Dental practices are much needed in their local community as people suffer with teeth problems everyday. 

As a family dentist, if you set up your practice in a prime hot spot, you can attract many people to come into your practice because there is urgency to solving a major pain that the patient has, but what about cosmetic dentistry?

Where the cost of cosmetic dentistry might be a turn off for some of your patients and there isn’t much urgency in getting the treatment done in the first place, how do you get a consistent flow of patient enquiries and patients into your practice?

In this blog post, I am going to share with you some ways you can adopt as a cosmetic dentist to help gain more patient appointments for those high-end treatment plans.

Here’s What You Will Learn:

• The traditional methods of getting patients to your dental practice and why they no longer work
• How to get patients to your dental practice through health talks
• How to get patients to your dental practice through your website and search engine optimisation (SEO)
• How to get patients to your dental practice through search engine marketing (SEM)
• How to get patients to your dental practice through social media marketing (SMM)
• Other methods to get patients to your dental practice

The Traditional Methods Of Getting Patients To Your Dental Practice And Why They No Longer Work

As a dental practice, you may be relying on traditional methods of getting people to know more about your business. 

They might be flyers, billboards, newspaper, television or radio ads. 

Whilst these methods were great for advertising back in those days, a lot has changed in terms of the type of media that our prospective patients are interacting with. 

If your prospective patients are millennials or of the generation X, the reality is, they are not reading newspapers or listening to the radio or watching television. 

Rather you might find them reading blogs or articles they find on Google, listening to podcasts or streaming broadcasts on platforms like Spotify or Pandora and even streaming videos on platforms like YouTube or DailyMotion.

So if your prospects are interacting and engaging with these platforms, this is where your business needs to show up. 

Now I’m not saying that you will never be able to use traditional forms of advertising to promote your business. 

You might get few patient enquiries from there. But you also need to ask yourself, whether you are getting a return on your investment and a return on the effort you spend in using these forums to generate patient enquiries. 

Another reason why traditional forms of advertising are not working is because those methods are not specifically targeting your ideal audiences. 

A case in point. Let’s say you do a radio ad that promotes a dental implant offer. Unless the radio ad is being played during a segment that you know your target audience listens to, your efforts will be fruitless since you will be casting a wide net just hoping to land any type of fish that catches.

This is the same for newspaper ads. The ads that you place in the Daily Express or the Daily Gazette may not be read by your target audience. 

And it’s difficult to establish who is consuming these types of media, unless the advertising companies give you data that will help you decide whether that forum is the best for you to invest your advertising dollars. 

So here’s what I would strongly recommend. Move away from traditional methods of advertising and invest in more modern methods of advertising and I hope the following methods will help you decide which one is best for your needs.  

How To Get Patients To Your Dental Practice Through Health And Beauty Talks

This method will require a bit of effort on your part, but here’s a strategy you can use to get dental patients to your practice. 

As a cosmetic dentist you want to get your brand in front of an audience that cares about their appearance. 

Find podcasts that are related to the beauty industry or even the health industry. 

If you don’t know how to find these podcasts, a simple Google search will help you. Here’s how I did it: 

Now you can reach out to the podcast owner and ask for a spot to discuss a beauty segment but incorporate cosmetic dentistry into it. 

The reason why you’re doing this is because when you think of beauty and health, it’s more than likely that the people that matter to your business, who can translate into patients, are listening to these podcasts. 

These people are concerned about how to keep up their appearance. Do you think therefore that they may be interested in your cosmetic dental offers?

I would say yes.

So, what better way to get your brand out to the ears that are listening and also to make an enticing offer to them. For example 50% off cosmetic dentistry for new patients or 50% off teeth whitening for new patients.

Before you do make an offer, do provide a bit of education on why your treatment is ideal, the benefit of such treatment as well as the outcome of such treatment on the patient. 

I also recommend that you take it a bit further. Instead of making a blind offer to anyone who is listening, set up a landing page where people can visit that landing page to claim the offer. 

This will help you build your own email list so you can get the names and email addresses of people who are interested in claiming the offer which allows you to follow up with them later on. 

How To Get Patients To Your Dental Practice Through Your Website And SEO

The biggest platform that dentists are using right now, is Google. 

There are many people who are searching for your type of treatment offer and these are the people that you want to get in front of. 

The way that Google SEO (search engine optimisation) works, is that you create a website that includes some of the words and phrases that your target audience are searching for. 

For example, when I use Google and search for keyword “veneers”, here’s what I find: 

Google tells it’s users, what people are searching for in the search engines. You will see this from the drop down box and also what’s in the red boxes that I highlighted. 

