Friday, April 26, 2013
There are many platforms in dental marketing and advertising including traditional print media, direct mail, websites and pop-up ads on the internet as well as paid commercials on television with one goal in mind; acquiring new patients. Let’s face it, every dentist is looking to grow his or her practice, and we’re all looking to bring in as many new patients as we can.
But even with all these marketing tools at our disposal, word of mouth and direct referrals remain the most powerful motivators driving new patients to a practice. A positive dental experience for one patient can lead new patients to your door, and quite often the way to provide that positive experience is to provide a pain-free dental appointment.
The patient’s perspective
Patients sit in our chairs because they fully trust our knowledge, experience and clinical capabilities to care for their oral health. However, what they are thinking about while looking up at our masks is; “please don’t hurt me.”
Consider this; you spend a half hour with a new patient, treating tooth #14 with an MOD composite bonded filling. You carefully excavate the decay, skillfully prepare the tooth with perfect cavosurface margins, etch, prime, place adhesive and composite, and cure for the appropriate time period. You spend a great deal of time creating a beautifully artistic representation of occlusal anatomy, and even place secondary grooves in the marginal ridges. Then you polish like you’ve never polished before. You’re proud of the artistic piece you have created, and you’ve provided a tremendous service to your patient.
However, when your patient goes home and reports back to his or her family and friends about this dental experience, are they going to tell them how wonderful your secondary grooves are? We all know the answer is no. But patients will remember whether or not you solved their problem, and if you did it without causing them pain.
In the past, patients leaving the dentist after a pain-free appointment might tell a co-worker, a friend or a family member. But in today’s world of social media, that patient is likely to spread the message to a much wider audience via Facebook or Twitter, and that positive experience has the potential to impact a far greater number of potential referrals.
It starts with providing a positive and pain-free dental experience for your patients. However, to truly maximize the social media impact of your clinical efforts you need to give patients a bit of extra encouragement to share their stories online. I know this equation can work because I’ve been involved in creating both tools for pain-free dentistry and an effective way to encourage patients to become social media marketers for dental practices providing positive experiences.
Patient comfort:
After more than two decades of providing dental care with a focus on patient comfort, in 2010 I invented the DentalVibe Injection Comfort System. Designed to block the pain of intraoral injections, the cordless, rechargeable, handheld DentalVibe delivers soothing, pulsed, percussive micro-oscillations, to “shake up” the site where an injection is being administered, sending a message to the brain, effectively closing the neural “pain gate,” and allowing for the comfortable administration of intra-oral injections.
Instruments such as The DentalVibe are what stand out in a patient’s mind following a positive dental experience. It’s simple to explain how it works, and the patient’s experience receiving a painless injection is a highly shareable story. Those artful secondary grooves might impress your colleagues, but patients are amazed by those simple extra touches that make their visit as comfortable as possible.
Marketing through Social Media:
Having the tools to deliver pain-free care is the first part of the process, and providing your patients with a forum to spread the word to their family and friends is the second. Some patients are likely to share everything they experience, good and bad, via Facebook or Twitter, but getting a large number of patients to talk about you and your practice on social media can require a little encouragement.
For clinicians using the DentalVibe, we have created an online patient sweepstakes that gives practices the tools they need to encourage positive patient testimonials. Participating practices give their patients an entry slip at the end of an appointment when the DentalVibe was used and the slip provides the patient with a promo code to use when posting a short testimonial about their experience, which is posted to the patient’s Facebook page or shared via email. The process is easy and patients are motivated by both a positive dental experience and the fact that they are automatically entered into a sweepstakes for the chance to win an Apple iPad mini monthly, and a year-end grand prize of $10,000.
Since the campaign’s inception a couple of months ago, 100s of dentists per week who are using the DentalVibe have been joining the program. Patient testimonials are pouring in, with some doctors receiving 10, 20 and upwards of 60 testimonials about them throughout Facebook thus far.
The support of DentalVibe gives this referral program a larger scope and broader reach than a program designed and run by an individual practice, but the basic concept could work for just about any dentist.
It starts with providing your patients with excellent care, a comfortable visit and making sure they know about the equipment and technologies you use to make their experience a great one. Next, provide patients with something to encourage their online social media testimonial. Of course the scale of the DentalVibe patient referral program allows for larger prizes, but even something smaller such as the chance to win a free whitening session, or a gift card can spur patients into action.
A win-win situation for all
Social media marketing is the easiest, fastest, and least expensive way to reach millions of potential new patients. As the thousands of DentalVibe Dentists around the globe participate in this patient referral program, new patients are drawn into our practices and we also accomplish the goal of improving our wonderful profession by reducing the anxiety and fear of going to the dentist.