28 Dental Marketing Ideas to Attract New Patients
Being a dentist, you have to look after a lot of things, such as watching patients, managing staff, ensuring that all the rules and regulations are in place, and more. Hence, it might be overwhelming to give time to dental marketing.
But if you are getting a limited number of patients and want to attract new patients, it is necessary for you to consider marketing ideas for dental offices. To attract more patients, you need to provide top-notch service at an affordable cost. Besides this, you need to consider all the essential things that come under the dental practice marketing plan.
In the beginning, you might not have any idea how to attract new patients to your dental practice. But once you become familiar with the marketing process, you can get a flood of new patients that will help you maintain high-quality revenue.
Here, we have done detailed research and curated some of the most creative dental marketing ideas to get more patients to your dental practice.
Let us look at all of these dental marketing tips in detail.
1. Offer a Membership Plan
Although dental membership plans rarely exist. They can be a viable choice for people who have restricted coverage.
A membership program overcomes the insurance problem by allowing your practice to keep patients who would otherwise cancel due to a lack of insurance.
The membership program demonstrates how patients can pay a minimal monthly fee for the services they require, allowing them to visit the dentist without concern of incurring a high-cost appointment.
2. Create a Professional Dental Website & Do Marketing
Patients use search engines to find new dental clinics. Moreover, they like to book appointments online. Therefore, if you don’t have a website for your clinic, you should create a dental website.
After creating a professional website, you need to do marketing. For marketing, you have two options: Search Engine Optimization & Pay Per Click Marketing.
Search engine optimization is the method of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic on the search engines. PPC is an advertisement model, in which the advertiser pays you when you click their Ads. We will look at this later.
For SEO & PPC of your dental website, you should approach a dental website marketing solution provider. They will understand your dental practice website and do effective marketing.
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
For online marketing, social media is a very crucial tool. Having a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others helps to humanize your brand.
As a dentist, you should not just use social media to promote your business. You can also use it to interact with your followers and show them what life is like at your dental office. You can utilize social media to cross-promote your other patient-acquisition methods. Use event hashtags if you’re sponsoring a local event.
Make sure you’re keeping an eye on your social media accounts for any mentions of your dental practice.
Motivate them to reach out to potential patients looking for a dentist in the area. It is a straightforward approach for bringing you people who hurry to visit a dentist but are unsure where to go.
4. Ask Your Patients for Reviews
Having a positive rating for your dental business is essential for attracting new patients. A dental business that doesn’t prioritize feedback has very few or no reviews.
Nobody will select a dentist who has no reviews over one who has dozens of positive ones. When it comes to your digital presence, your internet reputation is so significant that it can help you to make or break your dental business.
The truth is that when it comes to making a buying decision, reviews are the most significant aspect. So, if you get a few patients from friends or coworkers, politely ask them to post a review.
5. Distribute Press Releases
Doing press releases is one of the best dental marketing ideas for attracting patients to a new clinic. They’re a vital part of a lot of marketing campaigns for dentists. Here, you shouldn’t send notifications like “Hey, we’re open for business!”. Instead, send out press releases about topics that people care about.
Add your two cents on a local level whenever something dental-related makes national news. The Institute of Dental CPAs has some excellent headline examples: Dentist Says Needle, Drill Nearly Obsolete, and Cosmetic Dentistry Demand Running High.
6. Offer Discounts
Patients increasingly consider the worth of money and bargains. Offer discounts or incentives, such as a free consultation after two paid ones, to entice customers to come to your dental office.
Discounts and specials can attract new patients who consider visiting a dentist but lack a reason to switch dentists. Please keep track of their behavior after they start visiting your office to identify what services they are most interested in. This thing will assist you in developing future marketing messages for practice growth and patient involvement.
7. Offer 24/7 Online Appointment Scheduling
One of the most common mistakes dental professionals make with their websites is to create barriers for new users who may wish to schedule an appointment. Even if your office is closed, you can give outstanding customer service by allowing patients to arrange a meeting on your website at any time and any day.
