The Only Online Marketing Blog for Dentists You'll Need

Do you want your practice to be more successful? To be seen as 'The' best in your area? Sure you do. But you'll never get there if people don't know how to find you. Sound familiar? We can help you be found.

Blog By:
TysonDowns

*Originally published November 16, 2016 https://titanwebagency.com/blog/marketing-dental-practice/

As a private dental office, you’re competing against an ever-growing number of large corporate dental facilities.

These facilities often have a significant amount of capital to spend on widespread marketing campaigns and a vast amount of dentists to service those clients. In this way, they’re able to drastically lower prices and undercut many private practices.

This puts private dental practices in a jam, especially high-end offices. How are you supposed to compete against these behemoths?

Large corporate offices (and lower-end local practices) can compete on price, but not much else. So there is a lot of room to stand out — as long as you know what to focus on.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to market your high-end dental practice without competing on price. As you will see, not competing on price, actually allows you to focus on competing on everything else patients find important when choosing a dental office. And it allows you to focus on different types of marketing strategies that convey high value.

Listen to this blog post:

Let’s get started:

1. Referral Marketing

Dental practices rely strongly on word-of-mouth to attract new patients, more so than most other types of businesses.

This is because it’s tough to really know how much one will like a certain dentist without visiting them first.

So if a friend, family member, or acquaintance says they’ve had a good experience with a dentist, it’s a huge vote of confidence to that person that the office provides a quality service.

Image source

This is evidence by a Bright Local study on online consumer reviews, where they found that 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

Getting referrals should be one of your top focuses in your marketing efforts. However, most practices simply “hope” that their patients recommend them to their friends and family.

In referral marketing (and all types of marketing, in fact), you want to take matters into your own hands as much as possible. This drastically increases the effectiveness and scale of your results.

Here’s an excellent method to set up your referral marketing system, provided by Red Star Marketing:

Build the Referral Program Around Your Practice’s Goals and Objectives

Once you have identified the type of patient(s) you want to attract, you can build the rest of your referral marketing system around screening for those people.

Keep the Program Simple

You should make it easy for your current patients to understand how the program works. This includes how to refer people and the benefits they get for each referral.

If it’s too complicated, it won’t be worth their time or energy to help you. By making it simple and easy to understand, you maximize the amount of people who actively refer patients to you.

Create a Referral Reward

This is the benefit people receive for referring patients:

For example, Desert Family Dental offers an array of prizes based on how many patients someone refers each month:

Check out their referral page for an excellent example of how to display your referral program online.

The reward should convey that you genuinely appreciate their help in referring clients to you. So the more personalized you make it, the more effective it will be in encouraging your patients to refer more people.

Draw Out the Program on Paper

Create a formal outline of the entire referral program process, so that every member of your staff is on the same page. Include instructions for implementing the program and guidelines to be followed.

The more knowledgeable they are, the better they’ll be able to explain the program to your patients and get them on board.

Track and Measure the Results

In order to know how effective your referral program is, you need to be able to track and measure its results.

Here’s a great video on the metrics you should track in your referral program:

Make sure there is a system in place to do this. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Dentistry by Design uses a simple new patient gift card to keep track of who refers who:

This will allow you to make adjustments to the program, like new rewards or goals, and determine if these adjustments had a positive or negative effect on your ROI.

Referral marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow a dental practice. And if you’re a high-end practice competing against lower-priced ones, word-of-mouth could be the difference between a patient lost or gained.

2. Rewards Programs

Rewards programs are similar to referral marketing, except you reward people for much more than referring patients to you.

With any type of reward offered by a business, there is an initial cut in revenue. But that cut is offset by the lifetime value of holding onto that customer or client.

Here are some examples of rewards you can offer your patients:

These can be offered based on how long they have been with your practice, how many treatments they’ve received, what kinds of treatments they receive, the number of patients they’ve referred, for booking appointments, or any type of behavior you would like them to continue doing.

For instance, Seidner Dentistry offers a rewards program that gives people points for or maintaining their recommended dental well visits, getting their treatment completed, community service projects, and even getting good grades on a report card.

These points can then be redeemed for gift cards and other prizes.

You will also see these types of programs referred to as “loyalty” programs because they do just that. They help to keep your patients loyal to your practice by rewarding them for that devotion.

3. New Patient Specials

Unlike a rewards program, new patient specials are a way for you to entice new people to visit your practice directly.

In marketing terms, these are called loss leaders or lead magnets. They attract new patients to you through some sort of offer.

Image source

However, like a rewards program, you will take an initial cut in revenue in the beginning, but your lifetime revenue from that patient will be high, especially because you run a dental office that charges premium prices (for a premium service).

Then you can use your excellent customer service and your rewards program to keep those patients long term and lead to more referral marketing. (Do you see how this is starting to come together?)

Let’s say you run a new patient special that offers a free first exam, valued at $400. Initially, you lose $400 on that exam when someone takes you up on that offer.

But, if the patient stays with you for a set amount of years (rather than going to a competitor) and that patient brings in $800 in revenue per year, you will make up for that $400 on their next visit and profit above it on all of their future visits.

Let’s say your average patient stays with you for 10 years. You lost $400 initially on that patient, but you gained $7,200 in revenue over their lifetime.

