7 Ways to Grow Your Dental Practice
Wondering how to get more dental patients, grow your dental practice, and earn more revenue? We have you covered.
Check out our helpful tips for growing your practice — and explore how our dental membership plans can benefit both your practice and your patients.
How to Get More Dental Patients
If you are looking for ways to get more patients in a dental office, you'll first want to consider:
- What your ideal patient profile is
- How effectively your front office staff interacts with first-time patients
- Whether you have educational materials that cover specific treatments
- How easy and intuitive your appointment scheduling system is for patients
You need to determine what you are hoping to achieve when you are considering how to increase revenue in a dental practice, along with patient acquisition. Consider that we live in a customer-centric and online-centric world, so you should try to create an engaging experience for patients online.
Your practice should show that you value clients' time by providing them with an excellent online customer experience and dental membership plans that work for them. This is a simple way to attract new patients to your dental practice and strengthen patient loyalty, both of which can help grow your practice.
How Do I Grow My Dental Practice?
If you are looking to grow your dental practice, there are a few ways you can do so, including:
- Leverage digital marketing
- Send direct mail marketing
- Use your website more effectively
- Build online reviews
- Leverage social media and SMS to connect with potential clients
- Implement dental membership plans
Let's break down each of our top six tips for how to grow your dental practice.
1. Leverage Digital Marketing
First, you'll want to consider digital marketing to attract new patients to your dental office.
For any business, marketing is essential for success. Your dental practice is unique, and so is your target market, so you'll want to develop a digital marketing strategy that is effective for your practice. Follow the tips below to leverage digital marketing to grow your practice.
- Use local SEO: Local SEO is a great way to attract more local patients to your dental practice. You can target local areas by creating site content, optimized to target key terms and phrases potential clients are searching online. With local SEO, you can boost your rankings in search results and make it easier for people to find and contact your practice.
- Create a FAQ page: You can also bring in website traffic by answering FAQs on your website. FAQ pages are an example of digital content marketing. Content marketing brings visitors to your site by providing answers to questions they are asking, such as "when will my child's teeth come in" and "why does my tooth hurt?" You can build relationships and trust with your patients and potential patients by answering common questions and being a source of valuable information.
- Partner with a local non-profit and share updates on social media: By getting involved with a non-profit locally, you can improve your dental practice's exposure. Volunteer your time, such as by providing free dental care to an underserved area. This can increase your presence in the local community. You can also leverage this event in your digital marketing campaigns and advertise it on your social media platforms.
- Run Google ads for dental services: Another key element of your digital marketing campaign may be pay-per-click (PPC) ads. You can target specific keywords, and your ads may appear at the top of online search results when users search for dental services. Use location-specific keywords to make your ads more relevant to your audience.
2. Send Direct Mail Marketing
To tap into your dental practice's existing patient database and reach new potential patients, you can use direct mail marketing. Send flyers or greeting cards to welcome newcomers to the neighborhood and introduce them to your practice. With direct mail marketing, you can generate valuable leads and increase your monthly recurring revenue.
Direct mail marketing is a cost-effective option and a simple, easy method for attracting new patients to your dental practice.
3. Use Your Website More Effectively
Today, every dentist should have a website. Having a website that you and your patients can use effectively and easily is crucial for growing your dental practice. A potential patient's first impression is important, and people may judge your practice based on their experience with your website. Can they tell that you rank high in customer satisfaction? Does your website give the impression that you care about your patients?
If you will be making a new website or revitalizing an existing website, you should consider what type of message you want to deliver to your patients and potential patients. Showcase your latest dental technologies, your anxiety-free holistic dentistry, or your family-friendly focus.
- Informational pages: You may want to consider how informative your website should be, such as whether you want to include your professional background and experience, where you got your education and your scheduling details. Additionally, you may want to include timely information on your website about your social media channels and current practices in dentistry.
- Online appointment scheduling: Many patients prefer to conveniently make an appointment online rather than call to schedule. Use an online appointment scheduling platform on your website that patients can use at any time.
Ensure that your website is well designed and responsive to effectively represent your brand. Your website should also be mobile-friendly. Most searches for medical professionals are conducted on mobile devices, so if you don't optimize your site for mobile searches, you may be losing potential patients. To ensure you reach as many patients as possible, make sure your website is accessible on both desktops and mobile devices.
4. Build Online Reviews
Today, many people are comfortable using computers and the internet. When searching for a dentist, many potential patients read reviews about how a practice operates and how the dentist interacts with patients. This means the adding reviews to your dental website is essential for growing your practice.
Positive reviews can be an effective way to expand your practice, especially since search engines like Google and Bing display business reviews. Though positive reviews can increase patient retention and acquisition, negative reviews may damage your practice's reputation. Additionally, positive and negative reviews can impact your search engine optimization (SEO).
While you are figuring out how to utilize technology to develop your online presence, focus on building a strong reputation. When asked, most consumers will write a review for a business. To grow your dental practice, focus your efforts on getting positive reviews from patients, as this will allow your office to build strong relationships with patients.
