Promotional dental marketing

People are procrastinators; particularly when it comes to dentistry, they need a reason to come back in to see you. Incentive-based marketing is a great way to get your patients to come back in.

Promotions work. The statistics show this, with more than 81% of Australian consumers having purchased a product because of a promotional offer, and almost 40% having done so in the past thirty days.

By using the right promotions, retain existing patients, attract new patients, and sell a wider array of products and dental services to patients who have traditionally participated in a very small segment of what you offer. Incentives can help you leverage the power of referral-based marketing, too. More dental practices than ever are using this strategy to drive growth.

Planning your dental promotions

When thinking about what promotions and incentives you are going to use for your dental practice, think about:

• What you are trying to achieve.
• What your goals are for the promotion.
• What your budget is to run the promotion.
• What systems you have in place to track the conversion and ROI of the promotion.

Promotion ideas

There are many ways you can incentivise people to deal with you over another dental practice:

• Give away a low cost item or procedure to incentivise a larger procedure.
• Offer discounts to new patients.
• Offer referral incentives to existing patients who bring you new business.

I don’t generally recommend that you offer money off items in a patient’s treatment plan but you may wish to offer a gift as an incentive to accept the treatment.

Promoting your incentives

The key to making your incentives as successful as possible is to publicise them as widely as possible. You may have the most amazing promotions in place but if nobody knows about them, what is the point? You need to publicise them and market them across as many of your patient touch points as possible.

Most importantly, all of your staff need to know and understand the promotions that you are running and they need to be talking about them to all of the patients they come into contact with.

Tracking your dental promotions

As with all dental marketing campaigns, it is critical to track your promotions. Did they convert? What was the ROI of each campaign? Did people understand the campaign clearly or did they ask lots of questions that you had to answer?

As part of judging the success or failure of a promotion, you need to analyse the people that your promotion attracts. Did the patient that was attracted by the promotion stay or just come in for that one procedure, never to be seen again? All promotions need to be focused on attracting and retaining your ideal patient.