Starting your very own dental practice can seem like a dream come true for many new dentists, but the truth is that getting your dental practice off the ground is only the first step. Without properly marketing your new dental practice and attracting patients, your dental practice won’t be able to grow or even stay afloat. A dental practice is a business like any other, and just like any other business marketing is an intrinsic part of your success.
Although marketing your dental practice can seem scary and difficult, there are a few easy and practically free ways that you can get the word out about your new private practice. By following a few easy tips, you can make sure others in your area know about the quality service that you’re excited to offer them. Here are three fantastic tips for how to market your dental practice as easily as possible.
Get To Know Your Community
One of the most important parts of marketing any business is doing appropriate market research to understand the needs of your potential clients and how you can differentiate your own business compared to your competition. With a dental practice, your most likely source of customers is probably your immediate community, which makes market research a lot less difficult and costly.
A great way to get the word out about your new practice and get to know your potential clientele at the same time is hosting neighbourhood meet-and-greet when you first open your practice. Alternatively, you can call local phone numbers or even go around offering pamphlets to families around your dental practice and talk to them about their dental needs.
Engage With Social Media
Another simple way to engage with your potential patients is through social media. An Instagram, Facebook or Twitter profile is an easy and free way of reaching potentially thousands of people at once, as well as making it easy for anyone looking for your dental practice online to find you and reach out.
You can talk to potential and existing patients on social media to get feedback and understand how you can better serve patients in the area. It’s also a fantastic channel for you to distribute marketing materials, or announce any updates or news about your dental practice instantaneously. You can even hire a social media manager to maintain and expand your dental practice’s social media presence and engage with patients full time.
Have A Strong Online Presence
Finally, if you’re willing to put in a bit more effort than just opening a social media profile, a website can be a fantastic way of finding new patients without having to pay for costly advertisements or marketing supplies. You can host a website for free on platforms like WordPress or Blogspot, or pay a small monthly fee to build your website on services like Squarespace.
There is an abundance of tools and services nowadays to allow small business owners to create their own websites without any coding or web-building knowledge. A website can also allow you to take advantage of search engine optimization by using words people commonly search in relation to dental practices so that search engines like Google will display your website more prominently to potential patients.