In any successful business, your dental practice needs to have a memorable brand. An established and consistent branding will help your practice stand out.
Your dental practice brand is your promise to your patients. The expectations that they will get from your service, your team and your practice.
Your branding is also how you portray an image of your dental practice derived from you, who you are and your team.
In marketing for dentists effectively, your brand awareness and the value of your practice is the frame that will help you to stand out from the competition and generate new patients. Take note that a better brand means better dental marketing results.
When building your dental brand, you have to raise positive emotion, strong enough for them to take action.
Before we give you tips to brand your dental practice, let’s discuss what branding is.
According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is “a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or service as distinct from those of other sellers.”
Take note that the word was “distinct.” There are a lot of dental practices that offer the same services within your area. That is why your dental practice name, marketing collateral and designs, and message should separate you from the competition.
Positioning Your Dental Practice Brand
When positioning your brand, you have to understand the brand fundamentals and components.
It will help you create a consistent brand that will resonate with your target audience in dentistry. The brand components and fundamentals are the following:
- Mission
- Vision
- Guidelines
- Logo
- Website
- Media
Today, we will discuss the five great tips to brand your dental practice.
1. Identify Who You Are A Practice, Your Mission and Vision
In branding your dental practice, you need to know who you are. It should answer beyond your expertise and services, but this should answer the question as to why your patient should choose you over other dentists within your area.
Use this list of questions for your discovery process and to answer and check what makes your practice different from the others.
- What are my strengths and weaknesses as a brand?
- What is my unique selling proposition?
- If I were to create my marketing materials, what would it look likes?
- How am I going to market my practice?
- How will I strategically distribute my brand messaging consistently across different channels?
When answering this checklist, you need to be honest and diligently follow through in taking action on each answer.
The next thing you have to do is to create your mission and vision statement.
Your brand mission defines the purpose of building your practice and its impact on your community and the world. It answers the big “Why” you are doing what you are doing.
In crafting your mission statement, you have to be honest with your values and the impact you want to give to your patients and the community. It should also focus on what you are doing today.
By being truthful and pushing through with the inner work, you were able to identify how you are unique from other dentists within your city and finally resonate with the dental patients in line with your branding.
On the other hand, your brand vision is the long-term and sustainable goal you want to achieve. It should be concise and clearly explained. Your vision will serve as your organizational compass to track your progress. It focuses on your goals for tomorrow.
Hand in hand, your mission and vision hold the key for your practice’s long-term growth and sustainable goals in line with your branding.
It might be overwhelming to figure things out by yourself but, dental marketing companies can help you figure your brand identity and craft your mission and vision.
2. Create Your Unique Selling Proposition
An impactful dental branding requires your strengths and unique features that convert them into your unique selling proposition. In building your brand practice, you want your dental practice to come across as original rather than a commodity. Knowing who you are, your strengths, values and uniqueness will separate you from an endless competition to win the lower price for your dental service.
So getting your USP is important during the branding process.
In finding your secret sauce, start reflecting and answering these questions:
- Who is my ideal target patient?
- Why did I get into the dental profession?
- What makes me unique as a person?
- How are my techniques different from other practices?
- Why do my existing patients still choose me?
It may take some time for you to think through how you can stand out when you offer the same services as your competitors.
Take some to ask your family, friends, your team and even your patients to describe their experience and a specific feeling they get from your practice.
Your USP should answer these questions:
- What can you provide from your practice that is unique?
- Why should someone set an appointment with you, instead of a variety of other options they have in hand?
Your USP is the heart of your brand message that makes your patients connect with you as a practice and on a deeper level.
Remember to take time to create your USP. Selling a target patient does not mean you will only say: I have 20 years of experience in dentistry.
Though this is also good, there is nothing unique about it as other dentists have the same years of experience. So be specific about your USP.
Perhaps your niche is more on Children’s dental care that eases a child’s dental anxiety when visiting for a dental check-up of procedures. From this, your USP can be: Children friendly Dental clinic for your Kid Anxiety-Free Dental Care.
It is now unique since you anchor the feeling they would get from the niche you focused on. So take your time and learn how to find the perfect angle for your practice.
An impactful dental branding requires your strengths and unique features that convert them into your unique selling proposition.
You want your dental practice to come across as original rather than a traditional commodity. Knowing who you are, your strengths, values and uniqueness will separate you from an endless competition to win the lower price for your dental service.
In finding your secret sauce, start reflecting and answering these questions:
- Who is my ideal target patient?
- Why did I get into the dental profession?
- What makes me unique as a person?
- How are my techniques different from other practices?
- Why do my existing patients still choose me?
It may take some time for you to think through how you can stand out when you offer the same services as your competitors.
Take some to ask your family, friends, your team and even your patients to describe their experience and a specific feeling they get from your practice.
3. Create a Consistent Brand Look and Design
Once you know your unique selling proposition and brand identity, the next step is to create a consistent brand design.
