Running a dental practice sounds incredibly lucrative at first. After all, everyone needs a dentist, and there are not a lot of unemployed dentists out there, right? Does this mean that every single dental practice is making money? Of course not. Dental supplies are not cheap, your dental office needs to be up to certain standards, and the specialists on your payroll need to be compensated accordingly. With these operational expenses, you’ll need quite the revenue to maintain an income surplus. Here are a couple of tips to help you thrive and prosper.
How Can a Dental Clinic Increase Sales?
The first objective that the majority of dental practices have is to increase sales at their dental clinic. This can be achieved by doing two things. You need to simultaneously increase your investments in marketing and lower your dental patient attrition.
Just increasing your marketing efforts would gain you new patients, but it wouldn’t resolve the issue of your old patients abandoning you. While this can still result in a positive net value gain, the truth is that it’s not the most cost-effective course of action. You see, returning patients are incredibly profitable. In some industries, just 20% of regular customers make as much as 80% of your entire profit.
So, you need to start your journey by examining dental attrition. Why do people stop visiting a dentist? Some of the most common reasons are:
- Financial troubles
- Not feeling like they need a checkup
- Troubles with your working hours
- Dissatisfaction with your service (recently)
Each of these problems has a unique solution to it. For instance, if their insurance doesn’t cover your services, you can expand and offer them an installment payment plan. If your working hours are the issue, you can always restructure your own schedule a bit. As for their “need” to visit a dentist, it all comes down to being able to educate your target audience on the subject matter. Fortunately, this is what content marketing is great at.
What Does a Dental Marketer Do?
Marketing is an umbrella term which can mean different things from one industry to another. For instance, take the example that we’ve already used, the one about the relevance of return customers. Someone who sells one-time-purchase items (chess sets or exercise equipment) could completely ignore everything regarding return customers.
Now, the field of dentistry is so specific that it requires a specialist in order to get optimal results. For instance, the standard ROI of email marketing is 4400%. This would mean that you get $44 for every $1 you invest. However, email marketing for dentists requires far more finesse in order to provide you with comparable results.
Keyword research alone, which is a huge part of your overall marketing efforts, requires a greater understanding of various technical terms. These terms often elude regular marketers.
While the majority of marketers understand the specifics of the post-sale follow-up, an appointment reminder is not one and the same thing. You would be surprised how many people make a schedule and never show up, which is a double-fold loss for the dental practice in question. With a tactful reminder method, this number can be cut short quite drastically.
Lastly, in today’s world, it’s nearly impossible to run a successful business without ads. You need someone who can manage them effectively and ensure that your practice is getting a decent ROI.
What Do People Value the Most in Dental Visits?
Making a unique selling proposition (USP) in marketing is incredibly important. More often than not, this USP will be tightly intertwined with the service that you’re providing. You see, one of the key things to pay attention to is the point of view of your average patient. What do they value the most during a dental visit?
The first thing that people have a problem with is often described as “being judged by their dentist.” Unfortunately, this is not just a stereotype and some dentists are really (casually) casting blame on their patients for:
- Not taking care of their dental health
- Skipping preventive examinations
- Waiting too long to come
This feeling of being judged and feeling like you’re being blamed for developing dental caries (which can happen to anyone) is one of the biggest problems that dental patients encounter. So, they value the right approach by a dentist, devoid of casting blame.
Gentle preventive examinations are also highly valued by dental patients, seeing as how they break the stereotype that every visit to the dentist has to involve drilling and filling. In general, even people who are not scared of pain have an aversion to it, which makes them reluctant (at the very least hesitant) to go to the dentist.
Patients also value dentists who are committed to educating them on this subject of dental care. Namely, it’s the objective of every patient to have healthy teeth and gums, spend as little money on dentists, and reduce their trips to the dentist to a minimum. In other words, there’s plenty of motivation involved. Now, via adequate education, a dentist can help them make their dental care as effortless as possible. Speaking about teeth brushing, diet change, and lifestyle, in general, are all interesting topics on their own, as well.
Plan for Expansion
Being unprepared for your best-case scenario can be as problematic as not having a contingency plan in a moment of crisis. Namely, when your workload increases, you need to be ready to add more people to your staff. Rejecting people will make them go someplace else, which is a potential loss of a patient for good.
Remember all we talked about things that people value when visiting a dentist? Well, you need to make sure that the people you hire can do all of that. The problem is that the empathy of a dentist is not a measurable skill. There’s nothing in their CV that can indicate that they’re sympathetic, which means that, while hiring, you need to be a great judge of character. The problem is that, during the interview, every applicant is telling you what you want to hear.
Second, you need to make sure that your dental practice space is good enough. Here, you need to put an emphasis on privacy. The last thing you want is for your (already uneasy) dental patients to be made even more anxious by the noises penetrating your premises. Also, when you have to expand, you might need to move. Needless to say, it’s the most cost-effective to handle all of this in advance.
Lastly, there are so many new trends that some of your clients will come to expect you to be proficient in. For instance, if a rival dental practice offers 3D printing services, chances are that this feature will make an impression even on those patients who don’t actually need it. After all, they just seem more tech-savvy and more in flow with the times.
In Conclusion
The dental industry is highly specialized, which is why it relies on specialists. Marketing is no exception here. In order to stay ahead, you need to have a more competent team and find the best way to promote this message. With the above-listed tips, this shouldn’t be that hard.
