Most dental practices we talk with tell us they’d love to get an extra 10-15 New Patients per month and that would totally turn things around for them. There are three aspects of this that we will address in this article. External Marketing, Internal Marketing, and Telephone Conversion.

First off, if you don’t already have a large following – or patient base to market to, then you will be doing more External Marketing. Unfortunately, this tends to be more expensive and more trial and error for many practices. It’s similar to cold-calling on the telephone. Unless you have a strategy in place, it can be rather expensive and often a futile, frustrating experience.

In the year 2021, online digital marketing is probably the number one source of providing new patients to dental practices. This is done via a well-crafted website and maximizing online searches on Google, Bing, AOL, and other major search engines, as well as a combination of Social Media posts, Superpages, Yellow Pages online, and major review sites.

Online marketing is not a one-and-done type of process. It requires regular monitoring, updating, and constant refinements. If you put up a website or a social media page such as Facebook or Instagram or even YouTube, you need to “feed” it with quality, personalized, authoritative content on a regular basis to keep your listings active and alive.

Joint ventures with local companies such as holistic doctors, acupuncturists, naturopaths, chiropractors, functional medicine spas, nail salons, hair salons, doing cross-promotion coupons, social media marketing, or sending out fliers, promoting 4-6 local businesses that you share in the production costs on, sending out to each other’s email addresses or physical addresses.

The next option for growing your practice is to do Internal Marketing. This is everything from asking for referrals from current patients to handing out business cards, to promoting various services to current patients. From the creation of a product standpoint, you can send out a newsletter to your patients, or do videos for YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram, and post them on your website. These types of videos don’t need to long or super professional. In fact, people like to see videos made in cars, while standing in line or very casual, as long as it's entertaining and easy to hear and gets the point across.

Internal marketing options are great because they tend to be less costly (often free) and referred patients, as everyone knows, tend to be more receptive to listening to you, plus accepting treatment plans and being more loyal.

Finally, Telephone Conversion Training is a critical aspect of handling the new patient flow. If your front desk is cold or abrupt on the phone, you may never even get to see that potential new patient walk in the door. If you are spending thousands of dollars to bring patients to the point where they call the office, if your front staff hasn’t been trained on how to handle insurance questions, billing questions, price shoppers, or more, then you could be wasting money on marketing. Using a Call Tracking Number with Recording will he greatly effective for evaluating your practice on this. If your phone lines aren’t being answered between 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday, you could be losing patients.

These techniques when mastered in a dental practice can double a practice in 6-8 months. Unfortunately, many dentists are either afraid to seem open to critique or don’t want to press the “marketing” button because of their pride. In the year 2020, marketing is acceptable and even required for most dental offices to be successful and thrive versus just trying to survive.

Integrity Dental Marketing can do an assessment on these three key areas and help you find the Blind Spots in your practice that can open the floodgates for new patients. Call us today for a Practice Discovery call to see if we are a good fit for your practice growth strategies!