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How to Create a Great Slogan for Your Dental Practice

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With a plethora of dentists competing for a patients attention through various forms of dental marketing (TV, radio, websites, social media, magazines, coupons, workplace referrals and more), you must up your game to become successful. Most patients think that all dentists are the same since only a few dental practices are able to establish their brand and make themselves stand out. Having a catchy, memorable slogan will help your dental office distinguish itself from others to dominate your local market. But how do you create a great tagline? This is exactly what we attempt to answer in this post.

invisalign tagline

Keep it Short

Keep your dental office slogan under 10 words. Anything too long will make it impossible to use anywhere with your logo. While you must keep your tagline short, you must also ensure that it is complete and anyone reading it should be able to tell that you provide dentistry service without any additional information.

Brand Consistency is Key

If you have a paediatric dentistry then your slogan must be related to kids and speak to their parents. If you want to attract high end clients, then your tagline should speak to the wealthy. The point being that brand consistency should be maintained when creating a slogan to attract the right patients. For example, Invisalign’s tagline positions it as a transparent alternative to metallic braces.

Focus on Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

At the end of the day, a tag-line is simply another opportunity to tell people what makes your dental practice different from the rest. For example, Crossoak Family Dentistry uses the slogan “We cater to cowards” with a big chicken on its website. Try to incorporate your primary unique selling point in your slogan.

Get Input from Patients

Short-list 5-6 slogan ideas and create a poll on your Facebook page to see what your fans think. Ask for some suggestions from your patients and announce a prize for the one who comes up with the best tag-line for your dental office. You could also personally approach a few loyal patients for their suggestions. Those are some ways to get feedback and advice from the target audience itself i.e. dental patients.

Say It Out Loud

Once you have a few ideas, say them out loud to hear how they sound. Try putting emphasis on different words and inserting punctuation to see how it changes the sound and meaning of your slogan.

Before finalizing a tagline, you will need to see if another business is already using it. If you’re in the U.S., you can run a trademark check through the USPTO. If you’re located in another country, check for availability with your government.

[FREE] 11 Collection Letter Examples for Dental Offices

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A collection letter is an attempt to encourage patients to clear their outstanding dues. It serves as a humble reminder to the patient without breaking the relationship of dentist and the patient. A good letter combined with a superior patient communications strategy will help your dental office improve collections and keep bad debt down. In this article we present 5 dental collection letter templates you can send to your patients. Just cut, paste, fill in your information and send.

dental collection letter sample

Letter courtesy of Dentists Collect.

[Your Name] [Street Address] [City, ST ZIP Code] December 16, 2015

[Patient Name] [Street Address] [City, ST ZIP Code]

Dear [Patient Name]:

You have a past-due balance of $323.46 for dental services provided. As of December 16, 2015, we have not received your payment.

If you are having financial difficulties, please call our office during business hours to make confidential payment arrangements.

If you have questions about the amount your insurance company covers, please call their customer service number to discuss.

If you have already sent your payment, please disregard this notice and accept our thanks.

Sincerely,
[Your Practice Name] [Title]

[hr]

Letter courtesy of Pediatric Inc.

«Recip_FirstName» «Recip_LastName»
«Recip_Address1» «Recip_Address2»
«Recip_City» «Recip_State» «Recip_Zip»
«Patient_FirstName» Account # «Patient_AcctNo»

Dear Mr/Mrs. «Recip_LastName»

It’s our policy to contact patients who received a billing statement from us in the past 30 days, but have not responded.

You currently have a balance of $ «Patient_PatBalance» with «Patient_ProviderName» To date we have not received payment or have heard from you regarding payment arrangements.

We understand that many of our patients experience financial difficulties. If this is the case, please let us know so we can assist you in making budget payment arrangements. We want to help you fulfill your commitment without causing undue hardship, so please do not hesitate to contact our office.

If you have already sent payment in, then please, disregard this letter. Otherwise, we look forward to receiving your payment within five days of this letter. Your prompt attention is appreciated.

Sincerely,

[Your Practice Name] [Title]
[hr]

15-Day Patient Collection Letter courtesy of Physicians Practice.