If you use content marketing or blogging to write articles for people who are searching for these keywords or phrases, then your website has a good chance at showing in the search engine. 

This is one of the ways that good dental practices are using Google and SEO, to create strategic content that answers to the keywords and phrases that people are searching for. 

Using this data, I would therefore write content on The Cost of Veneers or The Process for Getting Veneers. 

Why would you want to write this content? Because people are searching for answers to these questions and as a dental practice you want to answer these questions and be a helpful resource to the people searching for answers, since you might then be able to turn them into a patient. 

Quick tip: When writing articles that answers someone’s question, be sure to end that piece of content with an instruction for what the reader should do next. For example, you might want them to claim an offer or schedule a consultation. Include that instruction in your article.

How To Get Patients To Your Dental Practice Through SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Search engine marketing is using paid ads to get your content in front of people that are searching for certain keywords and phrases. 

SEM is like SEO, the only difference is that you’re actually paying Google to place your business at the top spot of the search engine, whereas with SEO, you have to create authoritative and high-quality content for Google to consider you as good enough to appear at the top page of Google. 

If you do not want to wait months or years for Google to favour your piece of content, you can pay them to do so through SEM.

When you use SEM, you are entering an auction for a keyword or phrase that you want to target. 

So using the example above, supposing you want to target people who are searching for veneers, you can tell Google that you would like to bid on the keyword “veneers Leeds” or “veneers cost”. 

When you bid on this keyword, the highest bidder wins the first, second or third spot on Google and your business will be seen by people searching for those keywords. 

Think of this bidding like Ebay. If you’ve ever used Ebay you know that if you were to bid on an item that you want to buy, the highest bidder wins the auction. The same here with Google. 

To get found through SEM, you must be the highest bidder and winning the auction will allow your ad to appear in the search engine and therefore get in front of the person searching for that keyword. 

Here are some examples of dental practices who are using SEM to advertise their business: 

When considering using SEM to advertise your business, this can be a costly option as to advertise on Google might cost you $2, $3, $6 or more for one person to visit your website as a result of clicking on your ad. 

If you have set up your website properly so that you capitalise on each visitor and turn them into a lead, you may be able to get a good return on your investment, since the people who are searching for keywords or phrases like “veneers cost” or “veneers near me”, having a strong buyer intent. 

That means that their intention to buy something is very likely. 

So I strongly recommend that you have a process in place for turning those visitors into enquiries by capturing their data (name and email) using a landing page. 

How To Get Patients To Your Dental Practice Through Social Media Marketing

Social media is the holy grail of online advertising because the cost of doing so can be very cheap for a dental practice looking to get their business in front of thousands of ideal prospects. 

But if you are choosing this method, your approach has to be different because people are not looking for cosmetic dental treatment when they go on websites like Facebook or Instagram. 

Your marketing efforts has to be more strategic and if you have a proper marketing strategy, the conversions can be very significant for your practice. 

If you’re thinking of using social media marketing, I want you to understand, that these platforms are there for people to socialise and connect with their friends and family. 

They are not there to look for the latest cosmetic dental treatment. Neither are they there to decide they’re going to spend thousands of dollars immediately on a dental procedure. 

However if you position your content, you can definitely leverage this platform so you can get high quality patient enquiries into your practice. 

Facebook Marketing

So let’s touch on Facebook marketing for a bit. 

If you have a Facebook business page and you’re a dental practice that’s just getting started with social media, you probably have a few followers and you are creating posts to help put your brand out there.

What Facebook was 5-10 years ago, isn’t what Facebook is today.

Five to ten years ago, businesses were able to build a social media presence using Facebook and have their posts seen by 70%+ of their followers. 

Today there’s a different story. That is because, Facebook has changed their algorithm which has affected the organic reach of our posts, making it more difficult for our followers to see our content when we are not creating strategic posts that help engage our audience.

If you are struggling to see engagement on your Facebook business page, here is something you can do. 

Create content that evokes emotion in your audience. 

People connect with businesses when they can bring out feelings in them. 

As you can see from the below post, Jamaica Cosmetic Dental Services was able to get a reaction from their followers by posting a family-friendly post about the director’s daughter on her GSAT. 

In this post, Winn Smiles Dental Office were able to get 21 shares and 40 likes to a post about their charitable work. 

In this post, Jamaica Cosmetic were able to get over 100 likes, comments and shares by creating a giveaway and they did not even use paid advertising.

