Content
How to Get More Dental Patients: 8 Ways
April 9, 2024
10 mins
All competitive healthcare businesses launch their marketing journey by developing a sufficient strategy and a marketing plan. However, that’s just not enough to win more clients for your dentistry practice.
While the question of how to get more patients in a dental office remains open, today we offer an invaluable advice and hands-on tips to ease up your marketing endeavors.
Given that the healthcare industry is getting more and more digitalized, the absolute winners are the market players who leverage digital marketing opportunities. The numbers from our most recent HealthCare Digital Marketing Benchmarks Report 2024 are more than telling:
🏥 Over 7% of Google's daily searches are healthcare-related, which is more than 70,000 searches per minute, or some 1 b. searches a day.
🏥 77% of users are browsing the web before scheduling appointments with healthcare providers.
Within our new series of healthcare marketing posts, we are diving deeper into the unknown nuances of promoting your dentistry services.
In today’s blog feature, Promodo healthcare marketers are sharing top strategic approaches that will help your dental practice win and retain more patients.
While you may have already built a decent amount of loyal patient base, that’s still not enough given a fierce rivalry across the healthcare niche and market fluctuations along the way. That’s why attracting new patients is so important for developing and scaling up your dental practice.
Today, we are featuring proven techniques to help dental clinics like yours prosper in 2024 and beyond.
To win more loyal patients with a competitive lifetime value (LTV), pursue a patient-centered approach by considering their individual needs and dental care preferences.
Here you should draw a detailed patient portrait to understand the dental concerns shared by your target audience. That will help you to set a strategic focus for your dental services and concentrate on the major patient needs.
With growing patient loyalty and trust in your dental expertise, ask them for feedback and referrals. Take your existing patient base as the best incentive to engage new patients.
Approach this part of your marketing legwork strategically by soliciting referrals from your satisfied patients. Deploy a customized email marketing strategy to get patient feedback and praise them for their time and effort.
Finally, critical patient reviews will help you improve your service and spot major gaps.
For starters, craft a reputable user-friendly website that will feature your dentistry as a market brand name. This is important not only for getting new patients but also for retaining the existing ones.
A patient-friendly, highly personalized dental website will serve you as a game-changer on the competitive battlefield. While most of your new patients will be seeking your dental practice online, make sure your website is also mobile-friendly.
Rather than burdening it with abundant graphics, add eye-catching visuals that will prove:
🏥 The quality of your dental service
🏥 The comfort of your office
🏥 The availability of professional staff.
Optimize your pages with extra dental services lacked by your closest competitors. Take these opportunities as your Unique Selling Proposition (USP):
🦷 After-hours emergency dental services
🦷 Special dental treatment for kids
🦷 High-end dentistry innovations
🦷 Customized patient solutions
🦷 Dentures
🦷 Implants.
Your ultimate goal here is to transform a site visitor into your patient. With that, fill the About Us page with the information about your practice and back it up with practice area pages that best describe your services. Craft a mobile-friendly Contact page where patients can schedule an appointment.
Primarily, you should give your potential patients a sound reason for choosing your practice and trying your services. Provide your patients with an inherent value by establishing yourself as a proven dentistry expert with an in-depth understanding of individual dental problems shared by your patients.
In both bricks-and-clicks modes, position your practice as a lead provider of dentistry services. Develop the image of a reputable dental practice within your locale and beyond.
More often than not, your dental practice may not match this number. In most cases coping with urgent calls is part of your business, so it is crucial to stay in touch 24/7 with the patients who might need you here and now. Arrange a separate line for emergency calls on your dentistry website, so patients in need may reach you in seconds.
Approach emergencies as a proper way of how to get new dental patients.
To stay above the crowd and pass through the road bumps of hectic competition, leverage the magic of healthcare content. This is the surest way to provide added value to your patients and prove your professional expertise.
It comes as no surprise, though, that as many as 72% of healthcare marketers bet on content as the most effective SEO approach.
Quality content on your dentistry website is also crucial for Google algorithms, given the E-E-A-T requirements applied on December 15, 2022. The search engine wants your content to:
🏥 Sound expert and enhance patient satisfaction
🏥 Lay on your hands-on dental experience to prove your credibility
🏥 Stay authoritative by proving your sources
🏥 Hold trust by providing reliable content.
