More often than not, most of the dental practice owners and managers regard marketing as an expense rather than an investment. For some reasons, there might be some scepticism when it comes to believing the promise of marketing. However, investing in dental marketing should be an integral part of your budget.
Research suggests that 10% of your total revenue should be invested in marketing in order to grow and gain market share.
This is specially true today as the buying behaviour of your targeted patients and prospects have changed a lot in past few years. The modern patient is socially connected and tech savvy, hooked to social sites like Facebook, digitally driven, and entitled with unlimited access to different information and people.
It simply means you need to be where your prospects are. If they are using Google to search dentists near them or choosing a dentists on the basis of reviews, or happen to book an appointment while leisurely browsing their Facebook, or perhaps by responding to a newsletter, you MUST be found.
The whole idea is attract and convert more patients, retain existing patients, and grow your practice.
Reasons why you need Dental Marketing
When you start thinking about your dental marketing, the first thing you need is to establish a plan. This will:
- Help you create a vision and a mission guide for your practice. This is critical to keep your practice in line with what you want to achieve.
- It defines your goal for the practice that is necessary for any dental clinic. You will be able to review your progress at given points of time and understand where you should place your effort more in based on your goals and where you are.
- The plan helps you identify who your target market is. Of course, you want to target every Australian in your vicinity because you want to help every tooth. However, it is more than that. You should know the community around you and what they are like so you can adjust your practice to best suit their needs.
- This will help communicate your point of difference in your market place.
It is easy to see why you need proper dental marketing, the question now is how you actually do it.
What you Need for Dental Marketing
There are several things you need to focus on in order to achieve proper marketing of your dental practice. This includes:
Website
More often than not, a potential patient’s first interaction with you would be online. So, having a strong and well-designed website is very important. This will be the foundation of your digital marketing efforts and should contain most, if not all the information that potential customers would need to know before contacting you or coming into your office. No dental marketing plan is complete without a proper website.
Local Listing
Make use of local listing such as Google My Business wherein you are provided a free platform to promote your practice. This allows you to show where you are located through online maps and provide quick contact information about your practice as well which will be more than helpful for people who are searching the internet for clinics near them.
Build Content
When you have a website, you would want to give your visitors the best content about you as possible. Dental marketing is about showing what you can do, your skills, and building trust. By creating great content on your website that showcases your knowledge on different treatments, this helps build the potential patient’s confidence in you.
At the same time, you can use this to remind your patients on proper dental hygiene. This is an extra value that you provided them which would surely be appreciated.
Use Appointment Reminders
There is a huge opportunity for dental marketing in reminding people that they need to visit their dentist. You would have the information on when each patient last visited your chair. If it’s been more than a year, send them a reminder. This is a good way to build on an existing patient relationship.
You can remind people via email, SMS, or any other messaging platform. The important thing is that they get the message.
Online Advertising
One of the most powerful tools in dental marketing is online advertising. It is a great way to increase your reach within the community and get noticed by potential patients because you can use specific parameters to target the right people.
Offline Advertising
In today’s world of distraction and over-information, your message might get lost.
Cut through the digital noise, reach out to your target audience by incorporating offline marketing into your overall marketing strategy.
Hire a Marketing Agency
To be honest, this seems to be a lot of work. And you would do this on top of having to practice your craft and take care of your patients?
You could either invest hours in planning, learning and pushing all marketing channels by yourself. Or…you could simply hire a trusted dental marketing company to drive your marketing channels on a regular basis, for far less than the cost of doing it all by yourself. This way, you can free up your time to serve more patients, plan for growth and perhaps, take some Me-time for yourself.
At 360° Dental Marketing, our dental marketing experts can help you grow your practice, by helping you achieve more patients, more profits and greater share in your local market.
So, why not discover your options today? Book your 30-Minute FREE Consultation.
