How to Attract New Clients to Your Family Dental Practice (And How to Keep Them!)
While word-of-mouth marketing can help bring new clients into your family dental practice, it’s not always enough.
If you find yourself running out of clients or having a little too much downtime during the week, you need to act fast. It may just be time to start adding a few new tools and techniques to your marketing arsenal.
Below, we’ll tell you exactly how to attract new clients to your family dental practice and how to keep them coming back time after time.
1. Offer Discounts and Referral Bonuses
One of the best ways to attract new clients and to retain your existing ones is through offering more promotions.
Clients love to receive special promotional offers and discounts. Offering more of these can be the fast track towards developing someone into a loyal patient. Consider offering a special dental cleaning deal for a holiday or finding other ways to provide value to your patients.
A referral program is also a great tool. While simple word-of-mouth marketing can be great for your practice, offering a small financial incentive, such as a discount to a current patient who refers new clients, can work well for you.
2. Establish Your Family Dental Practice Website
One of the best ways to market a dental practice is to make use of the internet. If you don’t have a professional looking website, you’re probably missing out on a lot of potential business.
You need to have a website that clients can look at to get a feel for your services, professionalism, and your friendly demeanor. You can quickly find out everything you need in a clear and concise way.
Your site should also load fast, look great, be branded well, and clearly describe what you can offer patients. It should also allow patients to easily find your contact info or fill in a form to set up an appointment.
3. Don’t Forget Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While creating your website is part of the battle, you shouldn’t stop there. You also need to ensure search engines (and patients) are easily finding it.
Learning a few search engine optimization (SEO) techniques is crucial for getting visitors to your website. This allows search engines, such as Google, to rank your site high. SEO techniques include things, such as adding content to your blog, optimizing the keywords on your site, and making sure your site loads quickly.
Local SEO techniques can help ensure that people who are specifically in your location can find you.
4. Be More Social
While launching your dental website is a great first step, there are many more ways to utilize the web. Using social media can be a great way to connect with your existing patients but can also be a great help in attracting brand new clients as well.
It’s important to be on at least a few of the main social media websites. However, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to start.
However, just be sure that you aren’t just constantly promoting and spamming your patients. You should also work to build a connection as well. For example, you may choose to give them a look into the people on your dental staff, link them to a helpful blog post, or find another way to provide value and build a connection with them.
5. Master the Follow-Up
You also need to have a solid follow-up plan for each patient after an appointment. A small number of follow-up actions can go a long way in boosting your business and ensuring that your patients keep coming back.
If you have their email info, that can be a great way to get in touch without being too invasive or annoying. Send them an occasional promotion after an appointment or think them for coming in.
When it comes time for the next recommended appointment date, checking up with a phone call can be an effective way to follow up. However, make sure to do it right and don’t be too aggressive. One or two phone calls max should do the trick.
6. Collect Feedback From Patients
In addition to encouraging patients to come back for another appointment, the follow up is also a great time to get feedback from patients.
Consider creating a patient survey. Then, send your recent patients a request asking that they rate your services and offer any feedback that they wish to. This is a great way to let your patients know that you truly value their thoughts and opinions.
In addition to direct feedback to your office, you should also encourage your patients to leave reviews and give you feedback online using sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook.
Positive reviews and testimonials online can be a great way to sway potential patients who are researching your business and help them decide to set up an appointment.
7. Build Trust (and Be Trustworthy)
The final way to effectively get new patients and ensure that your patients remain loyal is to build trust with them.
This may include listening to their needs and concerns and communicating with them well during an appointment. You should always do your best to give a great first impression to new clients and go out of your way to make sure they’re comfortable at all times. Proper patient education is a part of this as well.
You also should make sure that you are trustworthy and clear in everything you do. While some dentists try to push unnecessary procedures onto patients, many patients see through this kind of behavior and go running the other way as a result.
Don’t just make sure that your patients trust you, but ensure that their trust is well-founded as well.
Final Thoughts
If you’re trying to get new patients to your family dental practice, it doesn’t have to be as hard as it may seem. By staying focused on the above marketing techniques and always putting your patients first, you’ll be sure to create a thriving practice and ensure that you never run out of new business.
Looking for more tips to market your family dental practice? Check out our business advice blog now for more info.
