There is no shortage of competition in the dental industry – and ensuring your dental practice expands its profits can be an exhausting endeavor. That’s why it’s vital to explore tactics to help you stand out from the crowd while keeping the finances of your practice firmly in the green. In this article, we’ll reveal helpful strategies to help you increase profits for your dental practice. By utilizing these techniques, you can ensure that your business grows sustainably as time goes on. Let’s get started!
Expand your practice to offer more dental services
Expanding your dental practice to offer more services is a great way to increase patient satisfaction and boost profits. By offering more advanced and specialized services, such as Invisalign or dental implants, you can offer your patients complete oral health care they cannot find everywhere else.
Adding additional treatments will not only offer convenience for your patients, but it can also be highly profitable for your business if done correctly. Carefully consider which services you should offer in order to meet the needs of different types of patients and generate the best response from them.
Answer the phone and train staff properly
When a potential patient calls your dental practice, your staff should be trained to answer all inquiries in a friendly, helpful and knowledgeable manner. If your staff does not answer the phone calls promptly or are unable to provide knowledgeable answers, it is more likely that the potential patient will not make an appointment with you.
Additionally, well trained staff also know which questions to ask potential patients and how to handle questions as well. The staff answering your phones need to be engaged, upbeat, and interested in taking the call. Failure to do so will be detrimental to your dental practice, as you will lose patients to other practices.
By investing in proper training for your team, you can ensure that most calls are answered correctly and that your team is providing the highest level of customer service.
Make use of digital marketing techniques
In the digital age, it’s important to take advantage of the power of technology and leverage digital marketing tactics to reach out to potential patients. Here are a list of marketing avenues for you to consider:
- Website: Create a mobile friendly website for your practice.
- Social media: Engage with your patients and others on social media. Posting regularly and sharing compelling content will help to get you more exposure in your area.
- Search engine optimization: You can improve the rank of your website on SERPs (search engine results pages) through proven strategies. Learn more about dental SEO, or hire a dental SEO expert.
- Pay-per-click advertising: Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram, and many other platforms allow you to advertise your dental practice.
By using these techniques you can increase your profits and visibility for your dental practice. This will help you reach a wider audience in your are and see more patients. These digital marketing tactics give you the chance to build a strong online presence that will help attract new patients while increasing repeat visits from existing ones. Additionally, utilizing these strategies also helps strengthen patient loyalty and build trust in your practice/brand.
By investing in the right digital marketing techniques, you can ensure that your dental practice is reaching more potential patients than ever before, resulting in a steady stream of new patients as well as increased profits for your business.
Become less dependent on insurances
While insurances can be useful in the initial phases of a dental startup, they can hold you back in the long run. As your practice starts to mature, it is important to become less reliant on insurance companies and shift focus to cash payments.
By offering more payment options, such as monthly plans or discounts for pre-payment, you can encourage patients to pay in full using cash or a payment method of their choice. This will help you reduce your overhead costs associated with insurance processing and billing and increase overall profits.
In-house membership programs
Consider creating your own in-house membership plan. By signing up patients to membership plans, dentists can enjoy the multiple benefits of:
- sustainable recurring income
- enhanced patient satisfaction and loyalty
- decreased reliance on dental insurance carriers and an increase in practice value
Both physicians and patients stand to benefit from this arrangement.
Increase your focus on internal marketing
In order to create a great internal marketing system in your dental practice, you will need exceptional patient satisfaction. It’s easy to increase profits for your dental practice through internal marketing if you have exceptional patient satisfaction. Here’s some of the ways to leverage that to your favor:
- Ask for referrals, Google reviews, and testimonials when patients are happy with their experience.
- Place signs and other material in the office that talk about the culture you are creating for referrals.
- When a patient refers someone, be sure to thank them personally. You can do this in person, or by sending a card. The need to feel appreciated is one of the strongest human desires.
- Track referrals in your office and incentivize staff members for being part of the success.
- Find ways to make your patients experience uniquely positive.
Network with other dental offices
Some dental offices are not offering services that you are. Get to know as many other dentists as possible in your area. Find out which services they refer out for and meet with them regularly. This will ensure that you get more referrals from other dentists in the area.
You can also attend local dental conventions and events. This is a great way to network, meet potential partners, and build relationships with other dentists and providers.
Final thoughts
One of these strategies will probably be very helpful for your practice. However, if you are wanting to increase your profits substantially for your dental practice, you should implement as many as possible. Digital dental marketing, cash payment options, membership plans, internal marketing and networking with other dentists in the area are all important tactics to help grow your business. With a combined effort of these strategies you will be sure to see increased profits for your dental practice.
If you want to remove the digital marketing burden while benefitting from that tactic, contact AdPro4U. We’ve helped dentists make millions in additional revenue through online dental marketing. Contact us today.