If you search online, you’ll find countless dental promotions. The sheer volume of them can feel overwhelming. But which dental promotions work the best? That’s what we’ll cover here.
The key to identifying the best dental promotions is more than just identifying which bring patients to a practice. We must make sure they’re worth the time and money it takes to run each promotion.
Here are examples of popular dental promotion ideas along with comments and questions you must consider before using them for your practice.
Discount Dental Exams or Cleanings Promotions
Discount dental exams and cleanings promotions are popular with big corporate dental practices. Because of that, many privately owned practices try to compete by discounting as well.
While that’s a natural reaction, we find discount promotions to rarely be worth it. In fact, we often advise people to leave discount exams or cleanings to big corporate practices and concentrate on other promotions.
You’ll never be able to make more and work less as an independent practice by offering discount exams and cleanings. You’ll have to work too hard to make the numbers work.
If big corporate practices are willing to do it, great. It might push you out of your comfort zone a bit. I get it. In the long run, other strategies will help you build a bigger and better practice.
Free Add-On Services, such as Free Teeth Whitening for New Patients
Strategically offering a free add-on service to a paid service can be a good way to offer value without discounting. If you’re looking to build a practice with people who are interested in cosmetic procedures, for example, offering free teeth-whitening for new patients can be a good strategy for attracting patients interested in cosmetic services.
Without having to deeply discount rates for the services that don’t fall within insurance programs, you can often quickly make up for the cost of the free teeth whitening by performing future cosmetic procedures on those patients. If the future cosmetic procedures include high-value procedures, such as dental implants, your return on investment can be very high.
Free Consultations for High-Fee Services
Some of the most profitable dental promotions you can run include offering free consultations for high-fee services such as dental implants, Invisalign, or crowns.
For example, we know that most new patients walk through four steps before becoming a patient. First, they become aware of you and your practice. Second, they become interested in you, your practice, or something you have to offer. Third, they decide to learn more about you and your practice. Finally, they make an appointment with you.
Let’s assume you want to attract dental implant patients. You could create a short checklist that helps people figure out whether they’re eligible for dental implants. Then you would promote it using Facebook ads.
That Facebook ad makes potential implant patients aware of you, step one of the four steps to becoming a patient. The checklist you deliver generates interest in your practice and dental implants, step two of the four steps. When they click on your ad and give you their email address to get the checklist, they take the third step.
Finally, after delivering the checklist and any follow-up emails to answer frequently asked questions, addressing common objections, and sharing before-and-after pictures and testimonials, you can ask them to make an appointment for a free consultation. If they’ve made it all the way through your checklist, pictures, and testimonials, they will have gotten to know, like, and trust you. At that point, they’re much more likely to move forward with a free consultation, the fourth step in going from a stranger to a patient.
With high-fee services, it only takes a small percentage of patients to move forward with the full procedure after the consultation to become extremely profitable.
What Dental Promotions Work Best for You?
When evaluating a dental promotion, be sure to not only consider whether a promotion will work to attract patients to your practice. Also consider whether it will attract the right patients to your practice. What might be a useful dental promotion for one practice may not be for another.
Start by setting your practice vision. Reverse engineer your profit goals. Then run dental promotions like these to attract the right people to your practice for the right procedures to help you achieve your vision.
If you want more help finding dental promotions that work best for you and your practice, join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group. Thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices in there.
You can also join my next Dental Facebook Bootcamp to learn how to use Facebook to bring in 30 or more new patients per month on autopilot - all while spending less than $500 on ads!
This article originally appeared on DeliveringWow.com.