Did you know that a dental patient goes into an emergency room every 14 seconds? However, most of these emergencies can be handled at a dental office, and 90% of them can be triaged by teledentistry. In addition, 50% of Americans don’t go to the dentist (this was pre-Covid).
What does this mean for you and your dental practice?
Turns out, it’s good news. Many people need dental care, and you just need to get in front of them! In fact, most of the dentists in our tab32 community are seeing an increase in demand even during this uncertain time.
But of course, they don’t just sit in their office and hope for the best!
To attract more new patients, you need to get in front of high-quality prospects using the right marketing and advertising strategies.
Most advertising strategies focus on reaching prospects in the awareness stage of the dental marketing funnel to build brand awareness.
1. Google Ads: Paid search advertising can help you get in front of people who are looking for dentists in your area. You need to support this tactic with a robust patient journey, such as an online scheduling tool, to capture and convert leads.
Want to learn more about this tool? Book a call with a solutions rep today!
2. Facebook ads: You can promote your content on social media to build relationships with those in your community and stay top of mind. The platform helps you get in front of a highly targeted audience even when they’re not actively searching for a dentist.
3. Direct mail: Brochures, postcards, and newsletters capture recipients’ attention and help you get onto prospects’ radar and drive website traffic. However, this tactic can get costly if you’re sending out direct mail to a large list.
4. Billboards: You can let people in your area know about your dental practice and direct them to your website to learn more about your practice. However, it’s difficult to track the effectiveness of this tactic.
5. Community publications: Ads on local publications (online and offline) help you build brand recognition among potential patients in your local area. It’s important to choose the right publication with the right readership.
6. Event sponsorship: Support local events and build relationships with the community to boost the “like, know, and trust” factor. This is a great way to increase brand recognition while connecting your brand with causes that you care about.
Since many conventional advertising tactics aim at generating brand awareness, it’s quite difficult to track results and measure the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing dollars. As such, many dentists feel like they’re throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping that something will stick.
Besides, many of these tactics have low open rates or conversion rates. For example, direct mail or billboards have an open rate of just 2%. If you spend money to get your ad seen by a thousand people, 20 prospects will move down your marketing funnel. With an average conversion rate of 1%, you’d yield 0.2 of a patient! As such, these tactics often turn out to be quite costly.
To increase your marketing ROI, you have to understand why methods such as billboards and postcards have low conversion rates:
To overcome the challenges, you need to get in front of people who need dental treatment immediately while shortening the patient journey so you can put prospects as close to booking an appointment as possible when they enter your funnel.
That’s why we launched toothache.care -- a platform on which patients can search for dentists in their area. When you list your dental practice on the site, you get exposure to people who need a dentist right away. For example, you can capture patients who need emergency care and are therefore more likely to convert.
tab32 users can connect their online booking tool directly to toothache.care so patients can book an appointment right away -- reducing the friction to conversion. You can also use our teledentistry module to quickly triage patients to increase your practice’s cost-efficiency as you deliver your service to more people.
(You don’t have to be a tab32 customer to use toothache.care, but tab32 customers are prioritized in search)
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