For many, it is hard to imagine living in the pre-modern dentistry days. In the past, people often developed permanent oral health problems as they aged. Now, modern dentistry generates more than $162 billion every year in the United States alone, helping people maintain excellent oral health for many decades.
Of course, the industry size indicates several dental practices are competing for the same patients. Identifying how to grow your dental practice may require using more effective marketing techniques to help you stand out.
Read on to learn the most important techniques to attract new clients and grow your practice while serving your patients with excellence.
Welcome New Patients with a Promotion
In many cases, dental practices select one or a select few different marketing techniques. Although there are dozens of options available, dental practices are often overwhelmed by the sheer variety.
After all, it is difficult to evaluate which marketing technique will bring you the most success. Investing a little in one and observing the results is the easiest way to answer that question.
For example, try out a simple idea like offering a promotional discount in order to welcome more new patients.
Start by offering a single discount and examine the results. Depending on the response, you can commit to offering this discount for a longer period of time or test other levels of discounts.
Once the results are available and analyzed, it will be much easier to decide to invest additional time, resources, or effort, or if it’s time to move on to other techniques.
Encourage Dental Patients to Recommend Your Practice
The trial and error approach is applicable to other new techniques as well. For example, encouraging referrals.
Although many people are searching for a great dentist they often don’t disclose this to their friends or solicit their advice. In addition, your patients may not consider recommending your practice to their friends.
Providing a simple, effective referral tool like a patient newsletter, free report of the month or raffle prize can solve this problem and increase the referrals your practice receives. Why? First, the referral tool provides a personal benefit for recommending your practice to others. Second, this gives patients a reason to mention your dental practice in conversation.
As with discounts, you can start with a minimal investment of time and money. If the strategy works for your practice, expand the use of referral strategies. If it does not, move on to something else.
Create Content to Build up a Loyal Patient Base
One of the most powerful ways to attract new customers is by generating more value than any other provider in your market. Most practices talk about the same thing in order to attract customers–products, features, benefits, location, how long they’ve been in business and maybe some level of competitive superiority. Creating quality content to attract visitors to your website and answering their questions establishes you, and your practice, as a trusted authority in the dental industry. When prospective patients make the decision to receive treatment, your office is top of mind, increasing their likelihood of choosing your practice.
Plus, creating quality content also improves your SEO or search engine optimization.
Invest in Search Engine Optimization
One of the greatest strengths of search engine optimization is the permanent benefits it provides. The investments made in SEO today bring new customers month after month for years to come. Even modest improvements with minimal to no ongoing attention are impactful.
One powerful way to improve your SEO is by creating quality content, either by yourself or by hiring SEO experts to help you get your website to rank higher.
Start with setting up a landing page. An effective landing page includes relevant and valuable content for visitors, plus clearly defines actionable steps. Keep the content as simple as possible to minimize the loading time.
Put Your Orthodontic Practice on Social Media Platforms
Experiment with putting your practice on a variety of social media platforms. Start with investing a little time and effort into each platform and be aware of analytics to conclude which platforms and content types work best for your audience. Encourage patients to share ratings and reviews directly on the platform to build credibility.
If you discover a platform does not generate customers, you can move on with a nominal loss. Continue building a more powerful presence on the platforms performing well.
Understand How to Grow Your Dental Practice
The investment in your growth always pays off in the long run. Many practice owners miss opportunities to grow their practices by using the same few, and often outdated, marketing and positioning techniques.
To learn more about how to achieve marketing success with your dental practice, reach out and get in touch with us here at any time!
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