The good news is that this is a simple problem to solve. Patient booking is usually regularly included in dental office management software, which you may add to your practice website.
If you make it simple for people to choose you as their dentist, patient reviews are more likely to be good. The first time someone views your website, they will have a good patient experience.
8. Utilize Email Marketing
One of the most successful dental lead generation strategies for your clinic is an email marketing campaign that is well-coordinated.
Patients can stay in touch with you by receiving an automated greeting email, appointment reminders, and a monthly newsletter. It is also an excellent place to get feedback and referrals from current patients.
9. Create Informative Content
Patients will talk about the information you produce, regardless of how strong your dental marketing approach is. If you have trouble getting people to engage with your content, it may be because it’s not intriguing enough.
Your primary goal should be to establish your dental office as the best in the neighborhood. This thing not only generates clicks and likes but also establishes credibility. It would help if you created a great content marketing plan for your material to succeed. Choose a topic that is relevant to readers while generating content.
10. Establish Yourself as an Expert
Give potential patients a compelling incentive to visit your practice and try out your services, as this is the first step toward converting them into long-term customers.
Provide value and identify yourself as an expert who understands the issues they’re trying to address. This could be done, for example, through blog posts, webinars, guest articles, or podcasts. All of these actions will help you build a fan base, and if you follow a systematic strategy, you’ll be able to convert your fans into paying patients.
11. Utilize Video Marketing
People worldwide consume huge amounts of videos daily. Some of the best dental websites have understood the importance of videos and integrated them into their website to reach a wider audience and generate more revenue. By promoting your dental practice through videos, you have an opportunity to attract new patients.
Here are some of the effective ways to utilize video marketing:
Welcome Videos: Create a video for welcoming a new visitor to the website. It should tell the story of your dental office, staff, and the quality of service you deliver.
Dentist Profile Videos: Sharing a profile video of dentists with experience helps to build confidence among the users. Patients will believe in the dentist’s abilities.
Patient Review Videos: Give the opportunity to the users to leave a video review after getting service from you. People worldwide like to view video reviews compared to text.
Professional & Treatment Videos: Show users what the entire process looks like. Your video should answer questions like what will be the view of the room? Who will be the team? What will happen in the entire process? Present your expertise thoroughly.
Educational Videos: Make videos of the frequently asked questions. You can also convert blog content into videos and present them to the users. These videos can get higher views and help you build authority.
12. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
In order to expand your dental practice, you need to go for digital dental marketing.
PPC stands for pay per click. Whenever someone searches on Google, the search engine displays some ads followed by the main results. Various companies run their ads on Google. Out of which, only the ones that stand out appear at the top.
PPC is one of the most effective dental marketing ideas to reach your potential audience. Many dentists do PPC because others are doing it. They don’t have proper knowledge of it. It can result in failure.
The overall process of managing Google ads is complex. Here is how it can work for your dental practice.
- Choose the right keywords that display your service & product.
- A targeted customer searches for the products.
- Your ad might get displayed on the top of the search page.
- You only have to pay when someone clicks on the link.
- Monitor all the things that happen through ads.
13. Create a Google My Business Page for Your Practice
One of the most effective marketing ideas for dental office is to create a Google My Business page.
When you create a Google My Business Page, all of your potential patients can search for your business online. However, creating a Google My Business page is not enough to reach out to the audience. Here are some of the tips to optimize your page for the search engines and users:
- Fill out essential information like hours, address, and contact correctly.
- Presenting some attractive photos of the office
- Including the reviews
- Adding services information
Doing effective dental branding through logo and other brand identifiers
The Google My Business page plays a vital role in targeting the local population. When patients in your locality search for dentists, the search engine will display all the local dentists’ offices. If your listing appears in the results, there is a possibility that patients can reach out to you.
Lastly, the Google My Business listings will appear in the knowledge graph section, local search, etc.
14. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
If you already have a website and want to reach a wider audience, you should consider SEO for dental clinic website. By doing this, you will start getting traffic on your website and get more patients.
