It’s no secret that dentists are in demand. With an aging population, more people are requiring dental work for the first time or needing to replace old fillings and crowns with new ones.
But how can you generate leads and attract these new patients to your practice?
In this article, we’ll explore 7 proven dental lead generation strategies you can deploy immediately to have new patients walk through your door each month and take your practice to a new level.
These strategies are:
- Optimize your website for search engines
- Provide educational material on dental care
- Create a video showcasing you and your practice
- Start a Referral Program
- Offer Lead Magnets
- Start Email Marketing
- Get your business onto Google Maps
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Dental Lead Generation defined
Dental Lead Generation is the process of attracting potential new patients to a dental practice.
For a dental practice, a Lead can be a future patient or the parent/guardian of a future patient. For instance, for an orthodontal practice, the Lead is the parent while the patient is their child.
Dental lead generation is very different from lead generation for other businesses because most people think they do not need to go to the dentist very often.
In fact, most people will get their car serviced more regularly than get their teeth checked by a dentist.
This creates a unique challenge for dental lead generation – how to create a sense of urgency?
The answer lies in providing education and incentives.
6 Ways Dentists can attract new patients to their practice
1. Optimize your website for search engines
Many people, when they need a new dentist or a doctor, will go online and start searching for one in their neighborhood.
If you do not have a website, they may not find out. And even if they do find you, the absence of a website can be a red flag for many potential patients.
Now, if you do have a website but it isn’t optimized for search engines, then it will not show up in search results. This would be as good (or bad) as not having a website in the first place.
So make sure you have a website and that it is properly optimized with the latest search engine optimization techniques. If you’re not familiar with SEO techniques are here’s a very good guide from the company Ahrefs.
Organic Lead Generation from your website using SEO must be one of the strategies you deploy to grow your practice.
But if you’re a dentist or an assistant to a dentist you probably don’t have the time to conduct SEO on your website. So we recommend hiring a local marketing agency which can assist you with this task.
2. Provide educational material on dental care
Putting educational material on dental care on your website can have two benefits:
- If a potential patient is searching for something related to dental care, they could stumble upon your practice.
- By educating a potential patient you are positioning yourself as an expert who can take of the patient when they need to see a dentist.
Here are examples of questions your potential patients may have for which you could provide answers:
- How often should I floss?
- How can I whiten my teeth at home?
- How can I know if my wisdom tooth is coming out?
- At what age will my daughter lose her first tooth?
- Can I treat gingivitis at home?
3. Create a video showcasing you and your practice
A video will help potential patients learn about you, understand what you do and get a peek inside your practice.
Give them a walk-through of your clinic. Let them see the latest equipment you have. Ask your dental assistants to participate in the video.
The video should be made to humanize you and your team. It should be your introduction to a new patient.
Not only will a video make your website more engaging, but it can also be used on your social media channels.
4. Start a referral program
One of the best ways to attract more patients is by word-of-mouth referrals from current patients! Offer an incentive for referring friends and family who need dental care. You could offer a free electric toothbrush or free teeth whitening or $50 off of their next visit.
There is no better lead generation technique than a happy patient recommending you to someone else.
If you’d be interested in building a referral program, here’s a thorough guide from Hubspot showing how to start one from scratch.
5. Offer Lead Magnets
A Lead Magnet is something of value that you offer a potential lead in exchange for their contact information like their email address.
An excellent lead magnet that you could offer through your website is a free consultation or a free checkup.
It could work like this.
On your website, you advertise that the 100 people who are not existing patients can get a free consultation if they fill out a form and give their email addresses to you. These are your Leads.
Then do a short check-up and consultation with each Lead. If a good percent of them convert into regular patients, your investment in the Lead Magnet will have paid off handsomely.
6. Start Email Marketing
Email Marketing can be an excellent strategy not only to acquire new dental leads but also to nurture then even after they become your patients.
Once you’ve used Lead Magnets to acquire email addresses for your newsletter, you can start repurposing the educational content from your website and send it to your subscribers once a week or once a month as a way of keeping in contact with them.
7. Get your business onto Google Maps
Most people will search for a dentist in their neighborhood. And they will search on google which will display google maps with all dentists in the neighborhood of the search.
For instance, here are all the dentists that google maps shows in the downtown Seattle area.
If your practice is not on google maps, you’re missing out.
Here’s Google’s explanation on how to get onto google maps.
But here’s a better one.
Summary
Dental lead generation can draw upon strategies and practices that are used by regular businesses to attract leads and get new customers.
Just like regular businesses, dental practices should also have a website that is optimized for search engines.
What makes dental lead generation special is that the dentist has an opportunity to educate potential patients on dental care.
A dental practice is also one that is conducive to referral programs because many people make decisions about which dentists to visit by asking friends or family for their advice.
And finally, people choose a dental practice that is close to where they live or work. This means simply by getting your dental practice onto Google Maps you have a chance of attracting someone who lives nearby.
