Dental clinic marketing: Promote your practice

As the operator of a dental practice, you’re aware of how much time and effort go toward marketing your practice and reaching out to current patients to ensure return visits. It’s an essential part of running a business, as it provides a steady stream of patients to serve.

With that said, wouldn’t it be nice if the key processes associated with dental practice marketing were quicker, easier and more automated? With such a system in place, you could spend more time on the daily tasks associated with running your dental practice and providing exceptional patient care.

This is why it helps to think about dental marketing in modern, technology-driven terms. You can build a patient base, retain patients over time and stoke their loyalty, all without committing a disproportionate amount of time and effort to the necessary tasks.

Why is dental clinic marketing so important?

Without a solid combination of direct outreach and advertising, your practice may struggle to reach a significant audience of potential patients. No matter how skilled a team of dentists you have, and regardless of how positive the patient experience is, if people don’t know about your practice, they won’t come in for a first dental appointment, or return for more.

Investing in a strategic, targeted and digital approach to dental clinic marketing can help you achieve some of your macro-scale goals. You can:

• Increase the number and frequency of return appointments: Solid and responsive patient communication between visits is a helpful way to remind patients when it’s time for another appointment. Once you have a patient’s information stored in a digital platform, there’s no need to lose touch with them.
• Improve patient relationships: Even if it’s not time to immediately encourage a patient to come in for another appointment, strong marketing communications can still drive their loyalty and engagement. Birthday messages and other personalised outreach methods can build the connection between practice and dental patients.
• Bring in new patients to boost revenue: When your practice is visible and reachable through as many channels as possible, you can build a patient base for future communication. You must make patient discovery as easy as possible, which typically means being searchable in dental directories and listing services.

Reaching out to a large group of patients to keep them engaged is a time-consuming task. Or, rather, it can be when your practice is still constrained by too many manual processes. Achieving this important work with automated systems is a way to put time back in your day while still making a great impression.

Effective approaches for dental clinic marketing

The basic concept behind modern, digitally enabled dental clinic marketing is to automate wherever possible. Beyond this core idea, there are a few additional strategies that can help you break through, reaching your patients and making a positive impression.

Approaches to consider are:

• Have materials ready for many different interactions: When a patient joins your practice for the first time, do they receive a welcome packet? When you introduce a new dental service, do patients receive an email or text message about it? After a patient’s visit, do they receive a feedback form that encourages them to keep in touch? Producing readymade marketing materials for these situations and more can help you stay in touch with all your patients at key moments.
• Use multiple communication channels: Do your patients want to hear from you via physical mail? Emails with well-designed templates? Customised SMS text messages? This is a trick question — you should have all these methods available to suit patient preference, as well as the type of information in a particular message. A glossy welcome packet may look great on paper, while a quick SMS could be perfect for an appointment scheduling request.
• Personalise for each patient: When you can send messages based on individual dental history, or even something simple such as a patient’s birthday, you’re better equipped to connect directly with that person. Integrating your marketing system with your patient database is a way to make sure you’re not just sending generic communications, but connecting with individuals.
• Embrace effective graphic design: When your emails and physical mailers to patients look appealing, and have strong branding, you’re more likely to make a positive impression. This commitment to visual flair doesn’t have to mean expending excess time, either. When you work with template-based marketing materials, great design is easy to achieve.
• Automate and simplify wherever possible: When you can automate a whole category of marketing and outreach messages, you’re putting time back into your day. Creating an automated system of reminders for recall appointments is a way to send perfectly timed communications to your patients and keep them informed, with no extra time spent.

All of these marketing priorities are within your reach when you have the right dental practice management technology platform.

How technology helps with dental practice marketing

What’s the connection between dental practice management and marketing communications? When you use the Dental4Web or Dental4Windows platforms from Centaur Software, the two are wrapped up in the same easy deployment.

The D4W Marketing module is designed to give your dental practice an arsenal of effective patient outreach and marketing methods, alongside patient discovery capabilities, business intelligence and analytics tools, patient education features and a patient database to effectively store records and information. These come alongside more direct dental features such as imaging.

Both in the chair and in the back office, these solutions deliver a level of time- and effort-saving automation that can keep your practice efficient and effective. You need a way to connect directly with your patients, and the D4W Marketing suite is a digitally enabled answer to that need.

Book a free consultation to learn what this marketing functionality could mean for your practice.