 

Date

Patient Name

Patient Address

Re: Patient Name

Account #:

Balance Due: $

Dear [Patient Name],

This is to notify you that your account with us is delinquent. We have not received a response to the statements that were sent to you. The patient balance noted above is the amount that is your responsibility after your insurance company has made payments.

We must receive your payment within 15 days from the date of this letter, to avoid further collection action.

If you need assistance or have any questions, please call between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. If you are unable to pay this bill in full, please call and we can discuss setting up a payment plan.

Sincerely,

[Your Practice Name]
[hr]

Letter courtesy of Dental Economics.

Dear [Insert Patient Name],

The statements you have received from us indicate a remaining balance of $xxxx for the dentistry we recently completed. We did your dentistry in good faith that we would receive compensation for the work that we performed.

We want to work with you to clear this balance as soon as possible, so please call our office and ask to speak with [Insert Coordinator Name], our financial coordinator at (123) 456-7890. She will be happy to work out some suitable financial arrangements with you.

If we do not hear from you within the next 10 days, our only option is to turn your account over to a collection agency. We hope this will not be necessary.

Sincerely,
[Insert Dentist’s name]

[hr]

Letter courtesy of Letters Free.

Dear [Patient Name],

This is to inform you that you are required to settle the due payment of $000 for the dental services provided by [Your Practice Name] in between [Start Date] to [End Date].

As per our record you have not made the payment even after our telephonic reminder on [Reminder Date]. You are requested to contact our clinic if you have any financial difficulties regarding the amount. We will definitely arrange some assistance in form of flexible payment structure.

If this payment comes under your insurance company, you are requested to contact their officer to discuss and settle the outstanding amount promptly.

If you have already sent your payment before receiving this letter of collection, please take no notice of this and accept our sincere thanks.

Sincerely,
[Your Practice Name] [Title]

How to Get More Online Reviews for Your Dental Practice

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According to a 2012 survey by SearchEngineLand, almost three-quarters of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. The year 2016 is almost upon us and if you are still ignoring online reviews then you better wake up. In this article we explain how you can get more of your dental patients to give online reviews.

get more reviews

Get Listed on Local Business Directories

Make sure your practice is listed on as many third-party sites as possible so that patients can find you on their favorite website if they feel like writing a review. This will get you some reviews organically over time i.e. without specially asking patients.

Add Review Links/Buttons on Your Websites

Your website is where patients go to when they need information about your office. By having review buttons on prominent places you can direct some of these patients to third-party sites to write a review on your local listing. You can also create a separate page on your website where links to all your local listings and 3rd party sites are available. Then link to this page from prominent places on your website.

Distribute Handout

Prepare step-by-step instructions for writing a review on various sites e.g. (google+, yelp, angeslist etc.) on a one-sided handout. Then prepare copies of these handouts and distribute them to patients visiting your office. Make sure you only request a review from patients who have been visiting your office for several years as they are more likely to post a positive review.

Personal eMail

In addition to giving instructions in hard copy, you can send them the review link and instructions by email. Although it may be a problem for senior patients who do not use email, it will be easier and preferable for most patients to get the review links and instructions via email.

Phone Call

Almost every dental patient uses a phone. You can hand pick 20 odd patients and call them personally asking for a review. Also give them review instructions handout as well as a personal follow up email. This will increase your chances of getting a review.

Social Media Request

Ask your fans and followers on facebook and twitter to post a review by giving them a review link in your status or post. The good thing is that you can do this at least once a month and just collecting 2 reviews per month would give your dental office 24 reviews by the end of the year.

Ask Reviewers to Write on Another Site

If you know that a certain patient has given your dental practice a positive review, you can request them to review your dental office on a another website. You can ask them again after 5-6 months to post their feedback on another website and then another after a year. This way you can populate several of your local listings with positive reviews coming from a single patient.