From what I have seen, business related posts also has to build community and your efforts should not only be sales posts. 

People do not react too well to being pitched often. 

You can also incorporate some personal posts about your life, family and what’s going on in your practice to stand out and really show how you are unique. 

These are the types of posts that create engagement and this is what Facebook likes. When more people engage with your posts, it has the ability to be seen in the Facebook newsfeed more often because Facebook recognises it as a post that people want to see and rewards you for creating share-worthy content.

If organic Facebook marketing is taking too long and you really want to amplify your visibility, then you may want to consider paying Facebook to get that visibility. 

I will strongly recommend that you do not boost a post and here’s why.

Boosting a Facebook post does not allow you to target a specific group of people that are highly likely to be interested in your offer.

Instead that post is treated like a billboard ad. Remember when I spoke about the traditional methods of advertising?

Well your post will not be seen by a specific, targeted group of people and is a waste of your money.

Instead I recommend that you create an Ads Manager in a Business Manager account with this link and create a more effective ad campaign that will really help you create a strategic post content to get your offer out to the right people.

Here’s a strategy that you can use if you’d like to consider Facebook ad marketing. 

Step 1

From the ads manager select an audience that you would like to target. In the below example, I would like to target women between the ages of 25-55, who live within 5 miles from a dental practice and are engaged. 

My thoughts are, if I am promoting invisalign, there might be women who want the perfect smile for their big day and want to get that result in a short space of time. 

So this is the audience I am selecting.

Step 2

Start with an ad that offers valuable content to educate viewers about any treatment that you are offering. 

For example, if you’re offering Invisalign, a video story of one of your clients could be the first ad that someone sees. 

Notice from this ad that you are not asking the viewer to pay for anything. You’re not asking them to book a consultation. 

All you’re doing is educating them and putting them in the frame of mind to consider the treatment if it is something they’ve been considering for some time.

Step 3

Once you have shown that ad to people, the next step would be to create an audience of people who watched the video and show them another ad. 

The concept here is, if people watched the video or even spent at least 25% of their time watching that video, it’s more than likely that the video is fascinating or interesting to them.

It is here where you can make an offer to consider booking a consultation for the specific treatment.

When you approach Facebook marketing in this way, you are more than likely to have more success as opposed to trying to sell a service right out of the gate.  

Want to see how dental practices are using Facebook Ads to get 30+ new patients in the chair? Click the link to check out my free case study.

Other Methods To Get Patients To Your Dental Practice

The above methods are the most popular and current marketing methods that you can use to get new patients into your practice.

But if you are looking for more ideas, here’s a quick breakdown of six other methods.

Referral Marketing

Ask existing patients to refer their friends and family and get a percentage or discount off their next treatment.

Business Referrals

Do you have business colleagues that you can partner with and who align with your practice? For example you may have a business colleague who is the owner of a health spa. Ask them to consider a referral scheme where they refer their patients to you for certain dental procedures.

Collaboration

You might collaborate with another complimentary business owner, for example a day spa who might be hosting an event and you can show up at that event to promote your services. 

Sponsor Local Events

You can collaborate with a charity or have your own local community event where you invite the community to attend and hand out flyers or business cards. If you are collaborating with a charity, imagine having your name on their marketing material. This is a great way to build that brand awareness so more people can get to know about your practice.

Google My Business

Do you have a listing on Google My Business? This is another way for you to appear in the local listings for when people search for “dental practice near me”

Directory Listings

Other online listings you can join include Yelp, Angies List, Health Directory UK. Simply do a Google search to see what other directory listings there are and join them.

Wrap Up 

As a dental practice the options are endless when it comes to using modern digital media to find more patients for your dental practice. 

There are both paid and organic means of getting your business in front of your target audience and it is up to you as the practice to decide how quickly you would like results. 

If you are considering using any one of these methods, depending on your time and effort, I would strongly recommend that you use a combination of Google SEO and Facebook Ads since when used together are powerful to target people who have a strong buying intent and you can remarket them by putting your offers in front of them should they use social media. 

If you are not on the busy side, although I would hope that you do want to be busy, as a dental practice, you might want to consider manual efforts of marketing your business, where you pay to grow your practice with time. Those methods include sponsored local events, SEO, podcast marketing or collaboration opportunities.

Whatever method you choose you have no reason to not see continued practice growth. 

Are you ready to invest in the growth of your business by using a paid social media strategy using Facebook Ads? I help dental practices get more patients in the chair using a simple ad marketing strategy. Click here to book your free discovery call to see if we might be a good fit and how I can help you.