![24+ Best Dental Marketing Strategies & Ideas for Your Dental Office [2024]](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5fee3fd14df42836719a4aa2/66aad783077aff2e762a99b7_dental.png)
You know your dental practice is pretty awesome, but how do you get the word out so you have more patients walking in the door? A dental marketing plan, that’s how!
It can be hard to invest time and money in marketing, especially when your heart is in healing exposed tooth nerves and helping people clear up their yellow teeth stains. That’s why Flossy has put together the top dental marketing strategies and ideas for your dental office.
Marketing, more generally, is any action a company takes to attract audiences and/or sell products. This might involve visual advertisements (in print or on websites/social media), blogs or other long-form marketing content, search engine optimization (SEO), or video marketing (via television commercials or on social media).
Dental marketing specifically encompasses the marketing strategies and tactics that dental practices and clinics use to attract and retain clients. The goal of dental marketing is to get potential patients to make an appointment (online or by phone) and to get existing clients to make regular appointments.
If a practice or related dental company also sells products, dental marketing includes advertising those products.
Before implementing specific marketing ideas, effective marketing requires a plan to target the correct audience, establish goals and limitations, and create a strategy for implementation. Let’s explore the steps of creating a dental marketing plan.
Before you create your marketing plan, you need data to determine the best strategy for your company. Market research for dental practices helps you determine how best to position yourself to reach potential clients and compete with other dental practices.
Your research should include:
Potential secondary sources for your market research include industry reports, academic studies, government statistics, articles from reputable news outlets, competitor sites, and social media accounts.
But don’t forget to conduct primary research! This will help you understand your specific clientele and gain direct feedback. Primary sources include patient surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations of patient behavior, or field trials/pilot studies.
The next step in developing your marketing strategy is identifying your target audience and determining how to reach them. This may involve thinking about:
Outside of these specific considerations, you’ll need to consider the demographics of your office’s location and whether you should target specific groups of people, such as family/pediatric or elderly patients.
Having clear-cut business goals for your dental practice will give you a higher shot at succeeding. One particularly effective way of setting business goals is to use the S.M.A.R.T. method. Under this method, you’ll create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
A few examples of dental office goals include:
Next, you’ll need to determine how much your dental practice should spend on marketing. The first step is to review your existing dental practice budget to determine what you’re able to spend. Your final marketing budget will depend on what life-cycle stage your practice is in, what strategies you want to implement, and how long you will utilize each marketing strategy.
Once you have your market research and you know your audience, goals, and budget, you can create your dental marketing plan!
This is when you decide what specific types of marketing you’ll employ and what kind of content you want. You might choose to focus on social media ads, video campaigns, updating your website, optimizing your site for higher SEO rankings, starting a blog, or responding to Google reviews.
Tracking the results of your dental marketing plan involves more than just tracking changes in your profits or patient base. If your initial strategies don’t yield the results you want, you need to understand why. And if they do, then you should know what you did right so you can do it again later, since businesses often experience ups and downs.
There are several metrics you can use to track the results of your marketing plan:
Now let’s dig into the details. Here are some top marketing strategies to integrate into your dental marketing plan.
Email marketing is one of the most affordable strategies, and it helps you maintain direct contact with your patients. Increase patient retention with reminders for routine cleanings, dental hygiene tips, and product recommendations.
You can also use email marketing to build a network of medical care providers who could recommend you to their own patients! If you build brand awareness among local doctors, they may keep you in mind the next time one of their patients needs to see a dentist.
Social media isn’t just for following your friends anymore. According to 2024 data on social media in healthcare, 84% of patients use social media to find health information and connect with doctors and healthcare organizations.
A strong dental practice social media marketing strategy can help you build brand visibility and reach, acquire new patients, and save money by avoiding the costs of TV, newspaper, or radio ads.
Your social media profiles can act as a brochure of sorts for potential clients to explore your services and office atmosphere. A strong social media marketing strategy might utilize photos, videos, ads, and regular engagement with other accounts
Dental video marketing is a great way to increase engagement on social media, and educational videos are a great way to give your patients and followers added value and establish yourself as an expert resource for all their questions and needs.
You can offer videos about dental hygiene tips, common dental issues, and how to address them (like what to do if you chip a tooth at home), or even your office team! Give potential patients an inside scoop on the atmosphere in your practice!
Facebook is still the top social media platform for healthcare marketing. In fact, 89% of hospitals use it to engage with their patients! Facebook ads for dentists can help you reach more users than you would with just a profile and regular posts.
