Most dental and orthodontic practices today engage in marketing activities. The landscape has changed so that dental practices need to market themselves to stay in business. However, many dentist business owners try different marketing activities haphazardly to see what works without having specific aims in mind.
It’s critical to identify clear marketing goals for your dental practice so you can tailor your activities and investment around meeting those goals. It’s also how you evaluate whether your dental practice marketing is working.
Common goals for marketing may include building a strong brand awareness, business growth and targeting specific products or procedures. Keep reading to learn more!
Brand Awareness for Your Dental Practice
Often dental and orthodontic practices want to get their name out into their community so that potential new patients think of them 1st when looking for a new provider. They want to rank highly on Google searches and have a positive online reputation with glowing online reviews. Many would like to be active on social media with posts that engage their patients.
Outside of online marketing, many dentists want successful internal marketing as well – an exemplary patient experience, a robust internal referral flow, strong follow-up and effective communication with patients. Orthodontic practices often get involved in community service and local schools to market their business as well.
Building a strong brand awareness of your dental or orthodontic practice is a common goal for many dentist business owners. The most challenging part of this goal is how to measure it – it’s less tangible than something like your new patient flow per month. It’s also something that requires a long term sustainable marketing plan to achieve – it cannot be done overnight.
However when it works effectively, it will brand your practice as a central part of your community, and solidify your patient flow for years to come.
Business Growth for Your Dental Practice
Dental and orthodontic practices also commonly engage in marketing activities in order to grow their business. Each practice might have different priorities of what they measure. For some, new patients are the most important metric; for others it may be steady monthly production.
When your marketing goal is to grow your business, you’ll tailor your activities around incentivizing patients to come into your office. For example, an orthodontic office might offer the hottest concert tickets to the family that refers the most new patients over a given time period. A general dentistry office might run a promotion to offer free Zoom whitening with any dental implant procedure.
The goal of growing your business might be ongoing, or you may just want to try and keep your monthly production steadier and even out those ups and downs in your business. For example, February might be your slowest month so you may plan an Invisalign promotion during that month to boost your production.
When growing your business is a stated goal, it will direct your marketing activities to specifically target achieving that goal – meaning you won’t waste time or money on things that aren’t directly tied to your growth metric.
If growing your business is a primary goal, make sure you closely track your critical metrics to ensure that your activities are achieving your aims. If you find they’re not, adjust your strategy to meet your goals.
Procedure Specific Targeting for Your Dental Practice
Another marketing goal that dental practices often have is growing specific procedures. Maybe you’d like to do more dental implants, Invisalign or sleep apnea devices. This will tailor your marketing activates around growing certain measurable procedures or products.
Often strategies like Google Ads and Facebook Ads are an important part of a procedure-specific strategy. A tightly focused blog strategy can also help achieve this marketing goal. You’ll also want to ensure your dental practice website reflects these targeted procedures with plenty of keywords.
Growing specific procedures within your dental practice is an easily measurable goal to track. Still it’s important to give your marketing efforts time to come to fruition and see the results you desire. Typically it takes a minimum of 6-12 months to see the results that you’re aiming for, so keep this in mind when you’re evaluating your success.
Setting Marketing Goals Effectively
A critical part of any marketing plan is setting specific goals that you want to achieve. Without that, you’re just hoping something works and you may get frustrated when it doesn’t produce the results you want. Specific goals help you hone your focus and use your time and investment in the areas that are most important to your dental practice.
Often dental and orthodontic practice will have multiple marketing goals, so make sure to rank these so that you can focus on the most important ones first. Always take the time to measure your results so you know that your activities are working. Give marketing the appropriate time to achieve results, but also don’t hesitate to change your strategy if it’s not producing the outcomes you want.
We’d love to help you build an online or comprehensive marketing strategy for your dental or orthodontic practice! Contact us today to find out more. We customize all plans based on your needs and never lock you into contracts – we believe in earning your business every step of the way.