Marketing has changed throughout the years, especially with social media and other technology-forward digital marketing practices emerging. In this new age with plenty of competition, marketing is essential to help a business thrive. Below, you’ll learn more about marketing for dental offices and the marketing strategies you can use to drive results.
Importance of Marketing for Private Dental Practices
Marketing for your dental practice is essential to help you reach your ideal patients and keep your business running. There are many reasons your dental practice needs a marketing plan, including:
- Creates a vision and mission statement: A vision and mission statement helps you understand your business’s direction, which can inform your marketing strategies and allow you to reach your ideal patients.
- Defines what you need to accomplish: You should focus on setting achievable goals and review them regularly to determine if you need to make adjustments. Settings goals allow you to choose the best marketing strategy and which methods are working to drive results for your business.
- Differentiates your practice: It’s essential to differentiate your dental office from competitors. Marketing can help you define why patients should choose your office and what’s unique about your services instead of your competition.
Marketing Strategies for Dental Offices
Here are several marketing tips for dental offices to help drive results and encourage potential patients to choose your business over the competition.
1. Understand and Utilize Different Marketing Styles
First, you must understand the different marketing styles and how to use them to promote your dental office. Some of the different types of marketing styles and the ways you can use them are:
- Advertising: Advertising is considered an interruption-based marketing style. While it may work the fastest, it can also cost more than other methods and may have a low conversion rate due to its impersonal nature. Advertising is quickly being replaced by online and social media marketing. While you can still use this marketing method to drive results, it’s best to use other marketing styles alongside advertising to garner the most attention.
- Email promotions: Email is an excellent marketing style to maintain relationships with your existing patients. You can send out reminders or new promotions through email. You can also send informational materials, such as dental hygiene tips and business updates.
- Social media: Social media is one of the most popular ways to market your brand, as most people have a social media presence. You can promote your services, benefits and other aspects of your business through social media posts, helping you find new clients and engaging existing patients.
- Word of mouth: Recommendations from friends and family and reviews on or offline are excellent ways to draw attention to your business. Learning how to leverage word of mouth can take time to get perfect, but it can help your drive the best results and attract the best patients for your dental practice.
Implementing each marketing style for your dental practice is the best way to draw the most attention to your business and gain new patients while engaging with existing patients.
2. Establish Your Brand and Build Trust
One of the essential dental office marketing strategies is establishing your brand and creating trust between your practice and new and existing patients. New and existing patients who feel like they can trust your brand are more likely to return for future appointments.
Your brand is more than just a professionally designed logo — you should strive to use a consistent color scheme, message, and voice across your office and marketing strategies, helping establish consistency and trust with your patients.
3. Identify Your Ideal Market
Before you put some of your dental office marketing strategies into practice, you need to determine what market you’re trying to reach. For example, your practice may be open to anyone, or you might be trying to reach a specific demographic as a pediatric dentist. Once you identify your market, you can start directing your marketing materials toward them.
4. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
Another dental marketing strategy is optimizing your website to rank higher in search results. Many people’s search for a dentist starts with an online search, and most people only scroll as far as the first page of results. If your business doesn’t appear on the first page, you could lose out on potential new patients.
You can optimize your website by using keywords in page titles and content you know your ideal market is searching for. Include a call to action at the end of each page, so users on your website are directed somewhere, such as a contact page or booking an appointment. Don’t forget to update your Google Business page regularly to ensure information is accurate and helpful, encouraging users who find your page to book your services.
5. Showcase Your Benefits
While the features of your dental practice are important, people usually care more about what you can do for them. You’ll want to introduce people to the benefits of visiting your office and how it can improve their dental experience or life. For example, you can talk about how you can help patients improve their smiles in just a few visits or about the competitive pricing your office offers.
You’ll also want to utilize clear messaging so prospective patients know immediately who you are, what you do, and what you offer. If patients have to find out what you’re trying to say or what your services are, they’re unlikely to spend time figuring it out and may turn toward your competition.
6. Track Results and Adjust
You can ensure your marketing strategies are working by testing them, tracking the results, and making the necessary adjustments to improve them. Without monitoring or adjusting, you could waste time and money without seeing actionable results.
Learning to measure return on investment and identify cause and effect is essential to ensure your marketing strategies are effective. You may have to try multiple marketing strategies before seeing results, but tracking will allow you to make these adjustments based on accurate data.
7. Set a Realistic Budget
Your budget includes your money and time. It also includes the time of your employees and patients. You’ll want to determine how much time you can realistically devote to marketing, analysis, and campaign tracking. Sometimes, you may need to hire a specialist who can handle the specifics, freeing up your time to focus on other aspects of your business.
You’ll also need to consider where you’ll spend your budget. For example, you may want to spend more of your budget on social media marketing than advertising to make more personal connections with prospective and existing patients while showcasing the benefits of your dental practice.
Review your marketing allocations from past years and determine what performed the best and what didn’t to give you a better idea of how you can split up your marketing budget. You can do tests and make adjustments until your new marketing strategies outperform the old.
Contact Us
Marketing is essential for the success of your dental practice. By joining Synergy Dental Partners, you get access to discounts from all of our partners, including VivioSites and SmartBox, which work exclusively with dental practices to help create effective marketing strategies. Synergy Dental Partners also offers a range of services to help you save on products and services and increase your buying power.
You can join on a trial period to determine if you’re satisfied with our services and benefits before you commit to a full membership. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you with your marketing strategies!
