Learn to Invest in Your Dental Practice

Your dental practice deserves to succeed. But success takes time, money and effort. As you learn to value yourself and your practice, you’ll see the importance of investing in your future growth. In this article, we discuss how dental marketing can help with this process. Keep in mind that marketing is only one aspect of success. To truly thrive as an independent dentist, you’ll need a comprehensive growth strategy. But with that being said, let’s dive into your marketing introduction.

Digital Acquisition and Conversion

When it comes to growing your dental practice, marketing services are a necessity. The longer you wait to implement a digital marketing strategy, the further you fall behind your competitors. 

Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing would include things like direct mailers, newspaper ads, radio ads, billboards and commercials. In the age of the Internet, many of these efforts have become outdated and ineffective. It’s also difficult to track the success of these campaigns. This leaves dental practices wondering and hoping their marketing efforts will pay off. 

Digital marketing includes things like Google Ads, email marketing, website development and social media. These online efforts are easy to track so you can see a direct Return on your Investment (ROI). This means your spending becomes data-driven to produce greater success, and faster results. 

New Patient Growth

If you want to acquire new patients on a consistent basis, you’ll need to invest in marketing. There’s no way around it. As you implement a comprehensive marketing strategy, you’ll start to see more new appointments each month. Your dental practice should plan on investing anywhere from 5%-10% of your profits back into marketing.

For example, a dental practice in our network decided to commit to a marketing strategy for a full year. Within that year, here are just a few of the results:

• By creating a more modern website with proper analytics installed, they saw a 453% increase in website traffic.
• They generated 129 Google Reviews to establish credibility and improve their search ranking results. 
• They converted 240 new patients, with an average lifetime value of $2,100. 
• And the best part, they had a 740% positive return on their investment. 

This type of growth is possible for any practice. As long as you are willing to invest in yourself and trust the marketing process. 

Office Staff Handoff

It doesn’t matter how great your online marketing is… if your front office staff aren’t trained to convert these new patient leads. 

Too often dental practices invest in marketing, but don’t give their staff any training to handle the incoming growth. Here are a few examples of problems we’ve seen over the years:

• Unaware of Promotions: Many marketing campaigns require promotions to incentivize new patients to switch dentists. But if you run these promos, and your front office isn’t aware of them, they often create confusion when these patients call in to the office. This creates a bad experience and results in lost opportunities.
•  Unpleasant or Unhelpful: If your ads claim to have a friendly office… it better feel like it when they call in. Offices that don’t have call tracking set up have no way to monitor quality control. This means your front office staff could be saying things that drive away these potential new patients. 
• Email Follow-ups: When people don’t want to call in, they fill out an online form on the website. This form gathers their data and sends it to the dental practice email. But if the front office staff don’t respond to those emails quickly, they will likely find another dentist. These are golden opportunities wasted. Training your staff to treat these online requests with the highest priorities will ensure higher conversion rates. 

Obviously there are many more situations and examples we could discuss. And in most cases, front office staff do a fantastic job. But taking that extra step to ensure proper marketing training will go a long way to ensure you are maximizing your marketing spend. 

Patient Lifetime Value

Your marketing efforts don’t stop after a patient has completed treatment. Did you know that it’s 7x more expensive to acquire a new patient than it is to retain an existing patient? This means it’s critical to provide a great patient experience when they visit your office. 

Even after their appointment concludes, send them a Thank You email or card in the mail. These small touchpoints help to develop loyal patients for life. As you continually provide great experiences, your Patient Lifetime Value will significantly increase. This will stabilize your bottom line as you continue to add more patients to your schedule. 

Not only will you retain your patients, your patients will become advocates for your practice. Expect to see more and more patient referrals as time goes on. 

About SynergizeDental

Our team at SynergizeDental is dedicated to helping independent dental practices thrive in a competitive environment. We know independent dentists can unlock their growth potential as they invest in themselves. They deserve the peace of mind that comes from trusted business support, proven practice management systems, and a team of experts dedicated to their success. 

If you have any questions, please reach out to our team to schedule a free consultation. We also provide free Dental Intel Growth Reports to show exactly where you can save thousands of dollars instantly.