A considered and well thought out marketing campaign will keep leads up and attract a healthy stream of patients to a dental practice. It is an accepted strategy for dental practices to collaborate with a dental marketing agency to ensure further success for the practice.
When you partner with a marketing agency, they can help attract patients consistently, whilst you focus on what matters to you: the practice. So, today, we will be looking at marketing ideas that can be applied to the dental practice sector to grow the service and increase revenue:
Increase Review Numbers
Reviews are the first thing that consumers go to when trying to ascertain whether or not to support a service. When it comes to dental practices, the site that rules is Yelp.
Yelp positions itself as a great billboard for reaching millennials (25-40 year olds). It is important to claim your business listing on Yelp and then encourage your patients to post positive reviews.
You may already find reviews on Yelp for your service, hopefully positive in their nature, but what needs to be done is the following: encourage more recent positive reviews to up the relevancy of the recommendation service. Older reviews will be less trusted as the service has evolved and changed.
Our recommendation is for dental practices to showcase at least eight or nine recent positive reviews. The best dental practices will offer an online system for verified reviews following an experience in the practice or with one of their services.
Appointment Reminders
It is recommended that dental practices ensure that patient foot traffic is sustained. Something as little as appointment reminders can keep the level up.
You can send appointment reminders by letter, by email, by phone call or by text. Appointment reminders tell patients that you care about them, that you don’t want them to miss out, and that you value your service and don’t want it to go to waste.
If you want to streamline the appointment reminders even further, you could send them as Google calendar events which will then remind the patient via email and phone notifications.
Email Marketing
Research has shown that email marketing is one of the most effective ways to gain new leads for dentist practices. Data shows that for every pound spent on email advertising, you gain about £37 return on your investment.
Your dental practice should also work on formulating an email list from all the patients and clients that pass through the practice. You can use these emails to send them bills, offers, reminders and even newsletters to stay in their mind.
Offers and Referrals
Data from the Pride Institute reveals that 93% of people trust healthcare recommendations from their friends. Dental practices need to take advantage of the benefits of referrals and offers.
In order to encourage your patients into recommending your service, dental practices should use referral bonuses to retain the patient as well as generate new leads for new clients. This could take the form of a discount on the next visit for every new patient referred and booked in or perhaps loyalty offers for satisfied customers.
Hand out business cards to satisfied patients to pass on. Or run a voucher campaign to generate a whole host of new leads. And remember email marketing? Use this to spread awareness of your offers and referral system and watch it take off.
Local Facebook Adverts
Majority of dental practices are only looking to target patients within 50 miles of their practice. It doesn’t make sense to target wider than locally as the service simply isn’t relevant to them.
Facebook’s local ads can help you reach a local audience with detailed adverts that present all relevant information such as location, direction, price and operating hours. Furthermore, on Facebook you can install a ‘Call Now’ button to instantly let curious consumers reach you. Marketing agencies can help formulate text and graphics for ads to effectively target a local audience.
Mobile Call-Only Google Ads
Google has revealed that 53% of healthcare-related searches are performed on a smartphone. Furthermore, 1 out of every 20 Google searches is for health-based information. Mobile-only adverts that encourage patients to call-only is the best way to reach prospective dental patients.
Sponsor Local Events and Sports Teams
Many dental practices can benefit from sponsoring local events and sports teams. Paying for a team’s jerseys, taking their sponsor spot on their shirt and placing promotional banners at stadiums are great ways to use local sports teams to your benefit.
Doing this puts your practice in front of parents and children who participate in local events and teams. These potential clients will keep you in mind when determining what dental practice to take their commerce to because you supported their local endeavours.
Other local campaigns that a dental practice can run are screenings for gum disease or talks about dental health in schools, once again keeping your practice in the local population’s mind.
