Your Guide to Navigating the Overwhelming World of Dental Marketing in 2024
In 2024, developing a successful dental marketing strategy can feel more overwhelming than ever. With so many marketing channels available, determining which ones will be the most cost-effective can be a daunting task. Looking at the dental practices that thrive on social media, you might think that to run an effective campaign means you have to film yourself dancing to a TikTok song while performing a surgery or cracking stand-up level jokes during an oral exam for increased Instagram engagement. While these attention-grabbing tactics work for some, they aren’t typically the ones driving the biggest revenue streams for most practices. To help make informed decisions about which channels to use for the best dental marketing campaign, this article explores the fundamentals of dental marketing and provides insight into the implementation process of the most profitable strategies.
The first thing to know is that there are two types of marketing – inbound and outbound. Outbound marketing is more traditional and involves some of the first methods you think of when hearing the term “marketing”, such as TV/radio ads, print ads, billboards, etc. The goal of this method is to increase awareness of your practice among as many people as possible. The kind of outbound marketing you choose is specific to your budget, but the key concept for having the best dental marketing outbound advertisement campaign is crafting an interceptive story that makes people want to interact with the advertisement further. It is a riskier strategy, as the production costs can be high and the audience is not targeted.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is tailored to the qualified patients that are already interested in your services. Some examples are google ads that only pop up when the topic is searched, writing an article for your website on dental hygiene that attracts the interested population, and newsletters to the existing patient base. Inbound marketing involves the patient making the first step to discover your practice, resulting in more targeted advertising, which attracts customers naturally in contrast to outbound marketing that utilizes an interruption-based approach. Inbound marketing is more cost-effective due to the targeted nature of this method and its comparatively low production budget.
To develop the best dental marketing strategy, we recommend utilizing all available inbound marketing methods, starting with those that are free. Focusing on SEO, Google Ads, and your Google Business Profile is critical, as these channels typically drive the most revenue. As a partner in twelve dental practices and the owner of a nationwide dental marketing company, I always advise beginning with an engaging Google Business Profile. The most successful profiles tend to be personal, so include photos of yourself and your family, ensure all details are up-to-date, and aim to gather as many 5-star reviews as possible. Another key strategy is to create individual Google Business Profiles for each of your practitioners, complete with their photos. While you don’t need as many reviews for these individual profiles—5 reviews and a few 5-star ratings are sufficient—this approach can significantly boost your patient volume.
After utilizing all the free marketing channels, you will likely see an influx in patients, but to maximize growth and achieve the best dental marketing results, you will want to invest in paid strategies. At this stage, many dental practitioners choose to hire a dental marketing company, which is exactly what we did with our dental offices. However, with each company we tried, the results they delivered were underwhelming. The companies generated general interest and viewed the increased number of calls and website clicks as a testament to their professional success, but as a practice owner, I saw no increase in patients in my office. The patients that were interested either lacked the kind of insurance our practices accepted or did not bring revenue to the practice.
The frustration with the dental marketing industry for providing no effective solutions and keeping their decision-making process hidden pushed us to develop our own proprietary software, the Rise DDS platform. This unique technology enables us to track not only the number of new patients each channel brings in but also the quality of those patients: their insurance, number of missed and attended appointments, reason for visit, phone number, recordings of the phone conversations. We provide even more exclusive data, including the phone number and contact information of what we call “missed opportunities”—qualified potential new patients who were missed somewhere in the process. We then offer coaching to identify and address the root causes of these missed opportunities, ensuring your practice minimizes patient loss and maximizes retention. By harnessing the power of this analytics to guide our decisions, we are the only company in the industry that offers this level of transparency in crafting your best dental marketing campaign.
At Rise DDS, we understand your needs because we are you. Our board consists of dentists and doctors who own their own practices, and we know how important traceability and transparency are to our clients. We would love to give you a demo of the Rise DDS platform and showcase what tracking features you will have access to when you choose us.
To book your first free appointment with us and see our software:
Call us at (888) 849-1816
Email us at hello@risedds.com
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