As a dental practice, attracting new patients and providing excellent patient experiences are always top-of-mind. A strategic marketing plan can help you scale your dental practice and nurture your existing patient relationships.
Here are seven marketing strategies to help you grow your dental practice and boost patient loyalty.
7 Dental Marketing Strategies
1. Direct Mail
Direct mail can be a powerful tool for your dental office to attract new patients and maintain your existing patient relationships. Strategically targeting specific demographics and tailoring messages to address common dental concerns allows you to reach new patients effectively.
Personalized offers, such as new patient exams or discounts on specific procedures, can incentivize potential patients to choose your practice.
Moreover, high-quality direct mail pieces, complete with visually appealing designs and clear calls to action, can create a lasting impression and drive prospective patients to schedule appointments.
2. Targeting New Movers
Using new to attract new patients is another important acquisition strategy. Leveraging new mover data helps you identify and reach new residents in the area and proactively reach them with personalized offers and information about your services.
For example, when a family with a new baby moves to your area, you can target that family with ads specific to your pediatric or family dentistry services. This targeted approach helps you reach families new to the area when they are settling into their new homes and looking for new service providers.
3. Email Marketing
Your dental office should also invest in email marketing to nurture patient relationships, drive practice growth, and improve patient retention. By sending regular newsletters, appointment reminders, and promotional offers, your practice can stay top-of-mind with your patients.
Email marketing also allows for highly targeted campaigns, such as sending information about specific treatments or services to relevant patient segments. Email marketing also offers valuable insights into patient engagement, allowing you to refine your marketing strategies to deliver a more personalized experience.
4. Referral Programs
Did you know that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over any other form of advertising? Implementing a referral program can be significantly beneficial to a dental office’s marketing strategy. In fact, referrals are golden opportunities and account for 65% of new business. Incentivize your patients to recommend their practice to friends and family by offering a referral bonus or discount. Referral programs reward patient loyalty and help you attract new local patients.
When your patients refer others, they are essentially vouching for the quality of care and service provided by you.
5. Social Media
People spend much of their time on social media, so it only makes sense for your dental practice to build a presence on the various channels. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok offer valuable opportunities to showcase your brand and services.
Create engaging posts include posting before-and-after photos, sharing client testimonials, and providing educational content about oral health.
By engaging with patients through comments and messages, along with contests and giveaways, dental offices can build trust and foster a positive reputation. A strong social media presence can help them to stand out in a competitive market.
6. Local SEO
Local SEO works by helping Google understand where a business is located and what it offers. By optimizing your website and online presence for local search terms, you can increase your visibility on map platforms and search engines when potential patients search for “dentist near me,” “best dental clinic,” or other relevant keywords. Keywords are what people search for when looking for products, services, or amenities in their area.
When strategizing which keywords are best for your business, start with a generalized idea of what services you offer and work toward more specific queries (such as products, dental issue symptoms, etc.).
For example, the dentist’s office is the location, orthodontics is a service, and a toothache is a problem that might bring a patient into your office.
Local SEO can also help Google perceive your business as more popular and trustworthy. For example, reviews and relevance are key to ranking higher.
Having a strong SEO strategy, on the local level, helps to drive foot traffic to the office and build a strong reputation. The first page of Google captures at least 71% of web traffic (some sources say up to 92%), and the second page is far from a close second: It drops to 6% of website clicks.
7. Google Ads
More than 80% of desktop searches happen on Google. As a result, your dental office should utilize Google Ads to increase their online visibility and reach potential patients actively searching for dental care.
When using this tool, a business will appear at the top of the page, before organic search. For a dental office, this means appearing at the top of a Google search page when the possible patient is most engaged and ready to act. When targeting, you’re given complete control over customized fields such as search terms, age, location, hobbies, and interests. You can enable location, display your address, and include a clickable phone number.
Google Ads offers valuable insights into ad performance, allowing dentists to track clicks, conversions, and return on investment. Because of this, it is a key component in an effective marketing strategy.
Dental Marketing Solutions
For further ideas and marketing solutions to attract new patients, contact Welcome Wagon!
Founded in 1928 to welcome new movers to their community, Welcome Wagon is committed to connecting your dental practice with new homeowners through online and offline channels.