It is strategically vital to communicate your first-hand dentistry expertise continuously. To engage more patients, make sure you message complex dentistry issues in layman’s terms. That way, you will make your dental services clear and comprehensive.
Adding a dental blog to your site is the top priority to make your professional services more visible online.
Playing content marketing right is about filling your website pages with:
📈 Live real-time messengers
📈 Call-to-Action buttons
📈 Customized pop-ups
📈 Loyalty offers.
Beyond quality content creation, there’s much more to on-page SEO:
📈 Keyword optimization
📈 Title tags and meta descriptions
📈 Internal linking structure.
Also, be sure to diversify your dental content strategy beyond the blog posts on your site:
🏥 Arrange niche-related webinars
🏥 Post guest articles
🏥 Launch podcasts.
These are all proven ways of attracting a wider following, pursuing more patient-oriented communication, and expanding a patient base. Eventually, a well-structured content approach will help you convert online followers into paying patients.
Either in case of emergencies or in need of regular check-outs, most patients are seeking dentists nearby. This is a call for enhancing your local SEO strategy. Be sure to leverage Google Maps marketing to let new patients spot you on their smartphones.
Taking your local search presence to the next level, deploy feasible online options like Google Business Profile and other local-based listings to highlight your dental services.
Also, be sure to benefit from consistent local directory listings:
🔎 Facebook listing directory profiles
While offering a 30% discount for first-time patients sounds promising, beware not to get trapped in the loop of marketing promotions over time.
Even though most patients are into the value of money and deals, you should not win everyone by encouraging discounts or specials only.
While special and loyalty deals can help you attract new patients, do not reduce your professional services to these offers. Rather, customize the best practices in patient-centered healthcare to motivate first-time patients to make an appointment with your dentists.
Our advice: Once you spot the flow of new patients, be sure to track all incomers with the best web analytics tools. These invaluable resources will help you better understand a patient journey and build a better user experience on your dental website:
Proper use of these resources will help you define the exact dental services people need most. As an essential part of a wider patient engagement, an in-depth understanding of the customer journey will help you match your marketing messages with the most popular search queries online.
A lion’s share of your prospects will lack dental insurance. There will be those who won’t initiate a dentist’s appointment as they cannot pay for it now. Herewith, your competitive advantage is in offering flexible payment plans.
Greater financial flexibility customized to the individual circumstances of your patients will bring more loyalty to your dental service.
📈 Offer payments in installments
📈 Accept charge cards
📈 Partner with local finance companies that provide dental care loans.
To make your dental expertise even more patient-oriented, launch a branded YouTube channel where you will provide an in-depth understanding of the most common hygiene and dental problems people cope with.
Take YouTube marketing as a golden opportunity to go the extra mile and attract the attention of prospective patients beyond the scope of your target audience.
Eventually, video content enriched with informative insights and patient testimonials will make all the difference. Compelling videos convey authentic patient experiences through vivid storytelling and captivating visuals. This is how you’ll win more trust from the patients visiting your dental website.
Among other marketing channels, social media platforms hold high traffic potential. More to that, healthcare marketers feature social media among the most cost-effective ways to stay in touch with your existing patients and attract new ones.
🏥 Introducing your dentistry brand to wider audiences
🏥 Building close-knit relationships with future patient
🏥 Gaining a loyal following
🏥 Optimizing your marketing efforts.
While leveraging social media networking to attract new patients, bet on the right platforms frequently visited by your target audience. Maintain dental practice brand pages by posting engaging content regularly. Optimize your posts with niche-relevant keywords and hashtags.
We are sharing digital marketing advice and industry tips to help market players become more competitive, gain more patients, and optimize their marketing roadmap.
If you are still concerned about how to get more patients for dental office, we advise trying a 360-degree full-funnel marketing strategy. With that, you’ll be able to engage the best marketing channel to boost traffic to your dentistry website.
Our healthcare marketers pursue an individual customer approach by considering your current business circumstances and growth potential.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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