Based on reviews, they will choose a dental clinic that can be believable. Therefore, you should require your patients to give feedback and make sure to respond to both good and bad reviews. You can ask them while they’re on laughing gas, via comments on Facebook or email even at all times in all places.
4. Offer free or discounted service
You should offer new patients a free simple service such as an exam, clean and other services. This work gives patients opportunities to experience your product or service and they will come back if they feel satisfied. Both of which can be done fairly quickly, and inexpensively on your end. To make it interesting, you can even switch up the offer every quarter.
5. Optimize your website for mobile
Generally, people look for a product or service as well as a dental clinic with different types of equipment. But almost they use mobile phones instead of a traditional computer or tablet. For this reason, you should make sure your website is optimized for a lot of types of equipment.
6. Be an expert
If you are a dentist, sometimes, you should write articles with a lot of relevant topics for magazines or newspapers and then posting to your website. Furthermore, make a display of these magazines and newspaper in the waiting room for patients to read. When reading the information that you provided, your patient will have a sense that you’re an expert in your field, which builds confidence in your abilities.
7. Identify and approach the target patient
You shouldn’t approach everyone because it is fritter away your time. You must determine target patients and find unique ways to approach them. If you are a discount dental office that receives cash, you are probably going to be targeting middle-class families and older citizens that are on a fixed income. On the other hand, if you want most of your income to come from cosmetic surgery, upper-middle-class patients will be suitable to be your patients.
Besides, kinds of the patient can also affect what hours you want to be open. Working hour of your dental office must be suitable for the patient’s break time.
8. Use videos to advertise your practice
A video is always more attractive than plain text. Potential patients tend to believe more visual in a posted well-made video on your website than other marketing schemes.
Some ideas about the video that can help your clinic dental such as welcome to the dental office, introduce your facility, profile of dentists, reviewing patients in the past, procedure and treatment overviews, educational videos on commonly asked questions. These ideas make your dental office plentiful because of having a lot of valuable information that patient can get.
Building a YouTube page for your dental office with these types of videos will not only reach patients by a new channel but also clear up any confusion about your services.
9. Appointment reminder
Appointment reminders are important to make sure your patients show up whether it comes in the form of a postcard, email or a phone call. Avoid making other people uncomfortable, you contact them in a cause of confirming the appointment.
10. Use a unique and consistent logo and tagline
A professional logo and consistent tagline will create an attractive brand. It plays an important role in gaining patient’s trust.
11. Referral Bonuses
Small businesses are developed by the power of referrals and word of mouth. Most people usually trust recommendations from their friends or family. Referral bonuses can be used to retain current customers and expand new customer resource.
12. Update content
Posts of blogs or websites as well as social media should be updated continuously to make sure the knowledge that your dental office provides is correct over time. Sometimes, it is necessary to revise old information and add new knowledge.
13. Show off your results
Dental clinics often advertise the features and benefits of their product or service but they seldom show results that patients can get after treating. You should save images of patients with your quality of the product as well as service. You can put them on website, blog and show to new patients in the process of consulting.
14. Start a partner program
Linking up with a dental surgeon, orthodontist, pediatric dentist, as well as businesses in the area can be a great way to find new patients. All can share customers without necessarily taking business from each other. Dental offices and businesses use personal reputation to develop together.
15. Direct mail
There is a lot of dozen of email that people don’t have time to open. Therefore a direct mail is a good option for you to approve new homeowners. First of all, you must gather new homeowners information. Make out a list of them is available from many sources but sometimes at a cost. Let’s send out a welcome card to these new potential patients with the following that list to establish a relationship and introduce your dental clinic.
In high-income neighborhoods, your dental office can send brochures about upscale cosmetic procedures attached discount voucher. People live here, they are more able to pay for advanced services.
16. Get involved in your community
A dentist makes patients feel trusted when they can encounter this dentist outside of the dental clinic. In local events, from charity events to school athletics, you can advertise your practice by donating items with your logo on them, setting up a booth or just presence of dentist and others in the dental clinic.
The dentist can teach lessons about basic dental knowledge at an elementary school, high school or share advanced knowledge at the local University. It is a good activity for the community and benefit for the dental office because this is a chance to advertise your service or product. If students can apply useful lessons to their life, they will trust that dentist as well as the dental office.
Dentists, assistants as well as other staffs in a dental office must have friendly and sociable behaviors. It makes everyone respect individual in office and every individual represent the team.
