It takes a lot of work and resources to make a dental practice succeed. Not only should you focus on running your practice and handling patient appointments, but you should also be working on your dental marketing in order to help your practice grow.
However, because of all of the technical work involved to make a practice work, plenty of dentists end up forgetting to focus on the most important thing of all: the patient’s experience.
While it might be easy to brush off the concept of prioritizing a patient’s experience when you’re doing all you can to help them with their dental health, you should know that it plays a bigger role in your practice’ inner workings than you think. Find out how bad patient experience can affect your dental marketing here.
Bad experiences yield bad reviews
The reason why bad patient experiences affect your marketing is almost unreal in how simple it is. When patients have bad experiences with your practice, they will end up posting about their experiences on various platforms, whether it’s on your dental website itself, or on your social media profiles.
The issue with this is that when potential patients look up your practice, they will see these reviews, which means that it’s going to affect whether or not they decide to choose your dental practice for their dental health needs. The entire scenario results in a snowball effect, where a single bad review can ultimately affect other parts of your practice.
It’ll affect your word of mouth
No matter what advancements have been made in online technology, word of mouth is always going to be one of the most effective forms of online marketing today.
The same way that a bad review will turn the tide for you online, a patient who has had a bad experience with your practice will tell their family and friends, who will, in turn, tell their families and friends. This leads to a huge hit to your brand loyalty and can cause you to lose out on quite a bit of business.
It will end up costing you more
You may not know this, but it will cost you more to attract new patients than it would be to retain existing ones. If you combine this with the fact that your online and offline reputation is suffering because of bad patient experiences, you will find that you are spending significantly more on your dental marketing just to get your numbers up. It is far easier and more effective to provide a great experience for your patients than to have to go through all of that.