When marketing your dental practice, it’s hard to know what strategies will work best for you. With so many options available, it can be challenging to narrow your options down to strategies that are reliable, repeatable, and profitable.
Because of that, many dentists stick with traditional dental marketing strategies of placing ads in newspapers, phone books, radio programs, and on television. Although traditional dental advertising strategies are familiar, they have three disadvantages to newer strategies, especially when your goal is to attract new patients to your practice, who won’t already know, like, or trust you.
First, traditional dental advertising strategies are expensive to produce in terms of time and money. It takes time and money to properly plan, produce, and place traditional ads. You can spend thousands of dollars and spend months planning before you know if you’ll see any return on your investment.
Second, traditional dental advertising strategies are inflexible. If you need to change a television or radio ad, you need to reedit or rerecord the ad, which can take a lot of time or money.
Third, traditional dental advertising strategies are inefficient. Your ability to target the right audience is very limited with traditional dental marketing strategies. That’s because the audiences are broad by nature. They may have common interests or characteristics, but most people you reach through traditional dental marketing strategies will be unlikely to be ideal prospects.
Here are three newer dental marketing strategies that my team and I have found to be much more effective at getting strangers to know, like, and trust you and your practice.
Networking with Local Businesses
My two favorite ways to network with local business owners are strategic alliances and host beneficiary programs.
In short, with a strategic alliance, you and another local business work together to promote each other. For example, you could offer a deal on teeth whitening to a bridal shop, who might offer a discount on alterations to your patients.
Host beneficiary programs are similar, except instead of offering a deal to the other business’s customers, you offer it to their employees. For example, you could offer a new patient promotion, such as free teeth whitening with a cleaning, to the employees of a local bank.
Using Facebook to Attract New Patients
One of my favorite features of Facebook for dentists is the ability to target very specific groups of people. For example, you can target people who visit your website. You can target your patient list by uploading it to Facebook. You can target people who engage with your page. You can target people by location, demographic, income, and more. You have great control over who sees your ad.
What makes this even more powerful is your ability to exclude people from seeing your ad. For example, if you’re looking to get more likes for your dental Facebook page, you can target people who have visited your website and exclude people who already like your page.
When trying to attract new patients, you can ask Facebook to exclude people on the patient list you upload. Although there’s a chance an existing patient will use different contact information for Facebook, the ability to exclude your patient list makes the chances much smaller.
This helps you avoid a situation where an existing patient sees a new-patient offer and gets upset. You can’t do that with television, radio, or phone-book advertising.
Using Online Funnels to Promote Specific Procedures to New Patients
High-end procedures like Invisalign or dental implants offer a great opportunity for dentists to use online funnels to attract new patients because they automate many of the steps every person goes through before choosing a dentist.
For example, most new patients walk through four steps before becoming a patient. First, they become aware of you. Second, they become interested in something you have to offer. Third, they decide to learn more about you. Finally, they make an appointment for treatment.
My team and I have used online funnels to help me and other dentists automate this four-step process for dental practices and then present the funnels to people using targeted Facebook ads.
For example, if you wanted to attract people to your practice for dental implants, you could create a short checklist that helps people know if they are eligible for dental implants and present it to people through a Facebook ad. Your Facebook ad will make them aware of you and generate interest. By clicking on your ad and giving you their email address in exchange for the checklist, they make it through the second step, becoming interested in more information.
After sending the guide, you can automate follow-up emails that answer frequently asked questions, show before-and-after pictures, and present an offer and call to action, such as asking them to make an appointment for a free consultation or present another special offer.
By answering their frequently asked questions, you will build trust with them and get them interested in learning more about you.
Your call to action for a free consultation or special offer will present an opportunity for them to take the final step.
Here’s an example of a funnel sequence you can use to promote Invisalign!
Are you ready to regularly attract new patients to your practice?
By using local networking, Facebook, and online marketing funnels, you can take more control of your new patient marketing than ever before! Better yet, you can get started with each of these strategies this week!
To learn more about these and other dental marketing strategies, sign up for your 14-day trial to Delivering Wow U. You can also join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices. Finally, for more free info on using Facebook for dentists, check out my free guide: Facebook for Dentists: The Definitive Guide to Regularly Attracting New Patients to Your Dental Practice right here.
This post originally appeared on DeliveringWow.com