10 Essential Dental Practice Marketing Tips

Are you looking to expand your marketing plan for your dental practice? Make sure you know these dental practice marketing tips to help you out.

Do you need to up your dental practice marketing?

In a dental practice, there are many things that are out of your control. You can’t control the economy, which can prevent patients from scheduling regular checkups.

You can’t control that patients come in on average once every 11 months.

What does that mean for your practice?

You have a lot of appointments open that need to be filled and in order to do that, you need to increase or improve your marketing efforts.

Read on to learn the top 10 tips to effectively market your dental practice.

1. Know & Understand Your Patients

Before you do any marketing, you have to understand two things: what your practice is about and what your target market is looking for.

This ensures that you’re attracting the right patients to your practice. It doesn’t mean that you’ll turn people away if they happen to call. It allows you to get very specific about who you help so you can create marketing messages that speak directly to their lives and challenges.

To do that, you’ll need to ask yourself some questions.

• How old are your ideal patients?
• Do they have a family?
• Are they new to the area?
• How often do they visit the dentist?
• Where do they live?
• What do they do?
• Who do you love working with?
• How would you describe your dental practice?

These questions will help you get started in learning more about your patients and your practice.

2. Know What Sets You Apart

There are plenty of other dentists in the area that people can go to. You have to know what sets you apart from your competition.

Do you offer special services & programs for children? Do you specialize in people who haven’t seen the dentist in years?

These are programs and services that you’ll want people to know about you and can help them find the right dentist.

3. Improve Your Website

Your website is often the first point of contact people will have with your practice. You want to make sure that it’s fast, easy to read on any device, and it says what you do.

Take a look at Dental Care of Knoxville’s site. They have a clean website that clearly shows who they serve and they have incentives for new patients, too. Check it out for more info.

4. Create an SEO Campaign

Consumers are turning to search engines to help them find products and services. That includes dentists.

You’ll want to put your practice in a position to get new customers, especially for people who just moved to the area looking for a new dentist.

Search engine optimization can be a big part of your dental practice marketing strategy. In order to be successful, you’ll need to know how people search for your services and how to position your website’s content to match those keywords.

5. Start a Blog

If you decide to launch an SEO strategy, a blog will help with that.

A blog can also showcase your practice and give patients the chance to get to know you and your staff.

You can write about topics to make potential patients feel at ease, such as what to expect when you go to the dentist for the first time in years.

6. Check and Encourage Online Reviews

When people are looking online for your services, they’re going to look at the online reviews before they look for more information.

In fact, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

You’ll want to be sure that the reviews on your website are positive. You’ll also want to ask your current and past patients to write a review, especially on Google.

7. Ask for Referrals

Most businesses depend on a steady stream of referrals to survive. You can use the power of referrals and incorporate that into your dental practice marketing.

You can start by having a referral contest where your current patients refer new patient appointments to you. You can offer prizes for the person that refers at least 5 people or enter everyone in a drawing for a big prize.

8. Be a Local Expert

There are a couple of ways you can be the local expert.

The first is to write guest articles in the local newspaper, and local health blogs. If you do this, you’ll want to be sure that the publication reaches the same demographics you want to target.

You can also do speaking engagements about dental health in the community. If you’re a family practitioner and love to work with kids, you can reach out to schools to give presentations on healthy teeth.

9. Cross-Promotion

Team up with other businesses in your area who reach the same demographics as you. You can partner with an orthodontist or other health practitioners to refer business and create a win-win situation.

You can develop a referral campaign to send business to each other and market to each other’s audience.

Just be clear on the responsibilities of each party to make sure it’s a fruitful partnership.

10. Create a Customer Retention Program

In order to be successful, your dental practice marketing efforts need to focus on retention, too. After all, it costs anywhere between 5 and 25 times more to acquire a new patient than retain one.

The main job of that you and your staff have from the beginning is to create an incredible experience for them.

One way to do that is to track customer behavior. For instance, you can learn about patient preferences. Take the time to ask if there’s particular music they like, or if they like tea or water while they’re waiting.

Personalizing the experience and making the patient feel valued are key factors to retain them.

Create an incredible experience for them. Learn about preferences at the office. What kind of music do they like, what kind of  choices do they like?

Dental Practice Marketing Supports Growth

Your dental practice doesn’t just depend on getting new patients, it depends on you keeping those patients.

With the right blend of patient retention and acquisition strategies, your practice will be set up for success.

Would you like to learn more ways to grow your dental practice?

Visit the Small Business Brief Forums, where you can connect with other business owners and ask questions about the latest marketing tactics that will drive referrals and new patients to your practice.