We are consulted daily by dentists from all over Brazil with questions related to the recruitment of patients for dentistry.
Whether by email, through our social networks, chat or phone, the questions are always very similar to the following:
How to get patients to dental offices?
How to attract patients to the office?
What is the best strategy to attract patients for dentistry?
How to capture patients on Instagram?
How to capture patients on Facebook?
Is it worth using Google to get patients?
Does content marketing to attract patients work?
How to capture private patients?
How to reduce the dependence on dental plans?
How to capture patients during the pandemic?
These and other questions are constant and very relevant to the context of dentistry.
After all, the work of the dental professional only happens after the capture of patients.
Exactly to help you dental professional or dental clinic owner to attract more qualified patients to your dental clinic, we are launching this article with 7 strategies to attract more patients to dentists. Stay with us!
7 strategies to attract more patients to dentists
Although there is no single strategy to attract patients that works for all types of clinics, there is always a possibility to be applied, adapted and improved for each case.
Below are 7 strategies to attract more patients to dentists, dental offices and clinics.
01 – Patient acquisition strategy: Lives
Okay, you may be thinking that lives are a strategy of the moment. They are not.
The coronavirus pandemic actually gave lives visibility, but the fact is that the vast majority of professionals are using live in the wrong way, or at least, limited.
They believe that just providing great content and that they will attract patients. But not quite.
In order for the strategy of capturing patients through lives to be in fact a strategy and not only to deliver free content, it is necessary that some elements are present, namely:
One goal: what am I doing live for?
One goal: What number will I pursue at the end of this live? Amount of subscribers to my channel? A number of downloads of some material in exchange for an email / cell phone? A number of calls and appointments in my office?
A destination: The live cannot be an end in itself, it needs to have a destination location (capture page) where people will continue the conversation with you after the live ends.
Anyway, lives are a great way to attract more patients. It is so good that it deserves an entire article on the topic (soon).
02 – Patient capture strategy: In-person events
Ok, this is not the time due to the crowding restrictions given the Coronavirus situation. But, strategies are not temporal. Execution does.
If you are reading this article at any time, know that one of the best ways to attract more patients to your dental clinic is through face-to-face events.
Are you going to say you don’t know what to do in a face-to-face event? The tip is: try to create a theme around your target audience.
Example: Your target audience is mature or elderly people who undergo dental implant treatments.
A great way to create a face-to-face event is to associate with other health professionals such as geriatric doctors, psychologists focused on this audience, physiotherapists and rent a common space for a morning workshop or even a day with a cycle of lectures aimed at the quality of life in old age.
Using the customer lists of all participants and investing in media cooperatively, the visibility that this type of event brings is enormous.
Best of all, the recruitment of patients happens directed to those people who are already within the profile of their target audience.
In-person events can also be inserted into other sectoral events such as fairs, corporate events, panels, etc. Find out in your city / region, events that your target audience usually attends and make your presence there. You will not regret!
03 – Patient acquisition strategy: Offline media
Is your clinic “popular”? Or, on the contrary, is your clinic directed to the social “top of the pyramid”?
Know that in these cases the capture of patients via social networks and digital marketing has little effectiveness.
The explanation is very simple. The very popular public still has great support for offline means of communication such as radio and TV. The highly elite public is highly selective in media consumption, reading magazines and watching highly targeted pay TV programs.
So, despite being propagated to the four winds of “that everyone is on the internet”, not everyone is there looking for a dentist and often their advertising message will not have the necessary impact to take them to the service (purchase) .
Never, never, disregard, a priori, traditional offline media as a strategy for attracting patients.
04 – Patient acquisition strategy: Facebook and Instagram
We are not talking about branding. Do you know what branding is? That kind of post where you talk about your physical structure, your diplomas, your team, the routine of your day to day, your travels …
This does not bring any results, unless you consider it a result in marketing, it has many followers, a lot of praise about you and likes, likes, likes.
At Senior Marketing we work with the only marketing for dentists that really matters: Results marketing.
In this sense, if you want to use social networks to attract patients, you need to invest in campaigns. In performance campaigns.
