4 Innovative Strategies to Market Your Dental Implant Services
Dental implants, including all-on-4 and all-on-X dental implants, are a significant revenue source for dental service providers.
Last year, Fortune Business Insights valued the dental implants market at $4.15 billion, and it’s expected to grow by 6.7 percent annually through the next decade. With over 3.5 billion people worldwide suffering from some form of oral disease, including three-quarters of people living in middle-income countries, dental service providers have ample opportunities to expand their patient caseloads, increase revenue potential, and provide more people with vital oral health services.
However, reaching those people is more complicated than identifying the need. Many dental service providers readily acknowledge that marketing isn’t their greatest forte. According to one survey, nearly 40 percent of dental practices say better marketing strategies would make their office more productive and profitable.
Determining an appropriate marketing budget, establishing relevant KPIs, and ensuring positive ROI can take time and effort. Fortunately, marketing your dental implant services doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive or overly onerous. Here are four creative ideas that any practice can use to market its dental implant services.
#1 Strengthen Your Online Presence
In the digital age, online presence is synonymous with business opportunity. Strengthening your online presence makes your practice more visible to potential patients, generating leads, cultivating engagement, and educating visitors.
Specifically, practices should consider implementing digital marketing strategies to maximize their reach and potential. This includes:
Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of enhancing your website and content to make it easily discoverable on search engine results pages. Best practices include keyword optimization, link building, and improving site usability.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This digital marketing model allows businesses to pay a fee each time one of their online ads is clicked. Functionally, this means practices are buying visits to their website rather than earning them organically.
Social media campaigns. A survey conducted by the Journal of Contemporary Dental Practice found that just 52 percent of practices leverage social media to connect with their patients. Meanwhile, 82 percent of the U.S. uses at least one social media account, meaning there is ample opportunity to leverage social media to increase referrals, attract new patients, or drive people to your website.
Strengthening your online presence can be as simple as taking small steps to elevate your offerings, or an expansive, ground-up rebuild to modernize your digital footprint.
#2 Cultivate Online Reviews
Prospective dental patients are doing their research before walking in your front door. They read online reviews and ratings, using past patients’ experiences to inform their decisions.
Encourage and incentivize current patients to spread the word about their experience through online reviews, social media comments, and patient testimonials.
More than one-third of patients experience “dental fear,” or acute worry about the impact of their dental procedure. Dental implants can be especially scary or confusing, and online reviews can bring calm and clarity to your practice’s efficacy and impact.
Notably, many dental consumers trust online reviews as much as a person's recommendation, making them an especially useful tool for dental practices offering cutting-edge oral health solutions. Practices can encourage current patients to leave reviews on websites like Google or Yelp, while also developing patient testimonials that narrate a person’s experience with your practice.
You can encourage reviews by sending follow-up emails or text messages after appointments and offer incentives, such as discounts or free services, for leaving a review. Don’t forget to respond to positive and negative reviews to show that you truly value your patients’ feedback.
#3 Create a Patient Persona
Hypothetically, everyone is a potential implant customer. In reality, this market is much more limited as cost considerations, practice locations, and other factors limit who practices can actually reach.
By creating a patient persona, practices can more precisely engage their target audience, cultivating marketing collateral that is more effective and impactful than a generic marketing approach. A patient persona is a detailed description of a typical patient, including information such as demographics, pain points, and decision-making processes.
Once you have created a patient persona, you can use this information to tailor your marketing efforts to more effectively engage your target audience.
#4 Emphasize the “Wow” Factor
Patients want healthy smiles, honest dentistry, and affordable prices. They also want a great experience. Practices can deliver incredible customer experiences by emphasizing the “wow” factor — the elements that surpass patient expectations — leading to a sense of delight and surprise.
For many practices, this means leveraging innovative technology like digital impressions. This cutting-edge technology enables the creation of accurate 3D models of a patient's mouth, which can be displayed on a screen in real time.
The visualization enables patients to better comprehend their dental health situation and the proposed treatment plan, fostering enhanced communication and understanding between the patient and the dentist.
When patients are surprised and delighted by their experience, they are more likely to return to your practice in the future, tell others about your services, and contribute a positive review or testimonial. This “wow” factor can serve as a foundational pillar for a thriving practice.
Marketing to Maximize Impact
In the ever-evolving world of dental healthcare, standing out from the crowd is not just about offering high-quality services; it's also about communicating, engaging, and building trust with your prospective patients.
By strengthening your online presence, cultivating online reviews, creating a patient persona, and emphasizing the "wow" factor through cutting-edge technology like digital impressions, you are not just selling a service but an experience that can improve lives.
To make the most out of these strategies, it's crucial to continuously adapt and innovate. Remember, success in marketing your dental implant services doesn't happen overnight. It's a process that requires persistence, creativity, and a deep understanding of your patients' needs and expectations.
If you’re ready to enhance your patient experience and grow your practice, consider partnering with Dental Science. We provide the latest technologies and strategies that can help you make a significant impact on your patients' lives — and on your bottom line. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can help you transform your dental implant services.