For many dental offices, one of the biggest challenges is attracting new patients. As competition increases in the healthcare field, it has become more important than ever for dentists to do whatever they can to build and maintain a steady patient base. But how do you go about doing that? Here are 13 ways for attracting new dental patients to your practice.
Mobile Optimized Website
Devices have become an integral part of our daily lives. Mobile internet usage is projected to grow even further in the upcoming years and dental practices need to be ready for it. Dentists can get a head start by optimizing their websites for mobile users. This will make their sites easy to browse and look up information, attracting new dental patients.
Mobile optimized dental websites benefit both the practice and its users because they create a better user experience while providing quick access to important information. As a result, dental offices are able to keep their current patients informed while potentially attracting new ones, all through an intuitive, properly designed website.
A few keys to having a mobile optimized site include:
- Make sure your site is optimized for any device with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
- Take advantage of Custom CSS to ensure that your website is fully responsive and ready for any device. Optimize the design elements of your online presence with this powerful styling tool and provide the best user experience possible
- Make sure to select Responsive Themes and Plugins for the best user experience
- Check Your Website’s Core Web Vitals to Ensure Top Performance
- Enhance Your Site’s Loading Speeds to Boost Visitor Engagement
- Select a Dependable Web Host to Ensure Optimal Performance and Reliability
If you aren’t sure how to do these things, get some help. Reach out to your website administrator and ask them to check these things. If you don’t have an admin, find someone you trust to do a site audit. You may be in need of a new dental website design altogether.
Google Business Profile Listing
Your Google Business Profile is a marvelous marketing tool. It costs you nothing and gives you free virtual real estate on the most used website on the internet. Be sure that you are taking full advantage of your listing. Here are a few tips to making the most of it:
- Take ownership of the listing if you haven’t already
- Ask happy patients to leave positive reviews on your profile
- Respond to all reviews, positive and negative
- Answer any questions asked
- Fill out the entire profile to the fullest extent that you can
- Make sure the information on your listing is accurate and updated
- Post on your listing weekly
- Upload photos from your office regularly
Be sure to follow Google’s terms of service to the best of your ability to prevent the account getting shut down.
Internal Marketing
Internal marketing is how many practices are able to sustain themselves. At times, they do it without any other marketing of any kind. This works for sustaining your dental practice if you are good at what you do. It can be the lowest hanging fruit, but that fruit can bring in bountiful results. Referrals are the best types of patients because they are already pre-sold. So, do not neglect them. Leverage your current patients for attracting new dental patients.
Here’s a few helpful tips for making the most of your internal marketing:
- Create a culture of referrals among your patients by talking about it
- Post signs around the office that encourage referrals
- When a patient has a great experience, let them know that you would appreciate their referrals
- Personally thank patients who refer others to your practice
- Track your referral numbers and create an incentive for staff to achieve better numbers
Social Media
Social media can be especially powerful for marketing your dental practice. It is amplified by dental practices who do the following:
- Create a unique experience for patients, something they cannot find at just any other dental office
- Post about the unique aspects of the office on social media
This is not to say that social media cannot work for other dental offices. However, it’s hard to beat the wow factor of an office that gives their patients a truly unique experience.
Posting regularly with a loyal group of patients is a good way to stay top of mind. In another blog post recently, we talked about the power of memes in dental marketing. Things that get people to stop scrolling, laughing, or engaging with your staff online is going to pay dividends. Remind patients to come back for routine visits through catchy/fun/interesting posts and offers.
Also, don’t forget to leverage the power of social proof through reviews, comments, and photos of happy patients with great results.
Retargeting Ads
If you have a website, some amount of people are often visiting it. That number may be small, or it could be large. However many people are visiting, you can stay top of mind through retargeting ads.
Retargeting Ads are when you place ads on websites that cater to the same interests as your website visitors. This will help you stay top of mind with people who may have visited your website and were not ready to make an appointment at that time.
These ads can be very effective in bringing potential patients back for a second look or to remind them of your office when they are ready to book an appointment.
Networking with other dental offices
You may have heard the phrase, “it’s not how much you know, it’s who you know.” There’s something to be said about this in business. The reason is this, we don’t do business with “businesses”. We do business with people, and more often with people we know and like.
Knowing other dentists in town is a good way to get referrals to your office. Especially if you offer a service that another office does not. A general dentist I know made an entire business based around wisdom teeth removal this way.
Similar to what many orthodontists do with general dentists, you can personally visit or have staff visit offices near you. Make a list of offices that don’t offer the services you are trying to do more of.
Dental membership plans
Dental membership plans can appeal to those who do not have any dental insurance. This is a great way to get them in the door for routine visits. You can also offer discounted services for more expensive procedures as well.
Not only are these great for recurring revenue, they can also increase patient loyalty.
