18 Dental Marketing Messages to Get New Patients in the Door

This article is part of our series about improving your dental practice. You can find the links to the other articles at the bottom of the page.

Acquiring new patients for your dental practice can be challenging. Many practices have begun using one simple strategy: sending out unique, creative, engaging marketing messages to leads that encourage them to schedule dental exams.

Crafting effective dental marketing messages requires using the right marketing mediums and developing marketing ideas that reach your target audience. Such mediums can include social media, SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, text messaging, email, and more.

We’ve created this guide to help you learn everything you need to know about effective dental marketing messaging. Read on to discover the most successful dental marketing messages to get new patients in the door and other tried-and-true marketing ideas to promote your dental practice.

1. Prompt Patients to Focus On Preventative Dental Care

Often, prospective patients neglect to schedule dental appointments until they begin experiencing issues, such as tooth pain. One way to get new patients to schedule with your practice is to educate them about the importance of preventative dental care.

Sending email messages about the types of preventative appointments people should schedule each year can encourage your potential patients to schedule an appointment, turning them into new patients.

2. Send Friendly Reminders – You Care and the Value of Treatment

Developing a positive reputation within the dental industry is an essential step in maintaining steady growth over time. One easy way to improve your reputation is to send out friendly reminders to current and new dental patients about how much you care about their experiences with your practice.

These friendly reminders can include messages about:

• Your commitment to creating a positive patient experience
• The steps you take to reduce dental phobias
• The value your treatments provide for your patients’ health and wellness

You can send these messages through email, text, or direct mail.

3. Suggest Gift Giving Options From Your Dental Office for a Loved One

One way to engage prospective and current patients during the holiday season is by sending out a list of dental-related gift ideas they could consider for their loved ones. These ideas may include:

• A dentist-recommended toothbrush
• Tooth-shaped planters
• A dental gift basket
• Whitening toothpaste

You can post these gift ideas on your social media platforms, send them in emails, or post them on your blog. While they may not entice readers to visit your practice, they will probably increase engagement with your brand, which is an equally important marketing tactic.

4. Create Gift Giving Email Marketing Campaigns Offering Dental Treatment Discounts

If you want to be even more direct with your holiday-centric marketing campaign, you can also offer dental treatment discounts that new patients can use around the holidays.

Often, consumers wait to make significant purchases until the holiday season, when they know businesses typically offer discounts. If someone has been putting off scheduling a dentist appointment with a new practice, they may be more likely to schedule with you when they see that your practice offers a holiday discount or referral deal.

We recommend sharing information about your holiday discounts in social media posts, email messages, and direct mail campaigns. Using each of these communication methods is essential to reaching the most people through your dental marketing strategy.

5. Send “Use It or Lose It Before Year-End” Insurance Reminders

Dental insurance deductibles and discounts often reset at the beginning of the new year. However, with the busyness of the holiday season, many people forget to take advantage of their insurance discounts before the year ends.

Sending a “use it or lose it before year-end” dental marketing campaign is an excellent way to create a sense of urgency and encourage patients to schedule with your practice. Patients who may not have even considered coming in for another appointment may decide to once they realize their insurance benefits are about to reset.

6. Give Free Consultation Offers to New Patients

Offering new patient deals is an easy way to bring new patients to your practice. When potential patients search for a new dental practice to schedule with, cost is one of the most significant factors they consider. If your practice can offer a better price than others, people may be more likely to choose you over the competition.

If your office can afford it, we recommend giving free consultations to new patients who schedule within a designated period. You can advertise this offer on social media, through email, and through direct mail.

Every new patient that you get in the door with this offer has the potential to become a life-long patient. As a result, investing in referral deal up front can produce a significant return in the long run.

7. Share Patient Testimonials

When potential patients consider which dental practice to schedule a new appointment with, they often look to existing patients’ experiences to narrow their choices. We recommend sharing testimonials from old patients on your social media pages or website to help develop a positive image for potential new patients.

Sharing dental patient testimonials can produce similar benefits to patient referrals, giving new patients the push they need to schedule with your practice.

8. Offer Dental Hygiene Tips

The most effective dental practice marketing campaigns use a healthy balance of direct and indirect marketing tactics. If you only send patients messages inviting them to schedule an appointment, they may begin to tune out your messages, making your other marketing ideas ineffective.

