Learn The Best Ways To Get More Dental Patients
An effective and aggressive marketing campaign is the basic element in the success of a company’s product or service. During last few decades, technology has made a big impact on every aspect of life, and marketing is surely not an exception.
Internet is now considered as a prime factor for every promotional scheme, and the reasons are obviously its broader horizon and ability of delivery prompt results.
How to get new dental patients has always remained a challenging task for the dentists, especially in this competitive era. However, internet has given them an easy way out to approach and attract more patients. The modern technology has enabled them to communicate directly with their customers, and methods like search engine optimization (SEO), blog marketing and social media marketing have proved very handy in this regard.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization: The users of search engines are very specific about their findings. They just type their required facility with name of the place, where they want it.
For instance, if a patient is looking for a good dentist in Austin, he just type ‘dentist Austin’ and press enter. Here, the phrase ‘dentist Austin’ is the keyword and people, who want to market their products through internet, must realize the importance of right keywords.
Pay-per-click – In this scenario, keywords like dentist Austin, Austin dentist, Austin general dentist are all very useful. Further, to attract more patients, one can use the names of surrounding towns as well. Specialized jobs like dental fillings and laser teeth whitening with the name of the city can also be used as keywords. Smart marketers have already moved a step ahead, and now they are making successful use of programs like Google AdWords.
Blog Marketing: Blogging is another useful approach that offers instant feedback and amazing results. As compare to social networking websites, the posts at blogs have a longer life and importantly, these posts can be easily shared with other people on social networks. They not only give a perfect place to start the idea, but also to make a great number of followers.
Social Media Marketing: These days, approximately everybody is aware of both Twitter and Facebook, and most of them also have their accounts there.
These top social networking sites are the best medium to respond the query of how to get new dental patients.
It always works well to mingle up with new people, especially if someone is in service industry. Creating a personal page at these sites and promoting the offered service through latest status updates, pictures and guided maps surely helps in attracting new dental patients.
Getting Testimonials To Get More Dental Patients
Determine when is the right time to ask? This might be straight after a procedure that a patient has had or perhaps on a return visit. You need to test and find out when the best time to ask is and measure how many you get.
Let’s say it is when a patient thanks you for the service you have provided for this example.
Determine how to respond when they thank-you. Something like “I’m really pleased you are happy and wondered whether you could do me a favor?” – then wait for a response.
“Could you just take a couple of minutes to write down what it is that you are pleased about your experience in this practice – I would love to hear your comments and pass them onto other patients”.
Give them a testimonial form – pre-structured – so that they can simply put their appreciation comments down just at the point when they are most happy with your service.
This might not be the right ‘when’ and ‘where’ moment for you but you need to work that out for yourself. It definitely isn’t when you have a drill in your patient’s mouth or when they have just walked through the door. You have to make sure you have built a good relationship with the patients and delivered a high quality service.
Using The Right Kind Of Sweetener
Now I would be foolish to suggest to any dentists to offer sweeties or chocolates to their patients – it would go against all that you stand for.
What I’m talking about are incentives for people to give you testimonials.
If for example you sent a message to all your recent patients and requested a testimonial, although many would probably be happy to give you one they would just never get round to doing it. They probably even had the intention to but life just got in the way – it happens to us all in this age of incredibly busy lives.
The way around this is to give them incentives. Give them an extra boost to help them get that testimonial back to you. It might be a voucher to spend at your practice, a holiday or some cash. All of these should be tested and tried out for their effectiveness.
See how incentives can boost your testimonial gathering process.
Social proof is something that will boost your practice and get you new patients. But like everything there is an effective way of getting them. Test some things out and see how your patients respond. I bet you will be surprised.
And if you want all the benefits of dental marketing services without having to do any of the work yourself, whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Want someone else to do the work so you can focus on what is important for you, your dental work?