Now, all dentists have been realising that dental marketing is a major component of the success of the dentist and the prosperity of the dentistry clinic.

This is due to the dental patients’ keenness in most of the time to go to the well-known dental clinic. Even if you have deep experience as a dentist, you will not find yourself in a worthy position if you do not pay attention to marketing your dental clinic and highlighting your experiences.

Understanding this fact may not be difficult for you, but the real difficulty is figuring out how to do efficient marketing for your dental clinic? There is no exact answer, there are many possible strategies to use. Using a combination of different and effective strategies is the best decision, which depends upon the analysis of your market carefully.

In this article, we will review the powerful marketing strategies that should be used in your dental marketing.

Marketing Is Key To Success

Any business and dental practices are no exception. For a dental practice to grow, a single dentist should be seeing 24-50 new patients per month. And in order to attract new dental patients, a practice must offer a competitive product at competitive pricing, along with convenient quality services – all backed by a solid dental marketing plan.

When trying to figure out how to market your dental practice, the first step is always a SWOT session. In case you’re not familiar with this term, it’s simply a structured way to determine your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

• Strength: What sets your dental practice apart from other dentists in your area? List every possible item that you can preserve and leverage to make your practice stand out from the competition.
• Weakness: What are the biggest patient beef? Be honest with this list so you can recognise and deal with any obstacles.
• Opportunities: Where will practice growth come from? Evaluate each item to determine what you can take advantage of.
• Threats: Are there any issues your practice may have to anticipate, prepare for, and defend against?

Once you have established where your dental practice is positioned, you’ll be able to determine which dental marketing ideas will help secure a successful future.

Patient Referral Bonus System

For an established dental practice, more than 70% of new patient growth should come from internal patient referrals. Yet existing patients don’t often view your dental practice as a growing business in search of more patients. So how do you keep your name at the top of their minds and encourage them to tell others about your services? 

By offering a broad referral bonus program. The motivation for patients is simple: If a person recommends your practice to a friend, and if that friend ends up visiting your practice, then the original referrer is rewarded with a bonus, such as a discount or a dental product. This program has the double benefit of engaging with patients, both old and new and endearing them to your practice. What’s more, all you need to do is hand out simple referral cards at the office or tuck them into your other practice mailings. 

To make this idea even more effective, consider incentivising employees to motivate them to help improve and grow your practice, not just through referrals, but in all facets of your operation. 

Identify Your Target Audience (Most Likely Women)

Women make more than 90% of all dental buying decisions. They are powerhouse consumers who want to make informed decisions for their families. They want a service, not just a product, and in today’s market, they have plenty of dental practices to choose from. 

According to Marti Barletta, the world’s foremost expert on marketing to women, “Women make purchasing decisions differently than men in that they take a meandering approach.” A great dental marketing idea that will entice more female household heads to contact your practice is to carefully review your overall marketing image, including your dental practice logo and your existing collateral. 

Women want information before they purchase to ensure they are finding the perfect answer, so when creating marketing collateral for your dental practice, be sure to work with a provider that offers a ton of dental marketing ideas practice, can provide in-depth demographic targeting, and who understands how to market to women. 

An Offer To Beat Your Competition

When it comes to strategic dental marketing, it’s important to watch your market and know your competition. Remember that patients want conveniences, such as one-visit treatments, before-and-after-school appointments, and weekend availability. In other words, differentiate your practice from that of your competitors by being there when they want you and giving them what they want.

• Make Competitive Analysis
• Compare Your Competitor’s Offers to Yours
• Make a Better Offer From Them
• Solve Real Customer’s Problems
• Know Who Are Your Customers
• Differentiate Your Business From Your Competitors
• Let’s Customers Tell You How Your Business Can Be Better
• Always Be There Where Your and Your Competitions Customers Are
• Be Creative
• Be the First in More Things Then Your Competition

Someone who will be the first in changes, innovation, and improvements of all business processes will become better than the competition. It’s better to be a leader than a follower.

Patient Reviews & Web Presence

Even though more than 50% of your new dental patients should be referrals, those folks, along with people who receive your other dental marketing campaigns, will likely look you up online. What will they see?

Great dental marketing is to consistently clear your cache and Google “dentist in *insert your town here*.” Do you have 5-star Google reviews? Do you have any reviews at all? Whether you do or you don’t, it’s wise to encourage patients to give you positive reviews online, and a great way to do that is in your patient newsletter. Provide step-by-step “how-to” instructions to help patients help you.

• The friendlier you can make your image, the more success you will have

Another good marketing idea for the entire dental office team is to regularly look over your website. Is the content up to date? Will your website appeal to the female head-of-household? Is it easy to navigate and does it reflect the quality of your services? Is there a friendly picture of the dentist with their family and/or the team?

Fifty percent of consumers fear the dentist on some level, so the friendlier you can make your image, the more success you will have.

Get Out In The Community

The most effective primary target audience consists of the neighborhoods and consumers that lie within close proximity of your business. That said, your dental practice must have a positive community image.

Many clients find that sending out a neighborhood dental newsletter furthers their credibility and leads to additional community engagement. You can also get your practice’s name out through participation in community events, such as volunteer activities or neighborhood celebrations. You may even decide to sponsor a local little league team. This can serve as a brilliant opportunity for networking with actual potential new dental patients while establishing your practice as a firm fixture in the community.

The number-one dental marketing is to consistently focus on the new-patient generation. Every practice loses 15-20% of its patient base annually due to naturally occurring attrition. And direct mail is proven to drive higher results than any other type of marketing for dentists – but not all direct mail is the same. Dental marketing newsletters are proven to drive 70% higher call volume than dental marketing postcards, plus they’re twice as effective at engaging the brain. 

Dental Marketing With Local SEO

It is necessary to optimise search engines like Google, Bing, and many others for various keywords related to dentistry. 

Appearing on this first page of search engines in the keywords associated with your site is the most important factor in bringing more patients to your clinic. Targeting local keywords is very important when it comes to SEO, as you are providing a local service for your surrounding zone, include your city in the targeted keyword.

Using blogs and content marketing strategies will be very helpful in your ranking in search engines, presenting your targeted keywords invaluable articles would make you advance in search results. Also using a well-designed and search engine optimised website will help a lot in ranking on the first page of Google, so you should consider investing in this area very well.

The Use of Experts in Dental Marketing

Of course, you knew that marketing a dental clinic successfully requires a lot of effort and time, unless you know it yet that it also requires extensive experience in marketing in general and digital marketing for dental clinics in particular.

For this purpose, we recommend that you avoid the losses of unsuccessful marketing campaigns by seeking the assistance of experts, you can hire a marketing manager or a digital marketing agency that has the necessary marketing experience in the medical field.

Conclusion

Your success as a dentist has become dependent on your marketing activities, especially if you are opening a new clinic and no one still knows you.

Choosing the right marketing strategy will help you gain more customers and increase the retention rate of your existing customers. There are a lot of marketing strategies but you have to choose the right strategy or a mix of multiple strategies based on your analysis of your business as mentioned in the article.

Using digital marketing has been crucial especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, as people would prefer to search for reviews about the dentist and make sure that the dental clinic is following the precautions and preventive measures. Use an integrated dental clinic marketing strategy that guarantees a strong presence in the digital world including search engines, social media, free/paid advertising campaigns.

Please don’t forget to share your thoughts and best within the comments and let us know what is working with you in the different strategies for your dental marketing clinic in an efficient way and don’t hesitate to contact us at any time. 

Many thanks!