If you’ve been following this blog or The Patient Attraction Podcast™ for any length of time, you know that I firmly believe that dental patients view dentists as interchangeable commodities.
Dentists are assumed to be competent. Patients don’t understand the differences in the quality of care, the achievable results, or the difference in the patient experience.
Unless you tell them and show them.
If you remain a dental commodity in the eyes of your prospects, they’ll have no reason to choose you. You and your competitors will be competing on an equal footing for the same pool of dental prospects. The odds are that you’ll be competing on the basis of price, which costs you money; specials, which cost you money; and extended hours, which cost you money.
Even worse, the new dental patients you’re likely to attract will be price shoppers and one-and-dones. You’ll need an immense amount of those patients to grow your revenues.
Why do dentists compete that way? Because everyone else is doing it, and they don’t know what to do. They don’t teach dental marketing in dental school.
Become the “Go-to” Dentist
If you’re going to grow your practice and get more patients, more profits, and more freedom, you’ve got to move yourself out of the “dentist as commodity” category. To accomplish that, you’ll need to give prospects reasons to prefer you over your competition.
There are many ways to stand out from your competition – your emails, your website, your content marketing, patient testimonials, and you involvement in the community. You might be thinking that all dentists have those, and you’d be right. Those other dentists, though, aren’t focusing their efforts properly because they don’t understand what patients want.
Dentists are busy marketing to impress each other, not to convert prospects to butts in chairs. They focus on touting their training, their experience, and their publications.
Dental prospects don’t care about that. They need answers to two questions:
1) Do I like this dentist?
2) Can I trust this dentist to solve my dental problems?
When all of your marketing works together to answer those two questions, you become the “go-to dentist.” Your practice becomes a dental destination. And you get more patients who are predisposed to trust and accept your case solutions.
Change your marketing
Your marketing has to focus first on your prospects problems in terms they can understand. Patients don’t think in terms of periodontal disease – their gums are pulling away from their teeth and their teeth are loose. Patient’s aren’t edentulous, they’ve lost all their teeth. Talk to people, not to dental professionals.
Once they know that you understand their problems as they themselves see them, you can demonstrate that you have the solutions to their problems in terms they’ll understand. People want to smile without embarrassment, eat without pain, and brush their teeth without bleeding. Think of the outcomes of your interventions as what the patients will realize, and you can’t go wrong.dental
Make yourself and your practice a dental destination. You’ll spend more time treating the cases you love to do, and you’ll have more, and more loyal patients. They’ll never view you as a commodity again.