But don’t settle for a generic ad! Make sure you aim your ads at your target audience, and try A/B testing your calls-to-action (CTAs). You can also experiment with various Facebook ad types, including carousels, mobile news feed ads, and page post engagement ads.
Google ads for dentists are a great way to reach your target audience. You can target ideal patients and demographics, set up your ads quickly and easily, and benefit from lower financial risk.
All you need to do is conduct some basic keyword research to determine the best SEO strategy for your ads, determine your Google Ads budget, generate a unique selling point (USP), and create the ad! Google Ads provides helpful tracking tools for you to understand how successful your ads are, so you can experiment with different formats and content, as well.
Direct mail marketing is physical correspondence to current and potential customers encouraging them to patronize your business.
A lot of people see “snail mail” as somewhat out of date, but it’s actually still a strong marketing strategy. Because it’s physical, it’s more interactive, and it might even be more memorable for its nostalgia.
There’s less competition in direct mail now, and if one of your target demographics is of an older generation and generally not on social media, you might reach a wider audience!
You might wonder why you need to update your website often - after all, it might seem like the basic information hardly changes. But website updates are important for more than just keeping your information current. Reasons to update your site include:
Practicing dental SEO on your site should be an essential element of your dental marketing plan. Every month in the U.S., there are over 1.2 million searches for “dentist near me.” Maintaining a strong SEO strategy will help you avoid being bumped down in search engines and losing business to your competition.
Here are a few tips to optimize your site for higher search engine rankings:
Outside of your own website, you can also increase your SEO rankings with some of the following strategies:
Google business profile optimization is another key strategy you can implement to ensure you’ll show up in potential patients’ searches. Follow these steps to update your profile:
Google Maps app. All you have to do is enable location assets for your Google Ads account, target specific locations, and optimize your keywords.
The benefit of these ads is that when someone finds you on Google Maps, they’ll also see your contact information and Google Business profile. The fewer steps there are to contact you, or the less friction involved in the task, the more potential clients are more likely to choose you over another office.
Whether or not you pay for Yelp ads, you can still benefit from claiming your business on the site. According to Yelp, 83% of users hire or buy from a business they found on the site.
Yelp even offers features for users to book appointments or contact businesses directly from the app, reducing friction around the process of finding a new dentist. Make sure all your details are up to date and that you create an effective system for handling Yelp inquiries.
Dental directory listings help increase quality traffic to your site and heighten your chances of being found by potential clients. Directories like America Smiles or Smile Guide are useful tools for your marketing plan because many people use those directories as tools for finding highly-recommended dental practices more easily.
Great dental appointment reminders can help you maintain patient loyalty, keep your calendar booked with regular check-ups and cleanings, and increase your revenue potential.
Try sending reminders to book cleanings or x-rays about 1 to 4 weeks ahead of when patients are due, and follow up with booked appointment reminders 3 to 5 days beforehand. Make sure your appointment reminders reflect your brand voice and personality and use email software that allows you to personalize messages with client names and details.
Given that texts have a 98% open rate, it’s a great idea to implement text messaging for your dental office. You can send appointment reminders and personal messages to answer questions, follow up after missed calls, notify patients of office updates, request reviews, and speed up payments with text-to-pay.
By implementing text communications, you can cut down on missed appointments, prevent phone tag, and meet patients where they’re at by using a commonly-preferred mode of contact.
Patient testimonials are a powerful tool for dental marketing. People want dentists they can trust, and reviews from current or past patients can help them get a feel for whether or not your office is the place for them.
Encourage patients to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, and any other platforms you use. If you want to use their testimonials on your site or social media profile, make sure you get their consent. Respond to reviews to build a relationship with patients and show you care about your reputation, and make sure you feature your testimonials on the homepage of your website.
One of dental marketing’s biggest secrets is the power of podcasts for building your patient base. More than a third of Americans listen to podcasts regularly, giving you access to a massive pool of potential listeners.
Even if your listeners aren’t necessarily local, their interactions with your podcast will broaden your reach, and the podcast itself can help you build authority as an expert in the field. You’ll gain increased brand awareness, and your patients/listeners can feel more connected with you and your office community.
Despite the initial financial hit you’ll take by offering discounts, new patient specials pay off in the long run. For those without dental insurance, the cost of an appointment might make it difficult for them to try out a new dentist, even if they’re unhappy with their current dentist or they’re not seeing a dentist at all.
