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Do you want your dentist office to have a steady flow of loyal patients? Do you want to have a dental practice with an impeccable reputation? The dentist industry is highly competitive and requires more than just the local word of mouth and a good clinical reputation to ensure the office is filled with patients.
Your dental office needs to be a brand that thrives off giving the finest dental care, as well as a warm and welcoming environment that creates a wholesome and stress-free experience. The best way of doing so is to first implement strategies that will bring you patients in abundance. After all, you cannot strive to deliver the best to an empty dental office. The following list will fill your mind with fruitful ideas.
A Top-Class Website
Your dental practice is a business that needs to be marketed well. A professional and informative website is the open door to a thriving business that spreads wider than the local community.
We are living in a digital age whereby patients like to browse before they shop. Over 75% of people browse the internet for services and goods at least once a month. So, your website must be crisp, bright, and professional. One that mirrors the pristine interior of your dental practice. So, gleaming it replicates the whites of the teeth you have just polished. With 97% of prospective patients preferring to browse a dental practice website rather than have a phone call, utilizing the power of the internet is essential.
Marketing Spreads the Word
A great website and a comprehensive marketing strategy go hand in hand, like two peas in a pod. There are multiple marketing methods to be utilized. Ensuring that, firstly, the content on your web pages is SEO optimized is proven to make your brand more visible, 70% more visible to be precise.
Content that’s SEO optimized and that holds high value and quality is an extremely effective marketing strategy. Attracting new patients has also proven easy with the use of a robust Google AdWords campaign. Google AdWords allows your business to appear as an Ad when specific keyword searches are used. There are many more marketing strategies to utilize that a marketing agency can help you with.
Free Consultation Days
Why should I offer up my services, equipment, and time for free? you might ask. The theory behind this is proven and it is one of the most frequently used tactics to attract new patients across a wide range of industries, not just in the field of dentistry. As humans, we can all agree that it is rather enticing whenever the word ‘free’ is involved.
Therefore, it is a no brainer that a day of offering free consultations would at least generate one lead to a new customer. One lead to a lifelong, paying customer, just through offering a free consultation shows the long-term benefit. What is more, you can choose what will be included in the consultation. Perhaps only a check-up and an oral health recommendation, meaning the investments for you are minimal, but the interest generated is profitable.
In-House Improvements
The proof is in the pudding, as they say. There is no use putting such effective strategies in place if the in-house experience does not live up to the online reputation. It is essential to focus on the retention of new patients alongside attracting them. After all, new patients are also going to come from the word of mouth of existing patients.
We suggest a feedback form for the customer to complete that has open-ended questions that allow your patients to give their opinion. You can then reflect and improve on any areas necessary.
In the meantime, try going the extra mile for the patients you have at present. Perhaps branded gift bags with mini goodies such as toothpaste is an avenue you might want to explore. As a dental practice, you might be able to secure wholesale items to make this a more feasible idea to use long-term.
Loyalty Incentives
Similar to the idea of offering a free consultation, the offer of loyalty incentives will help to generate long term patients, not those that just wish to know if their oral health is in check because they know it’s for free. Customer retention is essential to a fruitful dental practice. We suggest offering discounts on procedures that generate a high profit.
As with all businesses, some services offered will no doubt yield a better profit than others due to the cost of materials. Chose the services where you can afford to take a loss and use them as your incentive. All that matters to the customer is that there are avenues to save money long term.
Household Discounts
Dental practices become a household name. The dentist is a big ordeal for some families and households, something that is always going to be true. Therefore, it will serve your dental practice well to offer some form of household discount. There is an average of 3.14 people per US household, which is the potential for 3.14 paying patients. 3.14 people paying slightly less than 1 person paying in full is going to yield dramatic financial gains in the long run.
Similarly, it is widely recognized across many industries that children tend to cost more, therefore child discounts are applied. If two parents are deciding what dental practice to use, they are far more likely to attend one where their child will receive cheaper services.
The above-mentioned strategies will not only improve the rate at which you can attain new patients, but also improve the image of your dental practice. As mentioned, it is a highly competitive industry relying on reputation, visibility, and the recommendations of loyal patients.
Ensure you are focusing holistically on all aspects of patient care, brand marketing, and service improvements so that your dental practice is a cut above the rest in your local area and further beyond that.
