Competition in the dental field is severe, making entering the market a significant challenge. And even if you’ve established a foothold, expanding your customer base is no easy task as well. Still, if you master traditional and digital marketing methods, you’ll quickly become a sought-after dental office. Learn how to promote your services and increase patient volume at a low cost in a highly competitive environment by applying dental office marketing strategies.
Make Your Services Visible with Local SEO
Visibility, both online and offline, is one of the first tasks to address when launching a dental business. While in a physical space, you can accomplish this aim with captivating signs that show the direction to your clinic and a beautiful façade. In the digital space, your most important tool for increasing online visibility is SEO. And since dental businesses are typically localized, you’ll need to focus on local SEO. Its tools and techniques will help you reach potential customers and build brand awareness. Local SEO includes a whole range of techniques:
- Creating and optimizing a Google Business Profile. To appear in local search results, you need to provide search engines with accurate information about your business. For example, by creating a Google Maps profile, you’ll receive a geotag on local maps. This way, your dental office will be visible even to users searching for other services nearby.
- Using the right keywords to define your location to searchers clearly. For example, a well-known New York dental clinic specifies its location by positioning itself as VIP Dental Care in Forest Hills. Such localizing keywords will help your website appear at the top of the SERP for users searching for dental services in the districts near your clinic.
- Encouraging loyal customers to leave reviews on local reputation sites to build trust in your business.
Offer Promotions for New Clients
The first visit to the dental office is crucial because it determines whether a patient will return for further treatment. Therefore, your primary goal is to encourage them to try your clinic’s services. The ideal tool for encouraging first visits is various promotions, such as:
- Free diagnostics and consultation;
- Discounts on the first visit;
- Discounts for multiple dental treatments;
- Discounts for children/students/seniors, etc.
While offering discounts to new patients, don’t forget about your regulars. Their loyalty is the key to your stable income, so consider creating some incentives for them as well. For example, this could include a cumulative discount system, bonuses, seasonal discounts, a well-designed loyalty program, and more.
Use the Power of Word of Mouth
When it comes to dental office marketing strategies, people are more likely to trust those who have already tried them than to rely on advertising. That is why your patients can be your best advertisers. To engage them, offer a “Refer a Friend” promotion on your website, which will benefit both you and your regular patients. This way, you’ll simultaneously strengthen the loyalty of your existing patients and attract new ones.
Alternatively, you can offer discounts to family members. In this case, the discount should depend on how many family members a given patient will bring to your care. This promotion will benefit you and the family you’re helping maintain their dental health:
- You’ll gain several new patients at once.
- The family will save significantly on dental treatment.
Offer New Services Unavailable at Competitors
To succeed in the dental industry, you need to monitor market innovations closely. If any of them seem promising, don’t hesitate to offer them to your patients. If you take too long to decide whether to introduce some innovations, your competitors will do so before you. This will result in losing competitive advantage and failing to capitalize on innovation. If you’re an early adopter of dental office marketing strategies, then incorporating them in dental care becomes part of your brand identity. And your clinic will be perceived as offering a better chance of fast, effective, and painless dental treatment or prosthetics.
Choose the Most Effective Type of Advertising
Don’t waste your company’s money showing ads to everyone. Modern technologies enable you to increase conversions by targeting individuals who may need your assistance the most. Targeted advertising allows you to identify users who meet specific criteria and show ads only to them. For example, these could be people living near your dental office. Alternatively, you can target your ads to those searching for information about various types of fillings, dentures, teeth straightening, and other related topics.
The Bottom Line
The specific methods you choose to attract patients depend on the size of your dental office and the budget you’re willing to spend on this task. Some strategies can yield significant savings if you invest your time to master new technologies. For example, many SEO platforms offer free tools for website optimization and promotion. If you or your staff master this skill, you can use the savings to offer discounts to patients. This way, you’ll be taking a comprehensive approach and achieving better results.
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