Effective Marketing Tips for Your Dental Office
Any successful dental advertising campaign begins with research. Before layouts are drafted, headlines are written or artwork is chosen, the savvy marketer learns everything they can about the target customer. It is important to research patients and also think like them. What are their pain points? What’s the number one thing they look for in a practice? What would keep them coming back to the same dentist?
Discovering current demographics is part of this research. Demographic information should include age, gender, household income, number of household members and physical location. There are many ways this data can help inform marketing decisions. For example, Patient News’s research, data analysis and years of experience show that women make more than 80 percent of all healthcare decisions, so most dental correspondence is addressed to the female head of house.
The next step is taking an honest look at your strengths and weaknesses as a practice. Once these are identified, marketing messages should highlight strengths and turn weaknesses into positives. If your practice excels at customer service, focus on the personal and friendly experience a patient will have at your office. If customer service is identified as a weakness because your front desk is understaffed, turn this into a positive point by telling customers you keep overhead low and pass those savings on to them.
Determining a budget is a critical part of any dental marketing campaign. Break down projected costs to determine the overall budget and then look at how often you can contact customers within that budget. Whether it is big or small, sticking to the projected costs and using them as a guideline for decision making will help your campaign be a success.
Once these pieces are in place, a marketing strategy can be developed. This strategy will outline clear goals, action items and measures of success. This is also the point at which the direct mail campaign is developed. This includes creating collateral, a mail calendar and mailing lists. The overall marketing plan and the direct mail campaign should be integrated and combined to complement and support one another. For example, if an advertisement for your practice runs in the local paper, send an acquisition mailing to new prospects at the same time.
