How to give your practice a marketing makeover

By Angus Pryor, MBA (Marketing)

If your service is good but your new patient numbers are not, you probably need a marketing makeover. In this article, we look at the exact steps to make this happen at your practice.

Step 1. Find your ideal patient

Every single dental practice in Australia has a sweet spot for the types of patients that they serve best. Trying to be all things to all people is a recipe for disaster and must be avoided.

The first step in your marketing makeover is to look at your data and identify the common characteristics of the patients that have historically been the best value for your business. To do this, run a report of the top 30 spenders at your practice in the last year. Almost every practice management software can do this. If need be, ask your provider how to generate this.

The reason we go after the top 30 spenders is this group is a combination of patients: • With a need for more dental services than just an annual check-up and clean; and • Who have trusted you to pay for those more expensive services.

This is the group we want more of - they trust you and they’re willing to spend. If you were to target patients without regard to their historic spending habits, you might end up attracting patients who don’t care about their oral health and won’t follow your treatment recommendations. That makes for unhappy dentistry.

Once you’ve identified the top 30 spenders, look at their demographic data such as their age, gender, suburb, occupation, educational background, family composition and so on.

There will be a spectrum but if you kind of squeeze them all together, you will come up with the series of averages i.e. among the top 30 patients, the average age is 45, the most common gender is female, their occupation is a teacher, etc. This aggregate person is what is known in marketing as your “avatar”.

Step 2. Personify your ideal patient

Now that you know the profile of your ideal patient (your avatar), we want your marketing to speak directly to that person. This next step in the process is kind of fun. Firstly, give your avatar a name, e.g. Mary.

Next, get together with your team and try to “look through the eyes of Mary” at your practice. This means asking questions like “what would Mary tell her friends about this practice?”, “what does Mary love about this practice?“, “what fears have we helped Mary to overcome?”. These kinds of insights are essential for attracting more “Marys” to your practice.

Step 3. Get the messaging right

It’s a surprise to some people, but the actual words that you use to describe what you do and the unique offer that you make to your potential patient, is really the most important part of your marketing.

Attractive images and broad exposure of your message form part of the picture, but the precise words you use are very, very important.

In my experience, this messaging is the one area most practices get wrong. Their messaging is frankly more often written for other dentists (“we have abc technical skills and xyz equipment”, etc) rather than speaking directly to your all-important avatar in a way they understand.

To avoid dentist-focused messaging, aggregate all of the feedback from the session at Step 2 above and then hand this text over to a professional copywriter.

You could do this writing yourself, but this step is so important that it’s better to get a professional involved. Once you have received perhaps a page of text from the copywriter that vividly describes what you do for your avatar and you’re happy with it, it’s time to start spreading that message.

Step 4. Marketing funnel

Now that you know who your ideal client is and you have a message that speaks directly to them, it’s time to set up a marketing “funnel” that drives your potential patients to your practice.

This funnel comprises three parts: a. Your unique message distributed in various marketing “channels” where your avatar is likely to hang out’ b. These messages drives potential patients to your website; and c. The website asks visitors to make an appointment.

An important part of part a of this process is to think about where your avatar actually hangs out. Channels to attract a 60-year-old are very different to those that attract a 20-year-old. Fortunately, you can play the odds and start in order of the most popular channels and work your way down to the least popular channels - more on that below.

Note: In a competitive, “noisy” marketplace, relying on just one form of external marketing is fraught with danger and more likely to be completely unsuccessful. Prospective patients need to see your message multiple times before they decide to become a patient.

Put it this way, would you go and see a movie after hearing about it just once? Probably not. By the time you actually attend, you’ve seen or heard about it multiple times via multiple “touch points” (social media, TV ads, bus shelters, etc). It’s the same for marketing your practice.

In our experience, the following is the hierarchy of channels to market your services to - ordered from most likely to be successful to least likely to be successful: 1. A strong “organic” presence in Google - this means appearing on the map and showing up in the unpaid listings; 2. Google ads - this system is completely separate to point 1 above but provides a good addition; 3. An internal referral system - good patients refer good patients, make it easy for them to do so; 4. Boosting your Google reviews - potential patients look for your Google reviews to reassure them that visiting your practice is the right choice; 5. A strong presence in social media - given declining visibility for business social media pages (unless you pay for ads), this step is about reassuring people who come to check what you’re like; 6. Local marketing - this can include sponsoring sports teams, community groups, schools, ads at cinemas, etc; 7. Letterbox drops - can work, often doesn’t; and 8. Radio, TV, newspaper - problematic because most people won’t travel far to the dentist - can work in regional areas.

Step 5: Capture more data

Once your marketing makeover is in place, the final step is to capture information on what’s working and what’s not. On your new patient form, make sure that you ask your new patient to identify ALL the places that they came across you, not just one.

Otherwise, they’re likely just to indicate the last place that they became aware of you rather than all of them. As noted above, successful marketing in 2022 is not about one marketing message in one place, but rather the aggregate of many touch points.

From time to time, aggregate the feedback from your new patient forms and adjust your marketing channels from there. If you find no one ever mentions a particular marketing channel that you use, then it may be time to kill it and move onto something else.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive environment like dentistry, having sound marketing activities really is a must. Implementing the steps above for a marketing makeover maximises your chances of attracting a steady flow of new patients to your practice.

About the author

Winner of the ADIA 2020 Marketing Award and Australia’s number one Google-ranked dental marketer, Angus Pryor is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, marketer and international speaker. Want a makeover but need some help with the process? Visit www.AngusPryor.com and book a free call.