5 Ways to Get New Patients for Your Dental Practice
If you are a dentist that wants to grow your dental practice, you will need new patients to achieve your goal. In today’s article, I’m going to share 5 ways you can effectively grow your practice in the shortest time possible.
1. Build Up Your 5-Star Reviews Online – People are using the internet more than ever, especially to search for service businesses. A great way to get new patients who are searching for your services is by building up your online reviews on sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and ZocDoc. You can easily do this by getting an iPad for your dental office and asking happy patients to review your practice. You only have to ask 10 patients a week to get 6-8 new reviews.
Most patients will not even use the iPad, but if you don’t give it to them and just ask for a review most people will forget as soon as they walk out of your clinic. Handing them the iPad brings your request into the present and even though some will not use it, they will give your dental practice a great review on the spot (several of my clients are using this method and they’ve already racked up over 50 reviews in a couple of months).
2. Ask for Referrals – You’re doing a great job taking care of your current patients so ask them to recommend you to their friends and family. Encourage them to share their experience online using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. You don’t have to ask them directly.
You can hang up a couple of signs in your office letting people know about your social media pages and #hashtags. Or you could just ask them to just refer someone the old fashion way – by word of mouth.
3. Reward Loyalty – My mother has been visiting the same dentist for over 14 years. His services are great, but that’s not why she has stuck with him. Every year he’s sent her a birthday card for her birthday and one at Christmas. After 5 years, he gave her a free travel tooth care kit. After 10 years, he gifted her an electronic toothbrush.
Now overall, these are not big expenses for his practice, but they do show he cares. I’m sure he hires a company to send out all the birthday cards and gifts and his staff reminds him of patient birthdays – but these small acts show his patients he cares about them. This keeps his patients happy, loyal, and mentioning him to everyone they know. My mother still has all 14 birthday cards!
4. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Ready – Most dentists have a website, but the majority of their sites are not mobile responsive. In 2017, 70-80% of the web traffic on your site is coming from mobile users.
You could be getting 4,000 clicks per month on your site, but if your conversion rate is less than 1% due to your website loading slowly or with errors on mobile – you’re doing something wrong. Your conversion rate goal should be at least 4%, and that’s because 4% is a realistic number. Now imagine going from a conversion rate of 1% to 4% virtually overnight.
You just went from getting only 10 new patients per month to getting 40 new patients per month. How much did that cost? It may cost $3,000 for a high-level firm to design a new site for you, but how much would you make off of 30 new patients? Not a bad ROI. The first couple of patients will easily get you your investment back.
5. Facebook Ads – We are experiencing the golden age of Facebook ads right now. The costs of doing advertising on Facebook is the cheapest it is every going to be so if you are not advertising on Facebook you are greatly missing out. Imagine being able to get new patients for as low as $3.00 a patient. That’s absolutely stunning and no other advertising platform even comes close to these type of results. But it won’t stay like this forever, every year lots of new small local businesses will pile in and start driving advertising costs up. Right now is the best time to start if you haven’t already.
If you would like help implementing any of these strategies above or would simply like to learn more then please book an appointment below so we can chat about growing your practice. I’ve helped several dentist grow their dental practice dramatically and I would like to do the same for you. I look forward to speaking with you!