How To Attract New Patients to Grow Your Dental Practice

Every successful dental practice relies on return patients. Dental patient attrition is a huge problem and to avoid it, you need to have at least 90% of your patients booked for the next appointment at every given minute.

Still, every returning patient was once a first-time patient. From here, it was up to you to show your competence and persuade them to come again. However, to even get to this point, you had to convince them to give you a chance in the first place. This raises a completely different question – how do you make people give you a chance?

The truth is that there are a lot of methods you can try and here are a few that you need to try out.

Make a Blog

The best thing about blogging is the fact that you generate value for your audience of charge. This is the best way to make first contact without being too pushy. With a good SEO, you’ll be easy to discover and with the right marketing, it doesn’t take much for a regular reader to become a regular patient.

Seeing as how you’re a dentist or an owner of a dental practice, you already speak from the position of authority. In other words, your opinion/knowledge on the subject matter is to be taken seriously. Most importantly, since it’s a matter connected to one’s dental health, it’s a topic that is of interest to almost everyone.

Blog content, especially in the field of medical practice, is quite social media friendly. By sharing a quote from your post and linking to it, you can use Instagram as a funnel for new readers. In other words, you have many options, and they’re all quite natural.

Improve Your Website

One of the first things you should do is make a great website. Keep in mind that you want to funnel all your social media followers and blog readers this way. So, having a place to send them might be the logical first step.

More importantly, you need to provide some basic contact info so that you can provide your audience with an opportunity to reach out. Most importantly, you need to allow your audience to book an appointment online. You still want to have a competent front-desk staff (some people are just traditional that way) but you also need this option available.

Keep in mind that you will be judged by the visuals and responsiveness of your site. This is why it’s advised that you leave this to professionals. Also, all of us have some preconceptions that are hard to shake off. So, do some research. Visit a lot of competitor sites to get a feel of what a dental practice site is “supposed to look like.”

Offer Something New

The real question is not why they should visit you, it’s why they shouldn’t go someplace else. Sure, they need a dentist and they’ll look up a dentist in their area. From this point, they’ll stumble upon several options. If your potential patient is the type of person to just go with the first option they encounter, it’s just up to a chance and there’s nothing you can do about it. Well, you could try to improve your SERP but (in this scenario) even this wouldn’t be a guarantee.

So, how to make your dental practice stand out in a good way?

Lowering the cost of your services is not necessarily a good idea. First of all, the cost of the procedure is fairly steep and you don’t want to cut any more into your profit margin. It would, therefore, be more efficient to offer them a new payment plan. This way, they would be able to afford your services even if their insurance doesn’t cover them. You can even include a new payment gateway, just to make things more convenient.

Another thing you can do is rethink your working hours. You see, for a lot of people, the overlapping between their working hours and those of their dentist is a major obstacle. So, if you could shuffle this a bit, you would potentially unlock a huge new patient base.

Lastly, you can just try to improve your dental practice administration so that it’s more effective. It sounds a bit intimidating but the truth is that, with the right management, it shouldn’t be that big of a problem. For instance, there are a lot of time-consuming tasks that will cause annoyance for your patients and distract your staff from their core responsibilities.

Earn Testimonials

When it comes to choosing a dentist, WOM is the most powerful tool of promotion there is. However, presently, people are getting more and more reliant on digital means, which is why they seek reviews as digital alternatives to WOM recommendations.

There are a couple of problems with reviews that you need to understand.

The first problem is negative reviews. You see, seeing as how they tend to be more specific, negative reviews somehow seem more credible. This is also the reason why the 1:1 ratio of positive and negative reviews is just horrible. However, not having any negative reviews is also quite suspicious. You might get accused of deleting negative reviews or just paying for positive ones. One more thing, responding to a negative review positively is an opportunity that’s easy to miss.

Second, it’s quite hard to earn reviews and it occurs quite randomly. The key thing you need to understand is that there’s nothing wrong with actively asking for reviews. It’s a minor request and if you direct it to every patient, some of them might leave a sentence or two. It’s a minor inconvenience that goes a long way.

Wrap Up

In the end, you need to understand that there’s no one big thing you can do to be more appealing. Success is all about doing many little things as best as you can and then reaping the benefits. Keep in mind that attracting new patients may take a while. However, after you build up your social media presence, boost your SEO rank and find a way to stand out, the growth in interest should be exponential.