Congratulations on your new dental practice! You’re a newly-minted dentist. Or you’re finally taking that big step, leaving your group to go out on your own. You know dental marketing is essential, but you’re a medical professional, not a marketing expert. How can you market your new practice so it will grow and thrive?
Follow these steps, and you’ll be able to establish successful dentistry marketing that starts generating new patients quickly and helps keep your practice growing.
Step #1: Identify your target audience.
What sort of patients will you see? Are you a general practitioner or a specialist?
- Who are those prospective patients, demographically – age range, gender, income range, etc.? If you’re a pediatric dentist, you’ll want to target parents, of course.
- Where are they, geographically – will you need to market only to nearby neighborhoods, your entire city or an even wider area?
- What do they want and need in a dentist?
Step #2: Why should they choose you?
Marketing is a process of differentiation. So think about what makes you special:
- Your professional attributes – if you’ve been in practice for a while, you can use testimonials or reviews from former patients, but if you’re brand new you might want to emphasize your knowledge of the very latest techniques. Do you offer pain-free or other treatment alternatives?
- Your personal attributes – you’re friendly, approachable, caring.
- Your business attributes – convenient location or hours, payment plans, etc.
Step #3: Consider your dentistry marketing options.
There are myriad ways to promote your new practice, from traditional advertising methods to online alternatives. Certainly you need a website, because the vast majority of potential patients search via the internet. But you have to drive traffic to your website as well as to your door. And as a start-up, you need marketing that will work quickly and cost-effectively.
You may be surprised to learn that dental postcard marketing is the favorite among many dentists. They offer unparalleled value, because:
- They introduce you as a dentist and introduce your new practice as a local business.
- They build familiarity and trust and confidence in potential patients – the things that motivate them to choose you and schedule a visit.
- They are proven to give you the highest return on investment of any marketing medium. And you can start seeing response right away.
Organizing a successful marketing effort can feel overwhelming, but don’t be discouraged. Simply move on to Step #4.
Step #4: Schedule an appointment with a direct mail marketing professional.
Postcard marketing is comparatively simple to create and execute, but you don’t have time or the essential expertise to ensure every detail is just right. That’s why it’s so important to partner with someone who has that background and experience – an expert who can advise you and handle all those pesky details on your behalf, with assurance. They will:
- Make sure you’ve asked yourself all the right questions to fully understand your target audiences, then use that information to help you develop exactly the right mailing list to get you started right and
- Explain how postcards work for dentistry marketing, so you can get the strongest response and the greatest value.
- Help you create a dynamite introductory campaign as well as ongoing marketing that will generate a steady flow of new patients for your practice.
Help you select the right pictures, copy and other design details, so your postcards will instantly capture attention and make people want to follow up on your marketing offer. What offer should you use? A direct mail expert can guide you toward the ones they know have worked best for dentists like you all over the country.
Dentistry marketing can be quite complex. Or it can be as simple as a postcard. Why not stick with what works? All you have to do is follow these steps.