In order to be consistently generating new clients for your dental practice, I’ll be providing some of the most effective dentist marketing tactics. Not having enough clients to keep your employees busy is a business owners greatest fear. We all know that running a business will have its peaks and valleys, but it’s our job as a business owner to provide great service so clients come back and also to be actively generating new clients.
18 Effective Ways To Market Your Dental Practice
Analyze Your Dental Website
Most dentists have a website, and I’m sure you do as well, but how effective is it? Does it convert? If your dental website is not bringing in new clients its not doing its job. A strong website can be one of the most powerful dentist marketing tools. The beauty of a website is that it is promoting your brand 24/7. Make sure you take a hard look at your website and the number of clients it brings in per month. It might be best to hire a professional to take a look at your website and see if there is room for improvement.
On average your client should be bringing in a 5% conversion rate. So for every 100 website visitors you get you should be setting 5 appointments for your dental practice. Dive into the analytics and see how many visitors your getting. If you’re not getting a 5% conversion rate consider placing more compelling call to actions through out your website.
If you’re not getting a 5% conversion rate consider placing more compelling call to actions through out your website.
SEO Marketing for Dentists
Once you’ve taken a hard look at your website and optimized it to increase conversions it’s time to bring it some traffic. Dentist SEO is a great traffic source because it’s consistent. The search term “Dentist San Diego” has 5,600 searches per month, that’s 5,600 people looking for a Dentist in San Diego! Impressive right? What’s great about dental SEO is that you have the capability of putting yourself in front of those 5,600 people every month. If your website was optimized to convert and you get your SEO right, you’ll be getting a lot of phone calls.
Re-Market to Your Audience
Another great dentist marketing ides is to launch a remarketing campaign. Remarketing will display ads to anyone who has visited your website. Getting someone to click through your ad, or visit your website takes work. You need to use your resources wisely and market to those who have already visited your dental website with an effective remarketing campaign.
A remarketing campaign can be ran on multiple platforms. Some of the more well known are Google display ads (ads that show up on popular websites) or Facebook. Either way the idea is the same. You target anyone who has visited your website in the past to continue growing the relationship.
Dental Discounts and Deals
Next up in our round of dentist marketing strategies is offering the right discounts and deals. We all love a great deal, but the deal isn’t what matters in this case. What matters is how you market the deal. Get creative and fun about it. Try offering a discount when someone brings a friend, like a buy one get one half off deal. That can get people to talk about your service and bring in double the traffic. Post this discount on your website, social media channels, direct mail, Group-on, flyers at the office, anything you can think of. The bigger you make it the bigger the results.
Social Media Marketing for Dentists
Social Media marketing can be a great traffic source for dentists. There are so many ways to advertise your dental business on Social Media. The most important things to consider with social media marketing is to post regular content. Posting regular content will help you get more exposure, more followers, and most importantly more clients. If you can’t manage posting regularly, get an employee to do it or outsource it. Either way, posting regular content on social media sites cannot be overlooked. It will help you build your brand and gain visibility on the internet.
Create a simple marketing strategy to streamline your social posting for your dental practice. At first, it’s tough to make strong dental content. You don’t know what to post. It’ll help if you create a system around it. For example, after every appointment kindly ask the patient if you can take a picture with them. Post the picture on all of your social channels and tag them in the photo if you can. The beauty of this is that it’ll become a habit and the key to success here is consistency and you’ll reap the rewards of your marketing efforts.
Create Strategic Partnerships
Creating strategic partnerships is a dental marketing idea that is done over years, but it can yield great results. As a dentist you can network with other health professionals to create strategic partnerships and exchange referrals. You would look for anyone that is in the health industry that is not a dentist. These strategic partnerships will bring in referrals, and referrals are a business owners best friend.
Networking events work great for creating strategic partnerships. Go out to some events and look out for those who would benefit from a partnership with your dental practice. The goal here is to create a mutual relationship where both parties benefit.
Facebook Marketing Ads
Facebook Ads can be more of an advanced dental digital marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t be overlooked. Facebook Ads, although expensive, are very targeted and great for getting brand awareness. The ideal Facebook ad marketing campaign would have a strong call to action to make the client want to call or visit your website.
It’s important to analyze your results and dive deep into the metrics. If you aren’t getting strong results (appointments) from the Facebook marketing campaign don’t throw money into it. Launch a marketing campaign, gather your results and analyze its effectiveness.
Send an email newsletter
An email newsletter is a great marketing campaign and ideal strategy to nurture clients. A strong email newsletter will create a deeper relationship with you and your clients. This will help keep your business top of mind when ever your clients need dental expertise.
