How to Market your Dental Practice

Marketing your Dental Practice

There are a hundred different ways to market your Dental Practice. You can use Twitter or Facebook, send emails, create a blog, mail flyers or use pay-per-click ads. Each of these tactics is effective and has its own rules and strategies. Employee any of these and you could execute on a full time basis.

So where and how do you start marketing your practice? Do you throw all these tactics against the wall and see what sticks? No doubt that a marketing plan is a great place to start. But in these constrained times, even starting a Marketing Plan doesn’t seem possible.

If you are not sure how to create a plan, following this How to Market your Dental Practice series will help a bit.

A Simple Definition of Marketing

One of the simplest definitions of marketing is: “attracting an audience”. If we go a little further and define marketing as: not only attracting an audience but “connecting to an audience”, you get a sense of what your marketing goal is. By connecting to your audience, (your patients), you begin to understand their needs, how they think and how they purchase your services.

Start Creating your Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan will help you identify your business goals. A good plan provides structure and can be used over and over to provide consistency with your messaging. In the long run, structured marketing will save you time and your hard earned money.

If you had to start marketing your practice right now and are not sure what to do first, start by taking a look at your patients, (both present and future ones).

Here are a few questions to think about to get you started.

Existing Patients:
1. Who are the patients already visiting my practice?
2. What services are they already using?

Future Patients:
1. What are these patient’s values?
2. How do they feel about my Dental Services?
3. How will I get them to sign up for my practice?

When digging deeper with your existing Patient base, speak with them or send them a survey. Ask them:
1. How they feel about your process?
2. How did they find you?
3. Do they know about all your services?
4. What do they really care about?

When looking at your potential client you should be aware of:
1. When a potential patient calls your practice, what questions are they asking?
2. Make sure you know the most common questions and that your support staff is answering them correctly. One wrong answer is all it takes for that potential client to hang up and call your competitor.

If you notice, you are marketing. You are connecting to your practice. You can do that same kind of connection with email, blogging or social media. Your marketing plan will vet which tactics to employ and which ones will work best for you.

After you contact your patients and do some research, you may start to see some trends; maybe how a patient found you. Immediately increase those efforts to attract potential patients.

Ultimately, the tactics you chose will create a connection, and the more human you can make that connection, the more successful your marketing will be.

Patient Behavior

Here’s a quick look at a patient’s buying cycle. The challenge is to figure out how and where they fall out of your sales cycle and how you can move more potential patients to Step 4.

Step 1.  A patient becomes aware of your practice, (hopefully through your marketing efforts).

Step 2.  They start showing some interest. Maybe looking at your website, or Facebook, they even make a phone call to find out more about your practice.

Step 3.  They like what they see and make an appointment. (hopefully once again responding to your marketing efforts).

Step 4.  They show up, pay you and become a patient.

Conclusion

Before you spend your time and money on Facebook or mailings, learn more about your current and potential patients.
If marketing is the act of connecting to your audience, than you have to get to know your patients better. You have to know their needs, problems and challenges and communicate how your practice can help them. If you have existing patients, you have to build a referral program.

Getting to know your patients and figuring how and why they became your customer will definitely help you and the future of your practice.

Good Luck!