It is not uncommon to have clients who invest R $ 3,000.00 to R $ 4,000.00 per month in campaigns to attract patients on social networks and have revenues of R $ 150,000.00 to R $ 200,000.00 / month.
It’s just that we don’t waste customers’ time making posts. All the work is directed to capture qualified leads, that is, people who are really willing to make a treatment.
To attract patients through social networks, you need to invest some money in boosting ads.
But not only that. The targeting of the target audience has to be very well done and perhaps the most important, the creative, that is, the art that will be shown in the ad has to arouse the patient’s interest so that this click and schedule an appointment.
So, remember: the next time you receive a marketing proposal to attract patients through social networks, focus on performance, results and escape this small talk of “management of social networks”. That an intern earning half a minimum wage does for you!
05 – Patient acquisition strategy: Google
It’s true what you did out there: either you look good on Google or you don’t exist.
Think about your own behavior as a consumer. You either know of someone who provides a certain type of service and calls you directly, or you go to Google.
To get patients through Google you must think in two ways. The first is to invest in paid ads on Google. He paid today, he shows up tomorrow morning.
The problem is that people rely less on ads. Every day less. This brings us to the importance of Google’s second strategy to attract patients: the so-called SEO.
This pompous acronym basically means that if someone searches for the service you offer (Example: orthodontics) your website will appear on the first page of Google.
Maybe you already know that. What you may not know is that if your website appears in the first position on the first page, it takes 60% of clicks. 60%
This means in practice that being first in Google searches means reaching more patients. That simple. Well, not that simple, because a good SEO job (really) costs an average of R $ 4,000.00 per month (lower values suspect) and takes at least 3 to 4 months to start giving results.
As for campaigns on Google Ads to attract patients, paid ones have a slightly different system. Generally, you invest some amount in Google (at least R $ 50.00) in Google and 20% of the amount invested in media pays the agency.
That is the theory. But in real life, if you really want to compete in markets like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and other major centers in areas such as facial harmonization, contact lenses, orthodontics, invisalign devices, dental aesthetics, implants and others are not going to achieve great results (probably) by investing less than R $ 2,500.00 per month in media to begin with.
But when it comes to attracting patients what has to be observed is the result that you will have and from there the investment that must be made to obtain this result.
Ah, so if you invest R $ 2,500.00 will you earn 10 x, 20 x this? Yes, no and perhaps the answers are possible. This is being an entrepreneur. You can’t live with that. Do not even try…
06 – Strategy to attract patients: Press office
Here is a strategy generally underestimated in dentistry. The vast majority that tried failed and those that worked, worked VERY RIGHT!
What is the secret of the press office in dentistry? Actually there is no secret, but there are some tricks:
The press officer must have a real relationship with the journalists;
The press officer has to get into your business and understand you;
You will need to be available (sometimes at night, on weekends, mid-business hours) to meet with the press officer and journalists;
Press office is not direct sales.
Is it worth investing in print consultancy to capture patients in dentistry?
Like everything in life, everything depends on the result. Unlike a digital marketing action in dentistry, like making a whitening campaign where you invest X and get a return from Y, in the press office it is not like that.
How to measure the return of a press office job that places a dentist as a recurring source of information on oral health in Bom dia SP (Globo’s local newspaper in São Paulo)?
Think of the press office as one more tool for capturing patients in dentistry.
07 – Patient acquisition strategy: Digital marketing for dentists
Many may be thinking: But isn’t capturing patients through Google digital marketing? Isn’t capturing patients on social media part of digital markting?
They do, but there are some more “little things” that you can do within the digital marketing strategies for dentists that will help you attract patients. Help yourself:
Create a blog
Open a YouTube channel
Generate an email newsleter for patients
Writing for health portals
Create a channel on WhatsApp
Create a channel on Telegram
Conduct online mentoring and post-consultation sessions
Guest posts on third party sites
Remarketing campaigns
All of the above actions can be performed to attract patients. What matters in the end is to apply the one that will most bring paying patients to your clinic.
Conclusion
Obtaining patients in dentistry is always a relevant and current topic. We at Senior want to make our contribution in this matter by writing on our portal on the subject regularly.
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Senior Marketing