Be sure to provide valuable content when you send this out. Sending out deals and coupons will make people ignore your email. Try to provide interesting ideas such as dental related guides, best practices, or simple tips.
Generate Reviews
Generating reviews creates multiple benefits for your business. Strong reviews of your dental practice help build trust and credibility in your market. Reviews also help lower sales resistance with new clients. If a prospect reads your reviews and sees nothing but good feedback, they’ll be less resistant with anything you have to offer. Generating reviews can also help your Google My Business rank higher for local search terms.
Promote a referral incentive
Referrals are great for your dentist business, why not get more? You can give some sort of discount or offer for any referrals. Maybe you offer a free teeth cleaning for any referral. The incentive could even be a bottle of wine. Do what you think is best for each specific client.
Create Videos of your work
A trendy topic is video. You don’t have to hire a video team to make great video anymore. You can take video of procedures, x-rays, inspections, cleanings. Basically any service that you offer you can create a video of a client while they have the service done. That will let people know what to do and also see you in action.
Strengthen your Call To Action
A strong call to action is crucial for any marketing effort. Take a look at your marketing efforts and ask yourself if the call to action is strong enough? Does it make clients want to call you?
PPC
Another great marketing idea for dentists is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. PPC can be expensive, but well worth the investment. PPC has the same benefits to offer as SEO except that you don’t have to wait for your website to rank, you can simply pay for the position. Setting up a strong PPC campaign can bring in a good amount of phone calls if the keyword research is done right. Typically, the best keywords to pay for are “Dentist + city” and similar variations, but there may be hidden gems. You can look for search terms that are relatively inexpensive but also show a strong buyer intent.
Appointment reminders
Setting up the right appointment reminder system can increase the percentage of clients who show up for an appointment. One of the most effective appointment reminders work by text message. Emails can often be left unopened, but most people read all of their text messages. This system should reach out to prospective clients in an automated and systematic fashion. Ultimately, this dentist marketing idea will increase the number of people that walk in the door.
Send Postcards
Nicely designed postcards can be a great way to get some attention to your dentistry. To run an effective direct mail campaign there’s a bit of work involved. You want to be sure that you have a few offers in the flyer.
On average the response rate of direct mail is 4.9%
The average response rate of direct mail is 4.9%. In other words if you send out 100 flyers you’ll get 5 people to take action.
What’s more impressive is the response rate of direct mail doubles when you send it to clients who have already visited you.
Ideally, you could run two separate campaigns. One that goes out to your surrounding neighborhood and another that goes to clients who have already visited you.
To really get the best results you can send your direct mail inside of an envelope, disguised as a letter from someone the prospect knows. This will cost more time and money but it’ll yield better results.
Understand Your Client Base
In order to effectively market and actually get some traction you need to understand who you are marketing to. A great way to do this is by talking to clients who visit you on a regular basis. If a large pool of your clients are finding you on Google, then invest more resources in SEO and PPC. A simple check box at the bottom of your check in or appointment form will help you understand your audience better.
Once you understand your clients and how the found you, set up quarterly goals for those marketing channels.
Offer Financing
This might not sound like a marketing idea for your dentistry, but it is. When you offer financing it can bring in certain patients who wouldn’t have stepped in to your office otherwise.
Now, offering financing won’t bring in new patients, but promoting the fact that you offer financing will. Include call to actions on your marketing campaigns that say:
- “Braces as low as $49 per month”
- “Invisalign starts at $89 per month”
- “0% Financing for 12 months”
This will help push those higher ticket sales without breaking your patients’ wallets.
Use the Right CRM to Stand Out
Your client base is your biggest asset as a business. You want to be sure that you are keeping contact with your patients on a regular basis. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the marketing tactics you should be employing. The right CRM will help you stay on track.
You don’t have to get fancy and spend $1,000 per month on a CRM. It can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. The important thing is to stay in touch with your clients.
With so many different options out there, it’ll take time to find the right one. Just go through a few free trials and choose the one that works best for you.
Reach out to them to set appointments for teeth cleaning, or move them down the funnel on their Invisalign. Either way you have to keep track of your patients and prospects to really increase sales. The right CRM will help you do that.
What is The Most Effective Marketing Campaign For Dentists?
So after listings out all of these possible marketing ideas you may be a bit overwhelmed. Don’t worry, the marketing space is overwhelming. With so much technology being developed it’s hard to keep up. The best thing you can do is test on a regular basis. Give each one of these marketing ideas a shot, gather the data, and measure its effectiveness. Each one of these ideas works, but they all work at a different rate. You need to test and find out which one works best for you and your business through trial and error. Once you know what works best, dive deep into it. If you are always testing, and measuring the results you’ll know where to put your money.