But with discounts, you can get them in the door and impress them with a high-quality patient experience. You build trust, and they may just become a long-term patient.
An effective SEO strategy can take time, but you can take advantage of other site’s rankings in the meantime through guest blogging. If you choose a site with high domain authority, your post will get you increased brand awareness while you’re waiting for your SEO changes to yield results.
Guest blogging will also help you build those SEO results! When you write a guest blog post, you can include a brief bio and a backlink to your own website, increasing traffic and building more authority.
A press release is a message announcing a story to the public. It is sent to journalists or media publishers to hopefully get the news published in media outlets. They’re particularly useful because earned media, or exposure from a third-party source, is the best type of brand exposure.
You can write press releases for new locations, new services, sponsorships, charity events, and dental health news. Some of the best places to send your press release are newspapers, TV or radio stations, and industry publications.
Like new patient discounts, referral bonuses help build trust and goodwill. Patient reviews are already effective marketing tools, but personal referrals are even stronger forms of reviews. People often take their friends’ or family members’ recommendations, because they already trust them.
Utilize those mutual connections and create referral promotions that will make both your current and prospective clients happy, long-term patients.
Local events are a great way to gain brand visibility and build a reputation as a dentist who cares for the community. You can send out press releases in the hopes of gaining third-party coverage and utilize the power of social media marketing to advertise the event.
Some great local event ideas include holiday toy drives, oral cancer awareness drives, or even a program to get young athletes mouthguards. You could even start a dental scholarship, host a workshop, or partner with a local charity.
Despite the fact that we’re now firmly rooted in the digital age, billboards are still an effective tool for marketing. A typical four-week billboard campaign is about $850, but that could be money well spent.
Billboard marketing helps businesses build brand visibility with eye-catching messages. And since commuters generally drive on the same route to work every weekday, your business gains high-frequency exposure.
Just make sure you identify your target audience, choose the best location for that audience, and utilize strong visual design and writing for the best possible billboard.
A referral partner is a business that refers customers to you, usually in exchange for compensation. Their compensation might be a flat fee, a percentage of a sale, or specific benefits.
Try reaching out to local businesses, especially doctors who might see patients who require dental treatment that their office doesn’t provide. You can also try getting ads with referral codes featured on podcasts or blogs.
Community outreach is a great way to make a mark in your area and get people in the door. People tend to gravitate toward businesses that want to do some good in the community, so volunteering is an effective way to stand out from the crowd.
You can participate in health fairs, offer free workshops, co-sponsor a Little League team, or partner with local charities or even other businesses.
It’s important to track the results of your marketing efforts so you can know whether or not you’re spending your budget wisely. One way to do that is to calculate the ROI of your dental marketing strategy.
ROI stands for return on investment, or how much profit you gain from your marketing efforts divided by expenses (how much you spent on that marketing strategy).
To calculate your ROI, you’ll need to know the number of leads you’ve had, your lead-to-customer rate, the average price of your services (appointments, procedures, etc.), and how much you spent on each marketing strategy. The formula for measuring marketing ROI is: [((number of leads x lead-to-customer rate x average sales/service price) - cost or ad spend) ÷ cost or ad spend] x 100.
A 300-500% ROI is generally considered to be good; if your ROI is less than 300%, you should re-examine your strategies to see where you’re getting the most profit and where your money isn’t yielding results.
Here are answers to your frequently asked questions about dental marketing.
There are many strategies for getting new dentistry clients, whether through SEO, social media marketing, blogging, press releases, or discount programs.
There are many strategies you can employ to build brand visibility and generate more patient leads and bookings, but the most important step is to create a solid marketing plan.
An effective plan requires marketing and keyword research, clear identification of your goals, identifying a target audience, setting a budget, and determining the best marketing strategies for your needs and budget.
The best way to market yourself as a new dentist is to create a strong marketing plan based on your target audience, market research, business goals, and budget. Once you establish those, you can choose between a variety of marketing strategies.
You can utilize social media, generate Google or Facebook ads, create business profiles on Google and Yelp, send direct mail advertisements, run discount promotions, and use email and text messages.
But don’t forget to get involved in the community, too! You’ll build more brand awareness and draw in patients who value businesses that support the local community.
Whether you’re a new dentist or trying to grow your practice, a dental marketing plan is the most effective way to reach your goals. Any of these strategies can help, but building brand visibility and getting new patients in the door can take time and dedicated effort.
