Treating the teeth of your patients is no fun, especially when you don’t have customers lining up in droves at your office. Given the saturated market filled with highly skilled dentists looking for ways to make a buck, it has become more difficult for others dentists to not only make an impact in their industry, but to drive in more clients for dental services.
As a dentist, the real advantage you hold over your competition is knowledge on how you should market yourself, which is why you need to brainstorm for dental marketing ideas to draw more clients to your office for a check-up. It all boils down to highly targeted and cost-efficient dental marketing strategy using print media, which is what you’re going to learn about in this post.
Below are dental marketing ideas that you could use when developing your plan of accumulating more customers for the coming months. Let’s begin!
Send out Direct Mail
This type of marketing has been one of the most preferred strategies by dentists due to how their customers and potential clients receive their print media on their mailboxes. As a result, there’s a greater chance for your target market to get their hands on your postcard or brochure and read what you have to say.
Aside from the aforementioned print media, you can also send out flyers and catalogs to maximize your marketing mix for direct mailing.
First, you need a mailing list, which would contain the names and addresses of your customers or potential clients who will receive your mail.
This can be done by asking people to fill out the necessary information on your sign-up sheets. The sheets can be set up at your booths during healthcare events or conventions you plan on attending. If you have a website, you can set up a form that visitors can fill out so you can still collect their contact details online.
For WordPress users, download the easy-to-use Contact Form 7plugin to create your sign-up sheet. You can customize the different information that visitors can enter on the sheet. Once done, create a dedicated page for the sheet and link it on your homepage or place the sheet on the sidebar so people can easily see it.
Aside from the name and address, you could include information such as age, gender, and income level that you could use to build your demographics to help you segregate your mailing list accordingly.
If building your list from scratch proves cumbersome, then purchase a list from sites offering mailing services. Specify the demographics of your target market who will receive your mail.
Additional Resource: How to Send Direct Mail and Save Money
Choose Your Print Media
An example of a dental brochure from the Creston Children’s Dental Clinic with the intention of raising money to provide low-income students from public Portland schools.
Below are suggestions on how to use the aforementioned print media ideal for direct mail:
- Brochures – Describe the Features, illustrate the Advantages, and boast the ultimate Benefits. (Brochure Basics)
- Postcards – Make the front side design compelling enough so recipients will take a closer look at them. (Postcard Printing Design – 17 Examples of Promotional Postcards)
- Flyers – Address and solve a problem. (Fabulous Flyers)
- Catalogs – Their appearance should appeal to your audience. (Catalog Design Tips)
Also make sure that your print products have a persuasive copy and design so you can convince recipients to heed your call to action.
Take Advantage of Holidays
Since there is no work or school during the holidays, you can hold promotions on that day to drive more patients to your clinics. Here are some specific suggestions for the upcoming holidays:
- Hold discounts for your general cleaning services a week before school starts so student can begin the school year with a clean set of teeth.
- On Grandparent’s Day (first Sunday after Labor Day), repair or fix the dentures of senior citizens for free.
- Hold another promo for general cleaning a day after Halloween when children have consumed lots of candy.
Aside from applying direct mail to promote your promos for the upcoming holidays, you can display posters or banners in front of your clinic or at locations with high foot traffic. Flyers that are distributed at places where your target market can be found should also increase buzz to your promo.
Additional resource: Marketing Posters – Six Effective Tips
Inform people about their teeth
Much of the problem that stems from diseases in the oral cavity is the lack of knowledge on what causes these diseases and how to avoid them. People need to be informed and you, as dentist, must be the catalyst that would open their minds about the damaging effects of poor oral hygiene.
Take cue from this illustrated book about proper oral hygiene in Portuguese geared to children.
You can begin by placing brochures on the waiting area of your clinic so people can get a copy and read it while waiting for their turn or take home for further reading.
Make them remember their appointment date
To avoid the risk of your patients forgetting their dental appointments with you, hand out magnets the size of a business card with the appointment date written in front before they leave your clinic.
Your patients will be compelled to display the magnets on any flat metal surface they have at home – they would stick it on their ref doors or whiteboards along with their other reminders.
Also, design the magnets with your contact details so your patients can refer to them for your services. This ensures that the magnets can still be used even when the appointment date has elapsed.
Give thanks
Patients, just like any other customer, appreciate feeling special to their doctors. Therefore, share your love by sending out thank you cards or postcards to people a week after their first visit to your clinic.
Aside from showing them your appreciation for choosing you over other dentists, this is a way of increasing customer retention – by building a more personal relationship with your clients through cards, they will remember your services much easier once they need dental services.
Additional resources: Customer Retention with Postcards, Five Effective Marketing Ideas to Increase Repeat and Referral Sales
Now that we’ve covered most of the basic dental marketing ideas you should try out for your clinic, let us at PrintRunner help you in marketing your clinic! Click here to view all the print products mentioned on this posts, as well as other marketing mix you can use for your campaigns.
Read more: