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Dental Practice Marketing: DIY vs Professional Help

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As a dentist you need new patients to grow your practice and to get new patients you have to promote your dental services to the local residents. You can manage your marketing campaigns in-house or hire a dental marketing company. You can also manage only some aspects of the campaign yourself and outsource other aspects to freelance designers and marketing consultants. All 3 approaches have their benefits and drawbacks so lets discuss each of the 3 in detail.

DIY dental marketing

Do-It-Yourself

This is the most straight forward method and also the cheapest if you know what you are doing. Most dentists do not have any formal marketing education so there is an issue of lack of expertise as well. If you want to market your dental office yourself, the first thing you should do is take some courses on dental marketing and practice management. This will help you avoid rookie advertising and sales mistakes and so you can make better use of your marketing budget to grow your dental practice.

The main advantage of doing your own marketing is that you are in control of all aspects of your campaign. Nobody knows your patients and treatment procedures better than yourself and therefore you have a distinct advantage over marketing companies and consultants. However, most DIY marketing are still not very successful because dentists are too busy with their patients to give due time and attention to their marketing campaigns. Another major reason for failure is the lack of marketing education and expertise among dentists. Consequently they fail to track, analyze and optimize the ROI of their advertising and promotional campaigns like a professional agency would.

Hiring a Dental Marketing Company

Since most dentists do not have the time or expertise to handle their own marketing, they usually turn to dental marketing firms for help. There many dental marketing companies out there offering a range of different service including, online, SEO, direct mail, billboard and full service marketing. It is better to hire a marketing company that specializes in a particular type of marketing like dental SEO or dental post card as they will be able to offer better rates and usually a better marketing ROI than a do-it-all agency.

The benefit of having a marketing company promote your dental office, is that you save time and have experts handling your marketing. You just have to monitor their ROI, and if the company doesn’t provide satisfactory ROI you just fire them and find a better one. Make sure you do not sign a long term contract with any agency until they have proven mettle by providing consistently good results over several months.

Using Freelance Consultants

You can look at this option as a combination of the 2 options above. As a dentist running your own practice you meet and talk to patients every day. You know their issues, fears and desires better than any marketing person. Therefore, you are in the best position to create and manage an effective marketing campaign. However, you don’t have the time nor the technical expertise to execute your marketing strategy. This is where freelance designers, developers, copywriters, videographers and SEOs come in. Let’s say you have researched and shortlisted 10 keywords you want to rank for. You find an SEO to do it for you and monitor their progress. Or you have surveyed your patients and come up with a special discount on dental implants. You hire a freelance designer and copywriter to design a postcard for this offer. Then you simple get them printed in the required quantity and use Fedex to deliver these postcards in your target zip codes.

In short, you create your in-house marketing department comprised of contract based workers who provide on demand services if and when you need them. You can even hire a marketing consultant to discuss various marketing strategies and create a marketing plan for you dental office. You can then review it every few months to make sure you are executing the plan correctly and improve it if necessary.

Depending on your budget, marketing expertise and time availability, you can select one of the above approaches to promote your dental office. In case you decide to hire a dental marketing company, please do not hesitate to contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation.

29 Dental Office Amenities to Attract More Patients

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Most people are not fond of dental offices and only visit a dentist because of necessity. Dental office amenities are an easy way to attract more patients to your practice by distinguishing it from other dentists in your neighbourhood. They also improve patient comfort and satisfaction encouraging more repeat visits and higher patient retention. In that sense, dental amenities are an important aspect of good dental practice management. Given below is a list of amenities you can add to your dental office.

Snacks

Snacks help patients refuel after a long commute or hectic work day while they wait for they wait for their appointment. Many patients skip breakfast/lunch to make the visit, specially on weekdays and a free snack would be a very welcome addition for them.

  • Cookies
  • Chewing Gum
  • Chew Mints
Dental Office Snack Bar
Snack Bar at Fieldman Smiles Othodontics

Drinks

Drinks help patients replenish and relax on a hot afternoon while they wait for they wait for their appointment. Water is a must have but you can change the selection of drinks based on the season.

  • Bottled water
  • Coffee Bar
  • Juice Bar

Comfort

Paraffin Wax TreatmentPatient comfort is the top most priority of any dental office and the following amenities will help your dental patients relax before, during and after the treatment.

  • Aromatherapy
  • Paraffin Wax Treatment
  • Hot Towel
  • Lip Balm
  • Soft Blanket
  • Eye Pilows
  • Neck Pilows
  • Sun Glasses
  • Warm, Inviting Waiting Room

Reading Material

Reading is one of the best ways to use your spare time productively. Reading material would be a welcome addition in the waiting room for patients who are not very technology savvy and prefer books over TV.

  • Magazines
  • Catalogues
  • Newspapers

Entertainment

Treatment Room TVEntertainment is one of the best ways for patients to kill time and anxiety in the waiting room. There are many options to choose form and some of the most popular ones are given below

  • Personal Music Stations
  • Personal DVD Players
  • Internet WiFi
  • Radio
  • TV
  • Netflix
  • Headphones

Kids

Kids can be difficult to pacify but an interactive video game can keep the naughtiest of little ones quiet – both in the treatment chair and in the waiting room.

  • Video Game Consoles
  • Treasure Chest
  • Toys

Depending on your location and patient demographic you can pick and choose the facilities you want to offer to your dental patients. If we missed anything, please comment below to add to the list above.

Convenience

Facilitate your dental patients as much as possible by removing any complaints they could have about visiting your dental office.

  • Ample adjacent parking
  • Attractive restrooms

Dental Office Branding: Dentist Name vs. Practice Name

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Before launching your dental office, you need to decide what to call it. Whether you are a start-up practice or buying an established office, you have to brand your dental office with a suitable name. Unfortunately they don’t teach you that in dental school which is why we are here to help.

One of the main sticking points dentists face when naming their office is to decide whether to use their own/family name or to come up with a unique practice name. There are pros and cons to both approaches and in this post we look at some of the points you should consider in this regard.

Dental Branding and Naming

Do you have family history in the same town?

Perhaps one of your parents or grandparents practised dentistry in the town where you are setting up your office. Maybe your family ran a successful local business in the same town. Basically if you have an established and respected family name in the community, you can leverage that to benefit your dental office. If you find yourself in such a fortunate situation it makes complete sense to use your name as the practice name. It will give you a distinct advantage other dentists in the area. A creative, non-family name may sound and appear more attractive but if nobody in your town can relate to it then all that creativity is of no use.

Do you plan to take on associates?

Another point to ponder is how you plan to run the office not just in the present but in the future. Do you have any plans for adding associates? How many will there be? If you have such plans, then it is better to avoid using your name for your dental practice. This will avoid unnecessary confusion in the future and will make transition a breeze when you eventually take on associates to share the workload.

Do you belong to a minority group?

This one may sound controversial but as humans we tend to trust one of our own more than others – specially with personal things like oral health and hygiene. If you are an Asian dentist practicing in a predominantly Asian community, it may be beneficial to use your real name to brand your dental practice. This will help Asians in your town identify with your ethnic background and prefer your office over non-Asian dentists. However, please note that this can also work against you as well because dental patients from other ethnic backgrounds may be turned off by your Asian name. Therefore, dentists from minority groups need to account for the current and future demographic make-up of their town before using their actual name to represent their dental office.

Do you plan to sell your dental office in the future?

Another important consideration for using your actual name is the marketability of your practice to potential buyers. Off course this only applies if you plan to sell your dental office in the future like many dentists do. If your exist strategy in the next 5 years involves selling your dental office then you may want to avoid using your personal name to brand your office. This will make all your branding including, logos, bill boards, marketing materials, brochures, website, patient reviews, stationary, staff uniforms etc. transferable to the new owner making your dental practice a turnkey solution for potential buyers. This is a very attractive proposition for any dentist wanting to buy an established practice in your town.

If you are facing trouble coming up with a catchy name for your dental office, please try our practice name generator tool.

5 Proven Ways to Improve Dental PPC Campaign ROI

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PPC advertising is a great way to generate new dental patients online. However, if done wrong, your ppc campaign can become a nightmare and burn through your marketing budget quickly. Therefore, it is important to achieve a good ROI for your PPC campaign before scaling it further. In this post we have identified 5 proven tactics to improve the ROI of your PPC advertising campaigns.

Dental PPC ROI

Add Negative Keywords

Negative keywords help prevent clicks from irrelevant and low quality searches. If your dental office is open from Monday – Friday, you don’t want your ad to appear for searches like “dentists open on Saturday” or “dentists open on Sunday”. In this case adding negative keywords like saturday, sunday and weekend will prevent your ad from showing up on such irrelevant searches.

