There are plenty of ways to introduce and promote your dental practice. Some are expensive, some are not so costly, some take time but no money. A sound dental marketing strategy incorporates multiple methodologies, to ensure you reach as many potential new patients as possible and meet people who can help spread the word about your practice.
But you can’t do it all, nor should you. You have limited resources – both time and budget – to direct toward marketing, and not every avenue is well-suited for promoting dental practices. Postcards, however, are proven to be top producers for thousands of dentists in general practice as well as those who specialize.
Postcards are practical and highly effective. They’re ideal for establishing your name and branding your practice if you’re just starting your business or if you’re opening another office in a new location. And while building awareness is important, dentists love postcards most for their reliability in attracting new patients.
Every practice needs a steady flow of new patients.
After trying a variety of marketing methods, many dentists have chosen postcards as the foundation of their dental marketing strategy. They still use in-person techniques such as networking, volunteering or speaking to build the kind of personal rapport within the community that “humanizes” their practice and instills confidence in prospective patients.
But postcards are their go-to medium for attracting new business, month in and month out. That month-in-and-month-out aspect is vital. Your dental marketing strategy must emphasize ongoing marketing for two reasons:
- Sometimes you lose patients. They move away, they no longer need your specialized services or they have other reasons. You need new patients to replace them.
- A steadily increasing patient base is essential to grow your practice.
You can use postcards in conjunction with other offline or online marketing channels to conduct broad-based campaigns, you can use them to drive traffic to your website and you can use them to motivate prospective patients to pick up the phone and call for an appointment.
Many dentists also use postcards to sustain their practice in other ways.
They’re using specially-targeted campaigns to:
- Get the word out about seasonal promotions, which helps boost business during traditionally lighter periods. For example, pediatric dentists often run summertime promotions to get kids into the office during their vacation or back-to-school promotions that help send children back to the schoolroom with a healthy smile.
- Introduce new treatment options, new professional staff or other changes to your practice that will increase interest from potential patients.
- Encourage and motivate existing patients to visit more regularly or take advantage of elective procedures and treatments such as whitening or adult teeth straightening.
- Reconnect with lapsed patients who are still in the area.
- Solicit referrals from existing patients.
Postcards are eminently affordable.
Making the best use of your marketing budget is simply smart business, but affordability alone isn’t necessarily valuable. Focusing on low cost is not a good investment if you get an equally low return. Postcards are affordable and cost-effective. You can generate impressive results quickly and continue to build response over time as you repeat your mailings.
Postcards are highly targetable.
You can zoom in on your best-qualified audience, whether that’s virtually everyone, parents of young children or adults needing dentures or investigating implants. You can do that by purchasing up-to-date, accurate mailing lists, and of course you can mail to existing patients as part of your dental marketing strategy.
Postcards go where you want them to go, without extraneous expense and waste. And they work. That drives up your return on investment in two important ways. Shouldn’t postcards be a vital part of your dental marketing strategy?
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