Best Dental Marketing Strategies

The game plan for getting new dental patients is pretty straightforward: gain visibility in front of your target patients, educate them on the problems you solve, and have them book you for their oral health issues. The first step is figuring out your niche. Once you identify the patients most likely to respond to that niche, you can develop a marketing strategy that directly targets that audience. Your niche market hinges on several factors, such as your geographic location, your patients’ income level, and your specialty. The best dental marketing strategies revolve around identifying your dental practice’s niche market, creating a marketing message directed towards that specific group, and hanging out where that audience hangs out. It’s as simple as that. We’re covering some of the best tactics for different types of practices and providing answers to the below questions:

• How can you market your practice to people looking for low-cost dental care?
• How can you attract patients to your high-end practice? 
• What are some uncommon marketing tips for pediatric and orthodontic dental practices? 
• What is a long-term dental marketing strategy that every dental practice should use?

Medicaid-Driven and Low-Cost Dental Practices:

If your practice is in a low-income area, you probably serve patients who need routine dental cleanings and tooth fillings. They live near your office. These patients aren’t looking for bells and whistles, just accessible, affordable, and essential dental care. The main concerns of these patients are: Is this dental practice affordable? Is it close to my home? Do they accept Medicaid?

The vast majority of patients in low-income areas will search the internet to find nearby, accessible practices. The best dental marketing strategy for your practice is using pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Google is one of the top advertising services providers for PPC ads. An advantage of using a Google ads strategy is that you don’t need to have a high SEO ranking, a long digital history, or an active social media presence to play. With Google Adwords, you pay for the clicks on your ads rather than the impressions. Your ads can be filtered by location, age, and keywords. When people search “dentists in my area,” your ad, with a link to your landing page, will appear on the top or bottom of the search results. Check out our guide to choosing the right keywords for these ads here.

High-End or Fee-for-Service Practices: 

The clientele you serve demands quality care and flawless results. These patients want the best of the best dentists, oral surgeons, and dental practices to perfect their smiles. They are not necessarily looking for the closest and most affordable dentist. Their approach to choosing a dentist is more research and referral-based. These patients invest in the top-rated dentists—whether that dentist is based in their neighborhood or beyond. They are reading reviews and scrolling through before and after photos of your porcelain dental veneers and dental implants. Because these patients want to work with industry experts, they care about three things when choosing a dentist: credibility, personality, and reputation. 

To showcase your brand’s unique value, go heavy on a video marketing strategy.

Why video marketing? Visual storytelling can make a potential patient like, know, and trust you and therefore want to work with you. Video marketing can create such a strong emotional connection between you and potential patients that they can feel like they’ve already met you before stepping foot inside your office. Talk about your favorite patient cases in a brief video. Have a patient share their smile transformation in a patient testimonial video. Highlight your staff talking about why they enjoy working at your practice. Content creation of any kind is effective, but video marketing is one of the most powerful ways to show your personal brand as a dentist and your practice’s unique value. Then, post these dental videos on several social media platforms, such as Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook.  

Remember, since patients don’t mind driving to see someone they consider the expert in crowns or veneers, you need to demonstrate who you are, what makes you the best, and what past patients say about you.

Pediatric and Orthodontic Practices:

Community, community, community. For you, it’s all about connecting with local families. Since your patients are usually families and children, it’s important to establish yourself as the orthodontist parents take their kids to for healthy smiles. This means you need to get in with the parents in your neighborhood. 

Before you can sell them on your pediatric dental services, you have to sell them on your warmth, friendliness, hygiene, and excellent work.

Establishing trust with parents will be key to boosting your reputation in your community. How do you connect with them? They’re hanging out on local Facebook groups for moms and neighborhood social networks such as NextDoor. Be active in these social groups. Once you connect with a few, a ripple effect will occur as they start to refer your pediatric practice to other moms. Word-of-mouth marketing works wonders for orthodontists. 

At Pain-Free Dental Marketing, we help our pediatric dentists connect with moms through contests and giveaways in local Facebook groups. Usually, each group will have rules for when a business can post advertisements. When allowed, we run contests or giveaways for our clients with prizes such as Kendra Scott Jewelry or a gift card to a local business. To enter the giveaway, participants might share the dental practice’s flyer, tag a friend, or post their best Halloween costume to their Instagram account and tag the dental practice. These types of posts and giveaways build brand awareness. Giveaways bring traffic to your online presence and are a good return on investment.  

The Best Dental Marketing Strategy for All Practices: 

A solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is a good ROI for all types of practices. We talk a lot about the virtues of Google ads, and while they are a good short-term investment, the costs can add up quickly. A long-term marketing strategy would be focusing on SEO through content creation and an SEO-optimized website. SEO works well because you can invest less and don’t have to buy every patient. Learn more about creating a killer dental SEO strategy in our guide here. For now, focus on optimizing your dental website for mobile devices and writing good blog articles that continually boost your ranking in Google search results.  

The Best Dental Marketing Strategy for Your Practice:

Every dentist we’ve worked with wants a fully-booked schedule. But while a University Park-based prosthodontist and a Medicaid-driven dentist might both share a desire for a crowded waiting room, that’s where their similarities end. At least when it comes to dental marketing. If you’re looking for a custom, data-driven approach to marketing your practice, look no further. Contact us directly for advice tailored to your practice’s needs.