Here are some of the strategies for search engine optimization:
Technical SEO: Ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly. If your site doesn’t load quickly, users will leave it immediately. Besides this, technical SEO includes various things like URL structure, thin content, duplicate content, Hreflang, structured data, and more.
On-Page-SEO: Add the right set of keywords in the headlines. You should also focus on adding keywords to the content as per the need. Here, you should not overuse them as they will have a negative impact on search engines. Never use the same keywords multiple times on the page. Instead, you should add synonyms and other phrases to the content.
Don’t use the same headlines on multiple pages. By doing this, all of your website pages will compete with each other. In short, it will confuse search engines about what to rank.
It is also necessary to consider local SEO while doing website optimization. You should integrate local keywords into the website. It will help you reach out to an audience; who will ultimately become your patients.
15. Contribute to Local Events
People usually get connected to a service whose name they have heard somewhere. As dentistry is a local service, it would be great if you engage with the local communities.
Here are some of the ways you can contribute to the local communities:
- Provide support to local fundraisers.
- Sponsor a sports match.
- Host an informational event.
- Provide a tour of your dental office to elementary schools in your region.
- Volunteer for a popular event happening in your region.
By contributing to local events, you can increase your reputation in the community and attract new patients to your practice.
16. Start a Dental Podcast
17. Support Local Charitable Organizations
18. Guest Posting
19. EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail)
Every Door Direct Mail is a great direct marketing strategy that allows you to reach your target audience. You have to select a specific neighborhood that you want to target through fliers or mail. A postal service carrier will deliver the printed flyer to all the addresses on his/her daily postal delivery route.
There are specific EDDM online tools. You can use that tools and create customized mail that will be delivered to your target audience in a specific neighborhood based on their income, household size, or age. Send your actionable mail with a clear call to action to generate more traffic to your website.
20. Use QR Codes
21. Advertise on Yelp
22. A Local ZocDoc Verified Dentist
23. Start a Patient Referral Program
The patient referral program is an effective and inexpensive way to increase the number of patients coming to your clinic. In this program, you have to give some reward to those patients who refer their friends, or family members to you.
It has been found that personal referrals are extremely effective to convince somebody. Therefore, if you can get a lot of loyal clients by providing the best treatment in solving their dental issues, they will be impressed by your service and will refer you to their friends and family. The reward for a referral could be free check-ups or a discount on their bill.
24. Print and Distribute Business Cards
25. Retarget Your Previous Visitors
26. Keep Your Branding Consistent
To improve the trust of your patient in your practice, brand consistency is a must as it will help to increase your ROI. If your brand is consistent, your target audience will find you reliable. This will help you to get new customers as well as repeat ones. You can use a unique logo and consistent tagline that is repeated consistently on all your points of engagement with the target audience.
Brand consistency requires you to offer the same brand messaging, visual elements, and voice in every piece of your content. This helps in improving the visibility and recognition of your brand amongst your target audience. And when they think about dental service, your name will come at the top of their mind.
If your brand approach is not consistent, it would limit your chances to get more traffic or sales. People go to those brands, which they feel are authentic and with which they can connect easily. It is very difficult to connect with a brand that does not have consistent messaging or appearance.
27. Always Have a Call to Action
28. Build Referral Partnerships
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed our list of dental marketing ideas for attracting new patients to your dental business.
By considering the above tips of marketing for dentists, you can attract a potential audience and generate good revenue.
If you want to implement any of the dental marketing ideas listed above to get more patients, you can contact us.
WebyKing is a professional dental website design company. We have a highly talented team of professionals who can understand your problem and provide you with a suitable solution.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a dental marketer do?
Why does your dental practice need a marketing agency?
Here are some of the reasons why you need a marketing agency for your dental clinic
- Create a customized marketing plan for your clinic and execute it properly.
- It is cost-effective to hire professionals.
- Professionals have years of experience working with different strategies & challenges.
- Get continuous support for the marketing of your clinic.
