Dentists and dental practitioners already know how some patients can feel squeamish about visiting your office. In fact, some clients liken a dental experience to walking into a torture chamber. These myths (well most of them) can be dispelled with the right marketing strategies. Therefore, you need to possess a lot of self-confidence when marketing your practice’s services. Unfortunately, many people view seeing a dentist as something that can definitely wait.
Communicating with Prospects and Patients: What to Keep in Mind
The one critical piece of information you need to convey is the importance of check-ups and dental visits. Seeing a dentist is not something that should be put on hold. Your goal is to communicate to prospects and patients about committing to a habit of regular dental care. Dental problems can lead to other health problems, such as heart disease, cancer, and respiratory distress. Therefore, you need to keep this in mind when implementing any marketing ideas or concepts.
What Do You Want to Achieve?
Before you go further, ask yourself, what do you want to accomplish when marketing your practice. Your answer may include the following:
- Increase the number of monthly appointments
- Build a more solid base of customers
- Target a specific demographic for your practice
- Emphasize specific dental services
- Encourage people to make regular appointments for cleanings and checkups
- Extend your influence in the local community as well as online
Some Genius Tips that Will Attract more Customer Interest
The following tips will give you the leverage you need to promote your practice transparently and professionally.
Build a Navigable, Lightening Fast Platform
If you want to attract dental patients, your website needs to be user-friendly and lightning fast. Think of your website as your new patient marketing machine – something that can be optimized for PCs, laptops, and mobile devices.
To make use of this type of machine, you need to work with a website developer who knows how to make this type of thing work. Contact a UX (user-experience) designer to assist in building your website - someone who is focused on providing your website visitors with the best user experience possible.
Optimize Your Site’s Content for SEO
You also want to work with an SEO team that will ensure your website ranks well in the search engines. After all, it will hardly do you any good to have a navigable website if your potential patients cannot find you online.
Provide Live Chat on Your Site
Different people like to communicate in different ways, so you need to make sure your dental customers can reach you by phone, email, or chat. Not only should you prominently feature your telephone listing and location on your platform, you should make it easy for people to hit “chat” and ask questions. Have your website developer build a live chat into your site so people can quickly connect with your practice.
Automate Your Confirmations and Collections
By using the right office software, you can streamline marketing for your front office as well. Keep the front office busy and humming by effectively using automation. Not only will you maintain a full schedule, you will increase appointments and revenue.
Automation allows you to easily follow up with text and email, and to communicate with patients on case-specific treatments. Use automated applications to receive online payments and collect overdue bills. Automation software is a necessity, as you cannot afford to be without it. If you want to maintain regular communications, you need to update your current scheduling and bookkeeping practices.
Implement Click-to-Call Ad Contacts
To encourage patients or prospects to book appointments, add click-to-call ads through Google Ads and Facebook. These ads can easily be seen on tablets, mobile devices, and desktops. You can add this extension to the current ads you are featuring online.
Create Mobile Call-only Ads
Google statistics reveal that most searches related to dentistry or health take place on smartphone technology. About one in 20 Google searches relate to this type of data. To jump ahead of the competition, create ads for call-only Google ad campaigns.
Remarket to the Patients Who Have Visited Your Website and Practice
If you want to recapture customers, you can do so through email contacts. Use the email addresses of site visitors and customers, and upload them through Customer Match on Facebook and Google Ads. Create an ad that will encourage erstwhile customers to visit your practice. Feature content that reminds them to come in for a dental cleaning or whitening.
Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews on Facebook and Yelp
To engage more people and exert your professional influence, you also need to encourage people to leave reviews on platforms, such Facebook and Yelp. Doing so will also help you find out why anyone may have had an unpleasant experience. Just make sure you respond to comments, either good or bad. Doing so shows that you care and that you want to provide people with the best services and treatments.
Send Monthly Newsletters by Email
It also helps to send out newsletters about the latest innovations in dentistry – especially as they affect your practice. Making this a habit allows you to continue to build a relationship with your customers. Not only does this establish professional credibility, it gives your patients the assurance they need to continue making appointments. You can use the newsletters to detail procedures and their benefits, and to even provide post-op instructions.
Don’t Forget to Add those Personal Touches
You can also add personal touches on your website to encourage kids to regularly visit your office or to keep adults informed on specific procedures. This can easily be done by linking blog posts with your social media accounts. Customize your patient’s website experience by adding downloadable and printable coloring books for kids or by including e-books for adults about specific dental practices.
One Final Note
Once you find out what techniques to use to encourage better dental care and customer responses, you can analyze the results. Doing so will help you see what marketing works the best and how to improve in all areas. By using the information above, you can increase the number of appointments you get and build a better relationship with prospects and customers near and far.
Need help with your marketing?
Dental and medical marketing plans can be touchy since your business needs are unique. You have your practice to run and trying to find the time to do your marketing as well can be cumbersome. Why not let us help?
We can help you grow your practice and create a healthcare marketing plan just for you. Let us create you a completely customized quote to get you where you want to be.
Contact us today to find out how we can create a customized marketing strategy just for you. Your no obligation quote is waiting—give us a call now to get started!
Call 904.710.3203 or contact us online today to see how BCP Digital Marketing can improve your digital world.
Take your marketing to the next level
If You Have A Growth Mindset, Let's Talk.
- Unlocking the Senior Market: Optimizing Your Website for Success - April 30, 2023
- Powerful Ways to Use ChatGPT in Your Marketing - April 21, 2023
- Which Marketing Channels Work For Senior Living - March 31, 2023