You’re ready to grow your dental practice and attract new patients. But aside from being an excellent dentist whom your patients will rave about to their friends and family, what can you do to get new patients through the door? You need a dental marketing plan to promote your dental practice and services.
Anyone can create a successful dental marketing plan no matter your budget, and we’ll show you how.
Identify your goals for marketing your dental office
First, get clear about the end goal(s) you want to meet with your marketing efforts. Perhaps you want to increase online appointment bookings by 20% within six months or improve your 12-month patient retention rate by 15%. Keeping this goal in mind will help you create an effective and, most importantly, measurable marketing plan.
When choosing the area of improvement you want to focus on, stay mindful of the six standard KPIs every dental practice should use: active patient numbers, case acceptance, production, revenue, profit, and overhead. You should be aware of your dental practice overhead percentages and consider a plan to decrease them.
Understand who you’re marketing to
To develop an effective marketing plan, you need to know who your target audience is and what dental patients care about most when they’re looking for a dentist. The Dandy Dental Survey: Patient Experience found that 76% of people looking at online reviews seek information on location and insurance, and 1-in-4 look for modern dental technology in the reviews. Plus, patients really care about on-time appointments and a dentist they feel explains procedures and costs transparently and thoroughly.
How to create a dental marketing strategy?
Now that you know your target customer (and what they most want), what is within your skill set that you can offer them? For instance, since patients care about seeing a dentist who uses modern technology, you should highlight the state-of-the-art tech you have in your office. (And you may want to consider investing in the new dental technologies your office needs.) Keep your talents in mind and explore Dandy’s 30 dental marketing ideas that may help you decide on your next great idea.
What dentists should consider when creating a dental marketing plan
Any marketing effort should first and foremost help build patient relationships. Dr. Adam Silvetch reminds that you can’t have a successful business without satisfying the patients you have attracted. And Dr. Len Tau promises, those patients will help you market through word-of-mouth and reviews. Because online reviews and available practice information have so much sway in why people choose a dentist, remember that your online reputation needs to be near-excellent.
Ensure your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is excellent so your target demographic can easily find your practice. Consider using Google Analytics, a free analytics tool, to track visitors to your site and see the digital path they follow, how many of them book an appointment, how long they stay on the site, and much more. This can give you crucial information about the sites your visitors are coming from and if your “sitemap” is effectively helping patients find the information you want them to.
Think about alternative ways you can use your unique personality and talents to create buzz for your office. One option, Dr. Ashley Ciapciak tells us, is to become a content creator (or hire someone to do it for you) and create informative and entertaining videos for TikTok and Instagram. If that’s not in your wheelhouse, you could also get involved with local charitable events to create local relationships and visibility, or develop an email marketing plan both for new and existing patients.
Getting started with your dental marketing plan
There are many options to choose from to market your business, but we’ve done the hard part for you and gathered 30 marketing ideas for dentists. Here are several effective favorites:
Encourage patient reviews for your dental practice
Hand patients a card with step-by-step instructions on how to give a Google and/or Yelp review on their way out of the office and follow up by email a few days later.
Offer special discounts to attract new patients
Consider running holiday specials that make sense for your business, or offering heavier discounts during business lulls. Keep in mind that the goal is to create long-term patients, not to treat them a single time.
Build strategic referral partnerships
Doctors depend on other doctors to send them a steady stream of referrals. An effective way to build professional relationships is to set up time to meet other doctors in person; visit their office, don’t take up too much of their time, and bring a gift for them and perhaps something for all of their staff to enjoy (who doesn’t love a box of donuts?). Then continue to follow up regularly with holiday cards from your office, personal letters with professional news, and face-to-face lunches and coffees.
Enhance your dental practice website’s design
Your website is the main place people will seek out information about your practice, yourself, and your services, so make sure it shows off your brand in a strong, appealing way. Prospective patients want all the basics such as location, services offered, and FAQs readily available, and it’s a bonus if you can get new patients to commit to your practice then and there (consider making appointments bookable online).
If you are a digital practice, leverage the technology in your marketing
As we stated earlier, patients expect their clinicians to be fully modern, but only about 50% of dental practices are digital. Stay ahead of your local competition by placing ads that show you are on the cutting edge. (If you aren’t digital contact Dandy today).
Allocate hours to marketing
Most marketing options aren’t set-it-and-forget-it; they take time to build and need to be regularly revisited along with your evolving practice goals. Setting weekly, monthly, and quarterly time aside for marketing efforts should be built into how you run your dental practice, and you may want to incorporate these responsibilities into an employee’s role. Remember that content marketing efforts should be measurable, so don’t forget to make time for planning, initiating, and then reviewing the success of each marketing campaign you launch.
Budget for dental marketing
There are dental marketing ideas available to fit every budget. If you don’t have extra funds right now, you can take some time to improve the information and SEO of your website (there are plenty of simple guides out there for beginners) so patients can better find you and your dental services. If you have a moderate budget, you could try targeted online ads. And with a larger budget, direct mailers or ads on television or the radio could work for your business.
Track how well your marketing is performing
Whatever your marketing budget is, you want the best return on investment (ROI) as possible, so it’s important to track the success of your efforts so you know which method works best for your practice.
Have a clear and measurable goal for what you want to achieve with a marketing campaign. Once your campaign begins, make sure a method is in place for you to track results so that at the end of your campaign you’ll be able to measure whether or not you hit your target. And always take time to review the outcome and learnings at the end of a campaign.
The dental marketing plan for your practice
There’s only one person who knows what’s best for your practice: you. You’re the expert on your practice’s strengths, qualifications, and unique placement in your community, so you’re best placed to figure out a marketing plan that will work for you. Trust your instincts, and don’t delay getting started on at least one campaign so you can gather data on what works (and doesn’t work) right away.
You may need to try a few things to find out what’s most effective for your dental practice. The good news is that if a marketing campaign ends up being a miss, you can take what you learned, apply it to your next effort, and shift your strategy. The best marketing plan will evolve as you and your practice do.
