If you’re a dentist who has never looked at your new patient numbers and asked, “What am I doing wrong?”, you should count yourself as being very fortunate.
The vast majority of dentists have ebbs and flows in their new patient stream. That’s just the nature of business of any kind; demand for services or products isn’t a constant. But if you’re hitting more dry spells than gushers, there may be something wrong with how you’re going about attracting new patients to your practice.
Once is coincidence. Twice is happenstance. The third time, it’s enemy action.
As a group, dentists tend take a static approach to their marketing. They experiment until they find a combination of online and offline marketing that seems to work fairly well, and they stick with it. That can bring reasonable results for some time. Where dentists fall down is when the competitive factors in their markets change.
The entry of a single competitor in a smaller market changes the dynamics. If only because of physical proximity to dental prospects, a new practice can siphon off some your prospects. Add in the additional marketing that a new practice almost certainly does, and you’re looking at a steady drain on your new patient numbers.
The situation is even worse if you suddenly have a corporate practice in your market. The chains have advertising budgets that beggar yours. They almost certainly have greater availability. And they can undercut you on price at every turn.
If you’re going to freshen your new patient stream, you’ve got to take a different approach to your marketing.
Stand Out to Stand Up
Dentists today are regarded as universally competent. It doesn’t matter how many certifications you have or where you might have done postgraduate work. The vast majority of your prospects don’t know the difference between one program and another.
If clinical competence and even expertise aren’t differentiators, you need to move on to other ways of persuading your prospects that you are the only logical choice to solve their dental problems. That’s not something you can accomplish through a traditional dental marketing approach. You’ll need a very strong social media presence focused on providing expert answers to prospects’ dental concerns. Your website and social media will have to work together to establish you as likable, relatable, and trustworthy.
One caveat – positioning yourself as the only logical choice for your prospects is very time consuming. While you’re creating all this content, you won’t be directly making a dime from it. You make money by seeing patients and solving their dental problems.
Fortunately, you don’t have to shoulder the burden of revamping your marketing approach yourself.
Are You Ready to Move On From the Same-old, Same-Old?
SmartBox works with more than 550 dentists on three continents to help them get more and better patients. Our proven, industry-leading Patient Attraction System™ is revolutionizing the way in which dentists attract the patients they want and need to grow their practices.
If you’re serious about your success, here’s what you should do. Go to www.PatientAttractionBlueprint.com and schedule your Practice Discovery System call. We reserve these calls for dentists who want to see a Patient Attraction System™ that can double or even triple their practices.
You may never again have to look at your new patient numbers and ask yourself, “What am I doing wrong?”