7 Tips to Get More Dental Patients with Facebook Ads

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Facebook Advertising is a great to way to promote your dental office online and get generate new patients at a reasonable cost. However, the Facebook ad platform can be very confusing for a first time user and you can waste a lot of money testing strategies that do no work. In this post we share some useful tips to help you get a jump-start on your Facebook advertising campaigns.

facebook ads logo

Create a Special Offer

Facebook is a social network where people log in to keep in touch with their friends, play games, join communities, share pictures and comment on them. Buying stuff is the last thing they have in mind. Therefore, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. This means your ad must be powerful enough to distract a user from their usual activity on Facebook. One of the best ways to make your advertising powerful is to create a discount offer. Ideally, your special offer should be unique and available for a limited time/quantity so that people are compelled to take immediate action else risk losing the discount. Special offers are the secret behind the most successful Facebook ad campaigns.

Use News-feed Ads

Facebook offer several different ad formats but the best ad format by far is definitely news-feed ads. The news-feed format is any sponsored content that appears in a user’s Facebook timeline and is therefore hard not to notice. News-feed ads work equally well on all devices and thus should be your main focus.

Refine Your Audience Targeting

In order to get the best ROI from Facebook, you must show your ad to qualified users only i.e. people who may be interested in your dental offer. Facebook allows you to target user using any of their many targeting options.

Custom Audience: Use email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs to create and save audiences you’d like to show your ads to. Learn more about Custom Audiences.

Location, Age, Gender and Language: Choose the basic demographics of the audience you want to reach.

Interests: Choose specific interests that are important to your audience. These are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

Behaviors: Select people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more. These behaviors are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

More Categories: Select people based on any Facebook or partner categories you’ve requested access to. Keep in mind that some data is only available to advertisers in the U.S.

Connections: Select your audience based on whether or not they’re connected to any of your Pages, apps or events. Anyone who has a friend connected to what you’re advertising will see their friend included in your ad. This can increase the likelihood that they’ll find your ad relevant enough to click on or engage with it.

Using these targeting criteria you have to create 3-4 different audiences that would be most likely to be interested in visiting a dentist. For e.g. a demographic you could target is moms aged 25-45 who like Delta Dental Facebook page and reside in the same zip code as your dental office. Another target audience could be males/females aged 25-55 who have recently moved into your town or zip code.

Use Before and After Images

As mentioned earlier, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. Therefore you must use images that grab the user’s attention as they are their news-feed content. Before and after images are perfect for attracting attention from prospective dental patients who may be suffering from a similar dental problem. For instance a teeth whitening ad could use a before and after treatment photo of your patient’s mile demonstrating the effectiveness of the treatment. The image would captivate the attention of users who also have yellow teeth and want to whiten them. They would definitely take your offer more seriously than if there was no before after photo in the ad.

Use Facebook Re-marketing Ads

Facebook Remarketing allows you to re-target visitors who left your website without completing a conversion action (such as appointment for submission or call or brochure download). These users will be tagged with a special cookie and will be shown your ad when they log in to their Facebook account. You can use remarketing to pitch a different offer or different price point to convert visitors who did not convert with the initial offer.

Use CPC Bidding and Conversion Tracking

Facebook offers its users the option to either pay for clicks using CPC bids or pay for impressions using CPM bids. For the most part you should avoid CPM bidding until you have found an incredible offer and matching audience. You must also use Facebook conversion tracking in all your campaigns to compare results of different offers and audiences. You can then pause campaigns that results in a high cost per patient acquisition and reallocate that budget to campaigns that produce a high conversion rate.

Use Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are the missing piece in many under-performing Facebook campaigns. Each offer should have a different landing page that is optimized for conversions (calls or form submits). You should use different landing pages for computers and mobile devices because user behavior on the two devices is quite different. e.g. forms with several fields do not work very well on mobile devices and should be avoided on mobile landing pages.

Try to look at some competitor landing pages to get an idea of what is working and then add some of your own ideas to come up with different designs that can then be A/B tested with the offer to optimize the conversion rate of your Facebook ad campaigns.