17. SEO
Make sure that your website is heightened with SEO content. SEO content will help your website connect new patients more easily while they are searching.
Search engine optimization for local keywords is more effective than all dental term keywords. It will be a real key for you to bring new patients. There is nobody who cares about your dental clinic unless it and their houses are in the same area.
You should diversify your keywords if you want your website to rank well in the search engines. An emergency keyword is a good strategy that should be considered. Any emergency service has a higher likelihood of being searched than normal services. When using emergency keywords you must make sure that your dental clinic can meet the demand of patients in a state of emergency. Staffs in the dental clinic must work overtime even weekend.
18. Send e-newsletter
An alternative to using postcards, you should consider the email element. When most people have finished sleeping, they will check email. Therefore, you should take advantage of their habit and send them a greeting email in order to stay top-of-mind with patients.
You can send a monthly e-newsletter with the contents as dental advice, dental health product reviews, new technologies, stories, request a friend referral, latest dental news and expert commentary to keep in touch with current and potential patients. E-newsletters are a tool to remind to make the next patient’s appointment without calling or force.
One of the ways to get someone’s email is requiring them to enter their email address to download a useful dental file or document.
19. Include CTA
The main goal of a dental advertisement is an appointment that is booked by patients. So that at the bottom or below of every page of your website and other pieces of marketing material, you should place a call to action as well as the phone number to attract them to where you want them to go.
20. Pay per click (PPC)
You pick keywords which you want your advertisement to show up for. That advertisement will pop up at the top of the search engine results page and you must pay a certain amount of money if someone clicks on your advertisement.
PPC supplies patients that drop in your advertisement immediately and you can evaluate the quality of advertisement in the shortest time possible. However, the cost per click is highly competitive so that you must calculate the expense budget in the long-term for advertisement, target types of patient, follow competitors.
21. Retarget
When potential patients visit your website and they leave it to go back to Google to look up competitors or do more research, you will place an advertisement with content that is “You have recently visited my website, come back and get the promotional price”. What do you think they will do then?
You can add the email of old patients target list to introduce new product or service as well as cleaning or whitening. This action is quite effective because you are approaching people that know who you are?
22. Invest a quality website
The design of the website shows the credibility of a dental clinic. It is the first interaction of patient and dentist and is judged based on how it looks and functions. Main features your website needs in order to attract more patients such as online scheduling, online bill pay, online prescription renewal, profiles for each dentist. So if your site doesn’t pass these basics, you may be written off no matter how great of a practice you are. Besides that, you need to make it attractive to keep your patients if not they will look for your competitors.
23. Engage social media
Social media is an important element in today’s society. From Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, this social media helped dental offices and patients to communicate easily.
Facebook is a popular advertising tool with a lot of convenient features. It has an amount of available demographic targeting such as language, relationship status, employment, income, etc and you can use this to your advantage. Nevertheless, people go on Facebook for entertainment, not to see your advertisement. Therefore, you must make the content of your posts on Facebook more interesting.
Furthermore, the advertisement feature utilizes Messenger to communicate with businesses. Advertisers will use “Send Message” as a CTA on their advertisements.
Facebook is an excellent platform that dental practices can use to build online communities of their patients. Share feature allows users to bring valuable and entertaining content to others, define ourselves to others, grow and nourish their relationships by sharing images, videos, posts. This function helps dozens of people exchange information to each other even information about your dental clinic.
24. Update your Google business page
You can optimize your Google My Business Page with address, phone, email, business’s description, hours of operation as well as image. The more complete your page looks, the more reputable you’ll seem. Feel free to allow reviews can almost immediately attract more patients. When someone searches dental office based on location, the information in it will be pulled from various local Google My Business pages.
Conclusion
These are the ideas for the dental office to attract new patients and run successfully. Making a dental office viable needs impeccable timing and lots of dedication. Before performing marketing strategies, you should set a realistic goal for yourself on new patients per month to measure your marketing effectiveness and change strategies followingly. Remember, the goal must be suitable for your dental office. Setting goals that are too easy will not provide you much motivation. Alternatively, setting a difficult goal will drain your energy and kill your spirit.
Everything will become better if you can use your whole team instead of relying on just one person. Content will be various by contributions of a lot of people and they can share your content, promote your website, social media pages, blog to their friends. Let’s make good use of resources and your dental office is more and more developed.
