Your Guide To A Winning Dental Marketing Strategy

It’s Chris Pistorius with Kickstart Dental Marketing. I wanted to take just a couple of minutes and talk about how we come up with our strategy for our clients and what makes it so successful. First of all, we don’t see a dentist as being just a dentist, or an orthodontist is just an orthodontist or an endodontist as just an endodontist. We feel as though each dentist has something unique about them that really makes them pop out from the rest of their competition. So we really want to make sure that our clients have a really solid USP or unique selling proposition. And that’s really something that we’ve got to have in place before we start marketing your business. You should ask yourself the question, why should somebody choose you over the competition in your area? And it can’t just be something simple like, Oh, we have the best service in town, and it’s got to really be something compelling.

But once you really have that in place, it makes marketing your practice that much easier. The best way to bring in new patients is to attract them at all four phases of the new patient journey, which is what you see here. And I’ve got it broken down into the research phase, the get to know phase, the decision phase, and the advocate phase. This is all the way from when they’re first trying to decide who they should call to be a dentist, all the way to the point where they’re a patient. Now, most marketing companies are going to focus on number one. I’m looking for a new dentist, and they’re going to try to talk about the new patient acquisition, SEO, paid ads, all this stuff. And there is no question, that’s absolutely very important, but where our strategy is different is that we don’t just help with that.

Yes, we’re very good at bringing in new patient leads, but we also help in the second phase where after they call you and they’re kind of trying to get to know you to try to figure out if they want to do business with you or not. And then we also help when they’re actually ready to make that appointment and schedule the appointment. We can help a lot with that. And then it just doesn’t end after we bring them to you. We’re going to help you get them back in, and help them refer you out, and just kind of turn them into little mini salespeople for you to bring in referrals. So just really quickly, I want to go over all four phases and how we do help.

Now that first phase is critical. We’ve got to get your website right. It’s got to be the best in class. It’s got to be stunning, but at the same time, it’s got to have some marketing science behind it to make people want to take that next step. It also has to be very fast. People really underestimate that. It has to load fast. Google likes it to be fast. It’ll help your SEO rankings. There’s a lot of different things into the website versus just how it looks. Well, we definitely have to increase visibility on Google, and not just Google, really Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Yelp, all these different search engines, and online places people go to find their next dentist. And even if you think that your rankings are good already, I can promise you after you do a consultation with me, I’ll show you some places where it can get even better. I believe that it’s very important to invest in paid advertising opportunities, especially on Google and Facebook. Almost all of our clients are making very good money and return on investment by using these platforms.

And it’s not just a matter of, yeah, maybe I’ve tried it before, and it didn’t work. It’s have you tried it and had some people behind it that really know what they’re doing, and they know the science of this? It’s also quick. SEO will take a few months to really get you where you want to be. But with paid advertising, it can be up and running and new patients coming in within a matter of a couple of weeks. We also want to look at your online reviews and make sure that you’ve got a very good repeatable system that’s mostly automated, honestly, to keep patients bringing you in and great reviews on places like Google, and Yelp, and Healthgrades, and places like that. So phase one is all about attraction.

Phase two is where we really start to make ourselves a little bit different. So we’ve generated the lead, but we’re actually going to help you close that lead. We’re going to build an automated follow-up system for you that allows you to follow up with somebody that fills out a form or responds to an ad online. We can respond to them within one minute and put you in touch with your front desk and that potential new patient within seconds. It’s absolutely stunning technology, and it works beautifully.

We also want to make sure that we’re creating as many ways as possible for potential new patients to be able to communicate with you. So we’re going to add forms, and tracking phone numbers, and even text and chat options on your website. And don’t worry. All of these features that I’m talking about today don’t put any more workload on your front desk. In fact, it lessens some of their workloads. Phase two, all about building up a system to be able to respond quickly to leads, and making sure that they are connecting with your front desk, and give them more ways to communicate with you.

In phase three, this is when the patient’s actually going to schedule the appointment. So we want to track and listen to every phone call that comes in from our campaign. Now, don’t worry, we are 100% HIPAA compliant, so everything that we do in all of our systems is HIPAA compliant, so there are no worries there. But I do have a team that does nothing but listen to these phone calls, and they will actually provide feedback to you on ways that your front desk could potentially answer cold leads a little bit better. And what we do is we actually will take your front desk through an online training course where they will go through modules, and at the end of the modules, they will take a test if they have to pass. And then once they do pass, they’re sent a little certificate in the mail saying that they have passed. And then every quarter we would like them to go in and take refresher training to make sure that they’re up on the latest training.

Now, this training’s all-around how to better close new patient calls, and not referrals because those are kind of already sold for you. But these are people that find you online, and they don’t really know who you are, and they’re looking for reasons to do business with you. We’re just going to train your front desk on how to give them those reasons.

And then finally, in the ongoing patient treatment section, you’ve already got them as a patient. We’ve generated the lead. We’ve helped you follow-up with the lead. We’ve helped train your front desk on how to close that lead. Now they’re actually a patient. They’ve been in to see you. Job’s done, right? Wrong. We’re actually going to turn these existing patients into advocates of your practice. Look, these are people that already know you, like you, and trust you. They should be the easiest ones to get back into your office and to generate more revenue for you.

Most dentists, unfortunately, will not communicate great with patients that have already been in. And if they do, it’s kind of ad hoc or like, Oh, they haven’t been in nine or 10 months, we should send them an email, or they may send them some automated email through Dentrix or something like that. But what we found is that, yeah, you do need to follow up with them, but you need to put this on autopilot. This needs to be scalable, and you’ve got to know what to say. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to do reactivation campaigns. We’re going to use text messaging, email, even voicemail drops we can use, along with programs that we put together to entice people to come back into the practice.

Now, we also use these sources to help get people to leave you reviews online, as we talked about a little bit earlier. Not only do we get them to leave you reviews online, after they leave that review, we get them to take that review that they left and put it onto their social media pages to share with all of their family and friends. This turns them into new patient advocates for you and will grow your referral base by leaps and bounds. Again, this is a very high level. And if you want to discuss this in detail about your practice, just schedule a free consultation with me, but I hope you can see where we’re different. We not only help you generate the leads, but we help you train, we help you follow up, we help you close. And then we help bring back in the patients that maybe haven’t been in, in a while. So I hope this helps a lot, and I look forward to speaking with you in a free consultation very soon.

Be sure to also check out Chris’ interview with Stephen Trutter on how to start a new dental practice!