A long-standing great brand impression for your dental practice needs to have a distinct and consistent brand design across different channels.
Brand design consistency increases your patient’s memory about your brand through colours, design elements, and how frequently you show up for your practice.
To start with, here is the list of the things you need to consider when building your brand design:
Brand Bible – This is your style guide that consists of a set of rules on how your brand should look. It will guide you to have a consistent look for your dental practice across different platforms and channels based on your organizational goals to support your USP.
Logo – It is your graphic symbol or customized text to identify your dental practice. Your logo is placed on your website and your social media profile, and the print banner.
Make sure that your logo represents your brand clearly and consistently and your practice purpose and personality.
Website– It is your online representation of your dental practice. Having a great design and optimized website can give a first great impression to your target patients.
Marketing Assets or Collaterals– This includes images, videos, brochures and social media graphic posters. Having customized and consistent media will gain more credibility and trust from your potential patients. You can hire a dental marketing agency to assist you in your dental clinic photoshoot to capture your office interior exterior, staff, and actual patients–with their permission.
Your company video can have a sneak peek of the actual owner, your team, explaining your why and what makes your practice different, an office tour, together with your patient testimonials.
With the right dental marketing agency, you can also create sets of explainer videos to educate your patients online about dental procedures.
Creating designs and marketing assets can take a lot of your time. The great news is there are a lot of dental marketing agencies that offer dental marketing services for your branding needs.
4. Create A Consistent and High-Quality Content
Content consistency is the key to building brand loyalty. You have to show up every time to your patients to create connections and trust with them.
If you also want to attract high-paying patients, you also need to keep on publishing high-quality content. Not just something that you can post just for the sake of posting.
Your content should always resonate with your values and brand voice. Aside from the benefits of your dental services, what type of communication style do you want to integrate across different channels for your practice?
Do you want to have a friendly but informational brand voice for your children-friendly dental clinic? Or do you want to instill credibility but a bit of a personal touch to target patients who have PPO type of insurance?
Each target patient demographic needs to have a distinct type of content.
Once you determine the content type and your brand voice, integrate it with your dental marketing strategy.
Have a different type of messaging length per channel.
Twitter has a text limit of 280 characters. Facebook has a text limit of 63,206 characters.
From this, be mindful of making the most out of your online post as there is an optimal reading time for the online audience until they get bored.
Your Facebook and Instagram bio should have at least consistent content of what your practice is all about. Each social media post should be showcasing who you are and your values aside from the dental services you offer.
Have a social media post at least 3-4 times a week across different channels to gather enough data if your brand designs capture and retain an audience.
The same goes for your website. It should have the same brand consistency across different website pages.
Have a quick check of your about section. Having a set of your certification indicated on your website is good, but of course, it is supposedly given that you have the experience.
The question is, what else can you bring to the table? You can try adding your interest or your quick backstory as to why you started your profession. Do you have any activity concerning the community you live in?
Showing that you are authentic and vulnerable at some point, will make you more relatable to your patients.
You have to leverage the power of storytelling so you will eventually create your marketplace and attract the best patients resonating well with you as a person, not just your practice.
Storytelling is the highest form of engagement. When you combine it with consistent and authentic content, your practice will set you apart from other generic and service-based content.
5. Build Your Brand Dental Marketing Plan
Branding is not just your colour scheme, logo or brochure. It is more on the strategy in line with your business goals.
When you plan for your dental marketing, you have to niche down to which channels you will only focus your dental practice.
Take note that your target patient will have different turnover rates.
For the business-to-customer transactions, it will have shorter touches to generate leads. For B2B, it requires six to eight touches.
So for your dental marketing strategy, you need to set a couple of persuasive marketing campaigns across different channels.
Create a set of blogs for your website and include a downloadable checklist in exchange for them to generate email leads. You can also conduct email marketing for your newsletter every week or promote your dental services promos and referrals.
Post a relatable holiday on social media to increase your organic reach through hashtags used for that holiday.
You can also be playful and post memes of funny reaction videos about dental care hacks you watch on Tiktok. It will make you more relatable and drive more traffic on your social media channels.
Lastly, you can run online ad campaigns on Facebook and Google for you to get seen on the top page of Google and your potential patients’ Facebook feed.
Creating a consistent and synchronized dental marketing strategy takes a lot of preparation and work to execute and analyze if there are any results.
Hiring a dental marketing agency to do the work for you will ease your worries about doing your dental marketing strategy and execution right.
Final Thoughts:
Branding your dental practice is a vital ingredient towards sustainable dental practice operations.
It is the soul of your dental practice and showcases your purpose of starting your practice. Without a strong brand, you will not be able to present your uniqueness outside your services.
Your patients might choose other offices that perfected and presented their branding well. We have discussed the brand fundamentals and the tips to brand your dental practice. However, if you want to ask for professional brand advice from experts, you can avail your 30-minute free discovery call here.
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