When patients research their options, all else being equal, they will be more likely to go with the dentist offering a new patient special than one who doesn’t. So these special offers can really help you stand out in the marketplace.

If you can’t think of a special to offer new patients, try one or more of these:

Here’s an example from San Marin Dental:

Then you can use local Facebook ads (discussed later) and other types of advertising to promote them.

4. Focusing On Best In Class Customer Experience

Customer service and the whole customer experience can become one of your greatest marketing tools.

When patients enjoy their experience with you, they tell their family and friends about you, they trust you for elective procedures and specialty procedures, they give you better reviews, your business encounters less turnover, and a host of other beneficial outcomes.

Harvard Business Review

And because the doctor-patient relationship is so important in the dental field, it’s even more crucial that customer service be one of your top priorities.

Here’s a big one: Hop on Yelp and read your competitor’s reviews.

Often, you will find a lot of complaints and praises of different aspects of their service. You can use both of these types of information to improve your own service.

Your customer service must become a system that’s uniform across all staff and processes, including reaching out to patients to remind them of appointments, scheduling, greeting patients, having conversations in the lobby and during treatment, etc.

It must encompass what your practice stands for. That’s how patients will feel truly cared for and then relay that experience to more people.

5. Create Great Content (And Promote It)

Up until now, we’ve been talking about what you can do within your practice to market it. Now, we’re moving into the digital realm.

We’re living in a digital age of the Internet, social media, smartphones, smart TV’s, and more. To ignore this trend (and the marketing opportunities it provides) is a major business blunder that could leave you in the dust behind your competitors.

Here’s a look at Internet usage growth from 2008 to 2015:

Image source

And the devices we’ve been using from 2010 to 2015:

Image source

As you can see, attention is moving towards digital devices, so that’s where your marketing must go as well.

One of the top things people turn to the digital world for is content. This is helpful, educational, or entertaining content that’s being shared on social media or found in search engines.

This is also known as content marketing, or “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action” (The Content Marketing Institute).

Content has become one of the most powerful marketing tools available. Businesses have learned that by creating the right types of content and getting it in front of their target market, they can stand out as a thought leader in the space and attract more customers.

They’ve also found that it’s cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising (billboards, commercials, etc) and it’s how people want to be marketed to. It’s how they want to discover businesses these days.

Content can come in many forms. Here are a few:

Some types of content you could create would be:

Articles like these will genuinely help your potential patients. But, at the same time, content like this shows them that you know what you’re doing and you’re an authority in the space.

This increases their trust in you and the likelihood of them visiting your practice over another one.

Once you have created this content, it’s time to promote it. At the very least, you should share it on all of your practice’s social media channels. But there is a lot more you can do as well.

Check out these articles for some great advice on promoting content:

6. Use Targeted Local Facebook Ad Campaigns

Facebook ads are extremely underutilized by local businesses. And this is a good thing.

Why?

Because it means you can stand out — not only amongst your competitors but amongst other local businesses that might be vying for your target market’s attention.

You can target people based on where they live, their age, occupation, income level, education, and almost any interest imaginable:

You can also start off with a small daily spend and increase it as you figure out which messages and targeting work best.

To get started, first, you need to outline the demographics you want to attract. This includes your target patient’s:

All of these can be chosen in Facebook’s Ad Manager.

Then you need to decide which messages to send them.

Image source

It can be tempting to go for the hard sale straight away. This would involve immediately sending out ads that say, “Hey! We are X Dental Practice located on W. 5th Street. Come check us out!” However, it’s more powerful to start off slowly and gradually build the relationship.

First, send out ads that send people to the educational content you have created. This will get them familiar with you and build authority at the same time. Here’s a great example:

Then, you need to differentiate yourself as a high-end dental practice. Create content that compares low- and high-end practices. Ultimately, dissuade people from going with lower-end practices for a variety of reasons.

Then directly introduce your own practice as the solution — a high-end dental practice with excellent customer service, new patient specials, rewards programs, and referral programs.

7. Understand the Significance of Local Search Engine Optimization

Finally, another excellent way to market your dental practice is through local search engine optimization, ?or ???local SEO.

Local SEO is the process of getting a business ranked on the first page of Google for local terms people are searching for. Here are a few examples:

They include the type of business and the local area. Odds are, you’ve conducted these types of searches before.

Local SEO involves optimizing your website’s pages correctly for these search terms. Then you get your business cited around the web in different listings that tell Google where your business is located and what it’s about.

If you can rank on the first page for search terms like these, you can bring in a significant amount of patients 100% passively. They simply type in their search, find your website, check you out, and if they're ready to book an appointment, they'll contact you.

But because these rankings are so valuable, they can be tough to get. So you want to work with a professional agency that understands how to rank local businesses in Google.

Conclusion:

As you can see, price, is not the only factor that differentiates a dental practice from the rest. There are many factors that can help you stand out, despite being a high-end practice competing with lower-priced ones.

Instead of price, focus on your customer service, referral marketing, rewards programs, new patient specials, and take advantage of the wealth of online marketing strategies available to you.

How have you been marketing your dental practice? What have you been struggling with?

Let us know in the comments below.