It goes without saying that dental patient marketing is important. All dental practices know that. However, it’s difficult to identify what method works best to market to your patients and reach your target audience. When talking about marketing to patients, one cannot help but think about the importance of engaging with the community. We all know that dental practices are basically local businesses. We know that the target market is usually the local community. And yet we always find it difficult to market to this community.
There is no right or wrong answer on how you’re going to involve your dental clinic in the community. The truth is, local communities are usually very welcoming to local businesses. They like supporting local businesses because they feel more at home with them. When they need to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, they usually look into local diners and restaurants because these are more family-oriented. When it comes to dental practices, all patients want the same thing: quality of service. If you can provide the best and most excellent dental service, you won’t find it hard to market to your target audience.
Getting Involved in the Local Community
What does it mean to get involved in the community? It means your local community should know about you, your services, your operating hours, and how active you are in the community. There are many ways that you can involve yourself in the fabric of the community that you want to serve. You can be a little league coach. You can join the local community association and be part of the programs and activities that they host and organize. You can support and sponsor programs for kids. You can attend local schools to give seminars about oral and dental health.
You will never run out of things and activities that you can do for a community. It all depends on how open you are to serve the community that you want to market to.
Dental practices are essentially local businesses. If you are located in Lakeland, Florida, for example, you are not marketing to people living in New York or Chicago. You will market to the people who live near your clinic. That’s why dental clinics cannot be successful without the support of the local community. You should do your best to know who you are marketing to and be involved in their lives on an almost personal level.
Create a Community on Social Media
Social media give you another important method to create and build a community of patients. You should be active on the Internet and social media because that’s where your patients are mostly spending their time on. If you are not active on social media, your patients may forget about your dental clinic and may find another dentist to do work on their teeth and gums. It all starts with a well-designed website. Your website needs to be easy to navigate and be filled with important and relevant information that your patients can learn from.
Next, you need a social media account manager who can regularly post updates on these platforms to remind patients of your presence in the community. You can share links of videos and blogs on your social media to lead your target audience to your website or YouTube channel. On social media, you’ll be able to engage and listen to what your customers are saying about your dental practice. Your dental patient marketing will greatly benefit from the metrics that social media can provide.