How to Create a Killer Discount Offer for Your Dental Office

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Discount offers are a great way to attract new patients to your dental practice but most dentists do not give enough thought when creating a discount offer. The aim for any discount coupon is to get a higher volume of patients visiting your office. This means your special offer must be attractive enough to compel prospective patients to make an appointment. In this post we discuss some ways to make your special offers more effective.

effective dental coupon

Limited Time

An easy way to get people to take action is to limit your discount for a specific time like a certain date or number of days. This means that prospective patients who do not take immediate action risk losing the discount forever and which is exactly why this technique is so effective in getting more people to book an appointment. By not binding the offer to a specific date or time you are saying that the discount is will be available for the foreseeable future leaving no incentive for a potential patient to take immediate action.

Limited Number

Similar to limited time offers, you can limit your discount offer to the first 10/20/30 patients. This again creates a sense of urgency among prospective patients because if they hesitate somebody else could claim the offer in their place. The great thing about this offer is that you do not have to specify any time frame and so the coupon/offer can be reused over and over again.

Packages/Bundles

Packaging or bundling related treatment procedures together with a discount can be very effective in getting patients to make an appointment. The most common of these offers is “$X for Dental Exam, X-ray and Cleaning” which every other dentist is offering nowadays. Similarly, you can combine other procedures together to create more offers e.g. crown + implant or Invisalign + teeth whitening.

Minimum Spend

A percentage discount on minimum spend works on group discount situations like families and group of friends/colleagues. This offer encourages people to spend a minimum amount at your dental office and get a fixed percentage off. This would be a very attractive offer for a family with 3 kids all of whom need some work done before the school reopens or holidays begin etc.

The next time you are creating a discount coupon for your dental office, consider using one of the above techniques to make your special offer more effective.

 

3 Online Marketing Ideas to Get New Dental Patients Fast!

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Are you in a hurry to increase your patient base? Are you fed up of being lied to about dental marketing? If the answer is yes, then this post is jut for you. Online advertising is one of the fastest ways to get more dental patients. Unlike offline advertising like radio, TV or direct mail, online advertising offers a better ROI in a shorter period of time. Another great thing about advertising on the we is that most ad networks will charge per click and therefore it is often called pay per click or ppc advertising. In this post we describe how you can utilize 3 of the biggest online PPC advertising networks to get new dental patients fast.

get new patients fast

Google Adwords

Google Adword logo

Google is by far the most popular search engine and also has the biggest online advertising platform called Google Adwords. It offers both search and display advertising options. If you want new dental patients quickly, you must try search advertising and ignore display advertising – at least in the beginning. Search advertising is one of the most effective ways of generating dental appointments by showing your ad to local residents searching for dentists on Google.

Using the free Google keyword tool you can quickly check how many people searched for dentists and dental procedures during the past 12 months which will give you an idea if there is enough demand for your dental service in your local area. Try searching for a ‘dentist [insert your city/town name]’ and look at the search results. If you see ads from other dentists then it is a clear indication they are getting dental patients from Google Adwords. Therefore you should also start advertising to get your ad up there to start attracting new dental patients.

Bing Ads

bing ads logo

Similar to Google, Bing has its own advertising platform called Bing Ads. It serves ads on both Bing and Yahoo search results helping Bing Ads reach approximately 1/3 rd of all searchers in USA. While this may not sound like a lot, you can still get enough search volume for your dental services specially if your office is located in a densely populated area. You can easily check the estimated monthly search volume (number of searches made in a give period) for the dental procedures and treatments you offer using the bing ads keyword research tool. If you find there is enough search volume then go ahead and launch a search advertising campaign in Bing Ads to show your ad to prospective dental patients.

Facebook Ads

facebook ads logo

Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the world and over 70% of online adults use facebook. This offers a huge opportunity to get your message across to users who might be interested in dental work. In Facebook ads you do not have keywords to tell you who is looking for dentist but instead you have to use likes, interests and demographic data to target audiences that may be most interested in getting a dental procedure done. In addition you have to create an offer to grab attention of the users and compel them to take action since most users on Facebook are there to have fun and don’t want ads distracting them. For e.g. you could target single moms who have liked the facebook page for Dental Dental (or another insurance your dental office accepts) with an offer of discounted teeth whitening. By testing different offers with different audiences you can quickly find a few winning combinations before scaling them up to generate new patient appointments consistently.

If you are interested online PPC advertising with any or all of the above platforms and need expert advice and assistance, don’t forget to request a free consultation!