Awesome Marketing Tips For Dental Offices
Utilize and activate your current patient base:
“40% to 60% of your current patients will refer at least one new patient a year, if you give them the right encouragement.” –DentistryiQ
1. Your biggest marketing advantage has to come from within the dental practice. A patient base that recommends and advocates your practice will lead to more referrals and patients. The key is to activate your advocates with micro-strategies that are noninvasive and non-abrasive.
2. Gift card referral rewards can activate your customers to provide a reward for referring your practice. This can be marketed through your bi-monthly e-mail blasts, text message blasts, and in-office signage.
3. Even though the review sites such as Yelp prohibit dentists from asking for reviews from their patients, it doesn’t hurt to place stickers and signs around the office, as well as digital badges on your email blasts. This is a basic way to positively activate your patient base.
4. Open houses are a great way to introduce a new dentist that have joined the practice. Most patients will go to the dental office once or twice a year. By hosting an open house, you can meet and greet your patients; they can also invite other friends and family members to the event. *Don’t forget to provide plenty of healthy snacks!
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CRM programs are built to market for you, so make them market:
5. If your practice is not on a decent CRM program, you need to get one ASAP. Besides the awesome patient management, a good CRM program can be a great marketing tool. Building on the first tip, the patient base can be activated with your CRM marketing tools.
6. Your primary marketing tool is text messaging. Text messages are highly effective; it beats out email, Facebook messages, and tweets. By setting up appointment reminders, e.g. scheduled visits and 6-month cleanings through text messages, it increases the number of appointments and decreases the chances of a patient no-show.
7. Your second most powerful tool is email marketing. Many CRM programs already have email marketing templates set up within the system. They are organized for holidays and bi-yearly appointment reminders. You can send emails to your patient base, marketing your product offerings, e.g. Invisalign, Zoom! and Botox.
8. Your third most powerful tool a CRM program can provide is review monitoring. Many dental CRM tools can provide up-to-date review monitoring on powerful sites such as Yelp, Google Places, ZocDoc, and many more. This will allow you to be on top of what your patients are saying about your practice.
Social Media IS NOT THE BE-ALL END-ALL TO YOUR MARKETING:
9. Because of technology, you’re able to engage with customers and measure the success of your marketing campaigns. There is a lot of confusion around social media marketing. We are firm believers in utilizing a total digital plan in which social media, digital advertising, and online brand presence needs to work succinctly to increase the number of inbound calls and leads.
10. The major social media platforms, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+, can be a godsend to lead generation. After managing social media pages for many different doctor offices, relevant and timely content postings have to be utilized. If you are posting content on social media with no plan, you’re just wasting your time and achieving no return.
11. Use social media to promote your specials such as Invisalign, Zoom! and cosmetic dental procedures.
12. Use social media to introduce staff members and doctors.
13. Use social media to showcase your office. If your office is modern and clean, show it off!
14. REMEMBER THE DENTIST IS THE STAR OF THE OFFICE, SO USE SOCIAL MEDIA AS SUCH.
All reviews are not created equal. Learn to make your reviews work for you:
“62 percent of patients use online reviews as the first step to find a new doctor.” –Software Advice
15. If reviews on social sites and search platforms were a currency, it would be considered a precious metal. A positive review left by an actual patient is worth more than its weight in gold. The more reviews you can garnish, the better your brand looks to a new patient.
16. If you have a CRM platform that manages your online reviews, find the easiest way for your patients to leave reviews in or outside the office. Social review sites will most likely block your review if done through your IP address.
17. If you have great reviews, don’t be afraid to share them on social media.
18. Sites strictly prohibit asking for reviews, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have stickers asking for reviews all around the office.
19. If you have a negative review, first research who the patient is. There’s a lot of scammers out there who would seek to put your review page on ransom.
Sometimes traditional marketing works better than anything online:
20. As a digital marketing veteran, we always believed digital tactics were better because you could measure online traffic. But that’s not always the case. For instance, some of the best walk-in traffic and inbound phone calls came from a very clean and beautiful street banner placed in front of the dental office.
21. The key is to learn what works for your business and how you can take simple marketing efforts to create 10X returns.