A/B Split Test Ads to Improve CTR

CTR (click-through rate) is the most important component of quality score. A higher CTR means a higher quality score. Ads with a high quality score will have a lower cost per click and a better ad position than other ads bidding on the same keywords. Therefore, improving CTR will directly reduce the cost of your PPC campaign and thus improve its ROI. The easiest way to improve CTR is to create multiple (2 to 4) ads in the same adgroup and rotate them evenly. Then every week revise ads with the lowest CTR with new verbiage and offers until you can beat the highest CTR ad (called the control).  When that happens, you revise the previous comtrol until you can beat the new control. This procedure of testing one ad against the other is called split-testing. Using split tests, you can  improve the average CTR of your campaign over time.

Use conversion optimizer or CPA bidding

In adwords, if you get more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer. Doing so will help you optimize the campaign for a target or max CPA (cost per acquisition of a new patient lead). For e.g. if you need 50 leads at $70 each to meet your ROI target and your campaign has an average CPA of $80 with more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer with a target CPA of $70. Google Adwords will then automatically adjust your CPC bids on each keyword taking into account the expected conversion rate for a click from each keyword. Thus achieving a maximum number of conversions at your target CPA of $70.

A/B Split Test Landing Pages to Improve Conversion Rate

Landing pages are a vital component of any successful PPC campaign. Once a searcher clicks your ad, all the work you did in optimizing the campaign is over and the conversion now depends on your landing page. A lot of dentists do not use dedicated landing pages for PPC advertising which can kill their campaign ROI and they end up shutting down the campaign. One of the quickest ways to improve the ROI of your PPC campaign is to improve your landing page conversion rate. This can be done through A/B testing of landing pages similar to ad split tests described above. However, with landing page split tests our goal is to improve conversion rate of clicks into leads (form submissions or calls).

Improve Call Handling Performance

The purpose of any PPC campaign is to generate leads in the form of calls and appointment request form submissions. However, you need to convert these leads into confirmed appointments and office visits to earn a profit from the PPC campaign. This is where call handling skills of your front desk come in. Often ignored by most dentists your staff’s call handling performance can make or break your PPC campaign ROI. Therefore you need to ensure that your receptionist is giving due attention each inquiry generated by the PPC campaign. The more leads they can close, the higher will be the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

In order to improve call answering performance, you need to record all inbound and outbound calls so that you or a sales expert can listen to these recordings and identify any shortcomings. These issues can then be addressed with some training sessions so that the a better closing rate can be achieved in the future.

As you can see from the discussion above, you must optimize a PPC marketing campaign through all stages of dental patient sales cycle – from the ad impressions to clicks, from clicks to leads (calls or form submission) and from leads to confirmed appointments. This will give you a high ROI after which you can increase your PPC campaign budget to generate even more dental patients for your dental office.

The Truth About Social Media Marketing for Dentists

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Dental Patients from Social NetworksSocial media marketing is a the most challenging way to get dental patients online. Many dentists who jump on the social media bandwagon, trying to find new patients learn this fact the hard way. They invest in a great page/profile, post a few updates, run some ads and then wonder why nobody is listening to what they have to sell. Well let me break it down for you –  nobody logs on to twitter, facebook, youtube or any other social network site to buy stuff. Social media is like this big party where everybody is invited to have fun, gossip around, stalk others and maybe relax after a busy workday. I mean you could setup shop on a table in the corner of the ballroom but dont be surprised if everybody ignores you. Social media marketing is all about joining in the fun, making new friends, sharing stories, discussing problems and then maybe giving out a business card to people who need help. However, before you get the opportunity to give away your business card to interested individuals, you need to start a conversation. 

There are many ways of getting people talking to you but some are more effective than others. You just have to ensure that you offer something of value that will distract people enough to take you seriously. Below I discuss 5 ways how your dental office can draw people’s attention on the various social media networks.

Social Proof

Facebook Marketing for DentistsWhether it’s facebook, twitter or youtube, the first thing people notice when visiting any page or profile is the number of likes, followers, subscribers  and comments activity you have. This is second nature to all social media users because we quickly want to assess the social value of the page or profile. You need to get a high number of likes, followers, subscribers and comment activity to grab people’s attention. The greater the followers count and activity level of your page, the easier it will be to attract more patients.
This is why it can be incredibly difficult to get a new page or profile going. Why would anyone like a page that nobody has liked before or commented on? Therefore, you should invite all your friends, family, relatives and patients to like or follow your dental office page when it is first launched. You can even offer a small discount or free whitening in return. You can also advertise your page to generate likes. But the point is that you need social proof to get new dental patients from social media.