5. Leverage Social Media and SMS to Connect With Potential Clients
Many Millennials do not have dental insurance, so even routine dental care can be a substantial out-of-pocket cost for this generation. If you want to market to this demographic, you may want to become active on social media like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to connect with your patients online.
Social media accounts can increase awareness of your dental practice. Use a mix of straightforward information with humor and fun quotes. In particular, Facebook retargeting can help drive users directly to your website to learn more about your practice and book an appointment. You may also consider running custom ads on social media to encourage people to visit your website, learn more about your practice, and schedule a visit.
The goal of social media is to have patients share the positive experiences they had while at your dental office. Equally important is patients sharing insights about your office with their network, as this is how to get more patients in a dental practice. Though nothing can grow your practice better than addressing your patients' needs for dental care, building a strong online presence can also be an incredibly effective strategy.
Along with social media, you may want to use a text message system to send your patients appointment reminders. Texts are a great option for communicating with patients, especially as so many people don't answer phone calls from unknown numbers. Appointment reminders decrease no-shows and do not disrupt a patient's day.
6. Implement Dental Membership Plans
Finally, implementing customizable dental membership plans into your practice can help with growth. With a membership plan, your practice can offer patients affordable, personalized care with no insurance middleman involved. This plan is similar to a subscription service, allowing patients to pay you an annual or monthly fee and receive preventive care and treatment discounts in return.
At Kleer, our dental membership plans can help you grow your practice, as you can design a plan for a patient's unique needs and make dental care affordable.
7. Incorporate Kleer Employee Care
With Kleer Employee Care, you can enhance your dental membership plans, empowering your practice to provide subscription-based dental benefits to local employers without an insurance middleman. With Employee Care, you can help your community get the low-cost, high-quality dental care it needs. Employee Care can be a great investment for your practice, as dental care is high in demand but low in supply from employers.
- One of the top three requested benefits by employees is dental coverage.
- Sixty-three percent of small businesses don't offer their employees a dental benefit but would like to.
- Half of U.S. adults do not have an employer-sponsored dental benefit, though they would like one.
Fortunately, with Kleer Employee Care, your practice can generate recurring cash flow by attracting new fee-for-service patients.
How to Grow Your Practice With Dental Membership Plans
When considering how to make your dental practice more profitable, you may want to implement and grow a dental membership plan. Along with increasing your income, dental membership plans also allow your practice to grow less dependent on insurers and give your uninsured patients an attractive alternative.
Develop a Simple, Unique Dental Membership Plan
When you offer a dental membership plan to a patient, it should be simple enough to explain to your patient in a sentence or two. The plan should also be straightforward enough for your team to understand and explain in simple terms. Your patients want to know exactly what they're getting when they agree to a plan that benefits their health.
Train Your Staff
If you decide to use dental membership plans in your practice, it's essential to train your staff about them. Regardless of whether patients are uninsured or have dental insurance, ensure they're given information about the benefits of a dental membership plan. Even if a patient has insurance, they may know a relative or friend who does not, and this could lead to a referral for your practice.
Included in the flyer or information packet should be the benefits of joining a dental membership plan and examples of the potential savings. No matter how you choose to present the information, dental membership plan options should be highly visible to your patients.
Incentivize Your Staff
Your staff interacts with your patients regularly, so once you've ensured they're trained on what your dental membership plans offer, incentivize them to mention the membership program to your patients. Whether at the front desk or in the operatory chair, your patients will be a captive audience while your staff informs them about the program.
While you can always make discussing the dental membership plans a part of your staff's job description, offering incentives can go further and benefit everyone.
Market Results Rather Than Services
Your patients likely don't want to hear about the medical details and steps involved in filling cavities. Rather than focus on your specific dental services, market the results of your services, such as a beautiful smile, a healthy mouth, and white teeth. With the right messaging, you can ensure that your patients will be eager to sign up for your in-house dental membership plan.
Email Your Patients
Email is an effective marketing tool for your dental membership plans. Be sure to collect your patients' email addresses if you aren't already and use email to communicate with them about your membership program. You can send out emails monthly or quarterly and include information about how patients could benefit from signing up for a membership plan. For patients, benefits of a dental membership plan include:
- Personalized, simple, and affordable dental care
- 2.3 times more treatment than uninsured patients
- 1.7 times more hygiene than uninsured patients
- No tedious paperwork
- No waiting periods
- No claim denials
- No deductibles
At Kleer, our Growth Team can equip your practice with the guidance, tools, and marketing resources you need to grow your dental membership plan, free of charge.
How to Grow Your Dental Practice With Kleer
At Kleer, we can help you with attracting new patients to your dental practice and increasing revenue. With our dental membership plans, your practice can offer a subscription-based plan directly to patients without an insurance middleman in between. We help you deliver dental care, liberated.TM
With the Kleer Advantage, you can access a set of resources and tools to maximize the results of your membership plan, including:
- Kleer platform
- Market research
- Kleer partnership
- Product innovation
- Kleer SmartDesignTM
- Kleer Growth Services
- Kleer renewal support
- Regulatory compliance
- Support from the Kleer Success Team
Ready to learn more about how to make your dental practice grow and join the thousands of dental practices using our platform? Request a demo from Kleer today.
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