Google Ads (Pay Per Click Advertising)
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is an excellent way for dentists to attract new patients and grow their practice. It allows dentists to make their services visible without having to wait for organic search traffic to trickle in. It provides immediate presence on the web.
With Google Ads, dentists get a lot of advantages. Some of them include:
- tailoring ads to those in need of specific dental treatments
- targeting new patients based on specific keywords that you choose
- only pay when someone actually takes an action, such as call or click on your website
- you can adjust the budget at any time to meet the needs of your dental office at any time
- ability to track conversions
Google Ads are a great choice for any dentist looking to draw more attention from potential patients and stay ahead of the competition online.
Buy another dental practice’s patients
If you are really in need of a lot of new patients, you can buy the patients from a retiring or moving dentist. Doing this does mean that you will have to spend more money upfront, but it could be a great investment in the long run. This is especially true if you purchase a practice with a lot of loyal, high-value patients.
You will want to buy from a dentist that is somewhat close to you in proximity. It can also be risky as these patients will not have the same loyalty to your office as they did with the last dentist. For that reason, it might be wise to have the retiring/moving dentist work for/with you for a time. You may also consider bringing on some of their staff as well. This will help make the transition smoother than it might otherwise be.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great way for dentists to reach their target market and improve the visibility of their practice. SEO entails optimizing specific web content with keywords, images, and backlinks that are relevant to your practice so that it increases its search engine rankings.
Additionally, SEO helps create an engaging user experience by using meta descriptions and page loading times that attract visitors to your website. Search Engine Optimization for dentists incorporates optimization strategies specifically targeted towards patients seeking dental care.
By effectively using popular keywords and regularly updating site content with targeted information, dentists can ensure they appear on the top of Google Search engine results. Search Engine Optimization can save dentists a lot of time in improving their online presence as well as help them stay ahead of the competition when it comes to attracting potential clients.
Unless you have experience and time to spare, you will want to hire someone to help you with this. That can be tricky, as there are a lot of bad SEO companies out there. Make sure to choose one with a proven track record and a lot of experience working in the dental industry.
Learn more about getting started with SEO.
Extended business hours
Many dentists work Monday-Thursday, from 8am-5pm, or something similar. While those are appealing work hours for most dentists, it creates an opportunity for others. We all know that dental emergencies and other dental services can still be helpful to people at other times of the week.
Even if you aren’t big on the idea of working weekends, maybe even just working Fridays, or extended hours on other days can create an opportunity for you. This is a good strategy for newer dentists trying to build their practices from the ground up.
Offer more services
If you find yourself referring out a lot of patients, consider taking a course to expand the services you can offer. Adding valuable services and procedures such as Invisalign and dental implants can make a huge difference in your bottom line. Another one to think about is same-day crowns.
Not only will this make you more competitive, but it can also help reduce the amount of time that patients need to spend in your office. That means less waiting around, which leads to happier patients and higher patient satisfaction.
Create a Unique Selling Proposition
If you’re a dentist looking to make your dentistry practice stand out, crafting a unique selling proposition (USP) is the perfect way to do it. USPs are essentially the key benefits of your practice and why people should choose you over any other dental practitioners.
A successful USP should be memorable and clearly inform prospective patients of why they should choose you over competitors. It needs to be more than just listing general services, i.e., root canals or braces – focus on how those services are provided slightly differently by your practice that makes it uniquely beneficial for patients.
One example of that is a Pediatric Dentist who created a massive arcade in their office – not just a few iPads. they lost room for operatories by doing this. However, it helped that they bought a big building to do it. The arcade is part of the USP, but the real USP is an experience unlike any other. Parents rave about and talk about this office on social media and in social circles quite often. Many of the parents have even asked, “Do you accept adults?”
If it sounds a little crazy, that is often the key to truly differentiating your practice from others.
Another example of this, outside of the dental sphere was Dominos Pizza. They created a campaign a few decades back where if they took more than 30 minutes to get you your pizza, it was free. That is a USP as well. It was a guarantee that offered something special either way, and it was not offered by their competition.
Create a Unique Selling Proposition that provides clear value to potential patients and it sets you apart from the competition!
Final thoughts on attracting new dental patients
By utilizing the tips outlined above, you can bring in a lot more patients, increase your revenue, and become one of the more successful dental offices in your city. Dentistry is a competitive industry. It will probably take more than one or two of these methods for achieving your goals.
In marketing, it may not always be easy to find one single method for bringing in 13 new patients per month. However, you can come up with 13 ways to bring in one new patient per month. In this case, many of these methods are worth more than 1-2 new patients for your dental practice.
Do you need help with dental marketing? At AdPro4U, we understand the challenges that dentists face in marketing. We have helped our clients make millions of dollars in revenue from our efforts. Let us help you with attracting new dental patients.