Create Useful Engaging Content

Now that you have a decent number of likes and followers, you need to leverage that following to promote your dental office in their friends and social network. This is where you need to produce content that will grab the attention of your fans and followers and compel them to engage with your page and profile. Let’s be honest, nobody on social media will participate in anything that is boring so you have to make extra effort to make your content fun, original and interesting specially since dentistry is such a dry subject. But you can still post some jokes, memes, quizzes, surveys, studies, animations, videos, success stories and social experiments about dental related topics.

When your fans and followers like the content you produce, they will share it with their friends and social circle and thus take your office name further. The content will want people to visit your page and for more cool stuff you have to share.

Discount Offers

Discount offers specially limited lime offers work very well in a social media setting. The main reason for it is limited time – people believe they stand to lose something if they don’t act and this leads then to claim the offer. For e.g. If somebody who has not visited the dentist for over 6 months, sees an offer for a $49 exam + xray, they would be happy to give it a shot.

However, you do not want to overdo this stuff because then people will be turned off by the number of offers you are sending out every month. Your promotions to content ratio should be very low around 1 promotional post for every 20 educational/informational/fun posts.

Reviews and Testimonials

This is again connected to social proof because most people do not want to risk going to a new dental office. Reviews and testimonials help people convince people that your dental office is the real deal and that you have several satisfied patients who recommend your services. This conviction then helps patients make the decision to contact you for professional help or claim one of your discount offers. Without some positive reviews you will have a hard time convincing people on social media to visit your dental office.

Before and After Photos

These photos act as proof that your services work and are powerful in grabbing attention of prospective patients. They help prospective patients see the transformation in black and white. Social media loves these kind of photos since a many the users suffer from the same or similar dental problems. and these before and after photos offer people something they can relate to. Seeing someone else overcome the same dental problem that you are suffering from is a very effective in attracting new patients.

5 Recall Letter Templates for Inactive Dental Patients

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Recalling in active dental patients is one of the most effective ways to increase your patient lifetime value and monthly production. Patient recall for follow-up attention is more than just good marketing. It is an essential aspect of good dental care. In fact, your practice could be in serious trouble with a potential malpractice issue if it does not bring certain patients back. Below you will find 5 patient recall letters you can send via email or better yet snail mail.

Dental Patient Recall

One

<<LETTERDATE>>

<<PATIENTNAME>>

<<ADDRESS>>

Dear <<GREETNAME>>,

We would like to remind you that your regular dental check up is now due.

If you would like to contact the surgery, we will be happy to arrange an appointment time to suit you.

Yours sincerely,

<<DENTIST>>

[hr]

Two

<<LETTERDATE>>

<<PATIENTNAME>>

<<ADDRESS>>

Dear <<GREETNAME>>,

Our records show that you are due for your next dental check-up.

Please phone our receptionist to make an appointment.

Yours sincerely

<<DENTIST>>

[hr]

Three

<<LETTERDATE>>

<<PATIENTNAME>>

<<ADDRESS>>

Dear  <<GREETNAME>>

Our records show that a considerable time has elapsed since your last examination.

Please ring <<PHONE NO>> should you care to arrange for a further examination, our receptionist will be pleased to schedule an appointment for you.

Yours sincerely

<<DENTIST>>

[hr]

Four

<<LETTERDATE>>

<<PATIENTNAME>>

<<ADDRESS>>

Dear <<GREETNAME>>,

Our records show your last examination was on the <<LASTEXAM>> and you are now due for your regular check-up.

Please contact our receptionist, Leslie, to make an appointment.

Kind regards,

<<DENTIST>>

[hr]

Five

<<LETTERDATE>>

<<PATIENTNAME>>

<<ADDRESS>>

Dear  <<GREETNAME>>

Since your last examination <<MONTHS>> months have elapsed.

Regular dental care is important.

Should you care to arrange for a further examination please ring <<PHONE NO>> and our receptionist will be pleased to schedule an appointment for you.

Yours sincerely

<<DENTIST>>