Instead, we recommend balancing your direct marketing messages with more casual dental tips and tricks. For example, you can send out a list of ten tips to maintain proper dental hygiene or five tips to determine when to schedule a dentist appointment.

9. Respond to Common Patient Questions

Do patients regularly call your practice with the same questions? If so, creating a social media or blog post with the answers to frequently asked questions could benefit your practice in several ways.

First, keeping these answers on your website can give patients an easily accessible location to find the answers to their questions without needing to contact your practice. Additionally, an FAQ page could increase your website’s SEO rankings, bringing more users to your site.

Finally, sending this information in an email can increase engagement with your practice, which could be enough to convince one or two patients to schedule an appointment.

10. Give a Tour of Your Dental Practice

Fear is one of the biggest reasons people decide not to schedule a dentist appointment. Even when individuals know how important dentistry is, a bad experience with a previous dentist or an overall phobia of dental work could prevent them from scheduling with you.

One way to help ease this sense of fear in your potential new patients is to record a video tour of your practice. When people see this video, they may feel more confident coming to your practice for the first time. They may also see how friendly and welcoming your staff is, giving them peace of mind that they will have a good experience.

With Weave, you can automatically send a link to this video to everyone who enters their email address on your website. When your first interaction with a prospective new patient showcases your team’s friendliness and your office’s welcoming atmosphere, they may be more likely to go ahead and schedule an appointment.

11. Establish Yourself as a Dental Expert

When a new patient researches your office, they want to feel 100% confident in your expertise and authority as a dentist. Creating authoritative, informative content for your social media platforms and your website is one way you can establish your expertise before new patients come to your practice.

We recommend stating your years of experience, training, and certifications on your website. Additionally, whenever you receive new certifications or undergo additional trainings, you can send out an email announcement to inform your patients.

You can also establish your authority by writing blog posts and social media posts that showcase your knowledge within the dentistry field.

12. Ads With Compelling Call to Actions (CTA)

Paid ads are some of the most effective digital marketing tools you can use when advertising your business. Today, paid advertising through platforms like Google AdWords (also known as Google Ad) and Facebook Ad has a much farther reach than physical advertising through billboards or pamphlets.

Pay per click, or PPC, ads are some of the most popular digital ads for online dental marketing. When you publish Google PPC ads to market your business, you only need to pay for these ads when people click on them, saving you money and enhancing your ROI.

Google PPC ads can allow you to reach patients who may not seek out your services organically. However, to make these Google ads the most effective, you must use strong calls to action that encourage viewers to call your practice, schedule an appointment, participate in a referral deal, or engage with your practice in some way.

13. Consistent Dental Office Branding Shows Professionalism

When creating content to share on social media or your website, you should always ensure that the language you use and the messages you convey create a consistent image of your brand. Consistency is a vital aspect of developing a professional reputation through your dental practice marketing strategy.

14. Use Videos To Show Your Smile, Staff, Personality, and Presence

In content marketing, videos tend to create more engaged responses from viewers than written content or images. One way to enhance your dental marketing strategy is to begin producing videos that encourage prospective new patients to schedule with your practice.

Your video content doesn’t need to be complex. One dental marketing idea for how to showcase your practice through video is to record your staff doing what they do each day. Showing how friendly and personable your employees are can help viewers feel more comfortable scheduling a first-time appointment with your team.

15. Add Videos to YouTube- A Popular Search Engine

Posting your videos to YouTube can increase their reach, allowing people in your area to discover your practice. However, when you post your dental practice videos to YouTube, you should make sure to use search engine optimization, or SEO strategies to help potential viewers find your content.

SEO strategies can help your YouTube video rise to the top of Google and YouTube search engine results when people search for related keywords and video types. Here are a few YouTube SEO marketing ideas to increase your rankings:

• Conduct SEO keyword research to determine what keywords to use in your title and description
• Add tags to the video
• Make longer videos
• Insert SEO keywords naturally in your video title

Without these SEO strategies, your YouTube video will not reach many people. Putting time and attention into YouTube SEO is just as important as filming high-quality content for your YouTube channel.

16. Add Videos to Your Dental Website

Along with adding videos to social media and YouTube, you should also post all of your videos to your website to make it easier for viewers to find them. One of the easiest ways to organize videos on your site is to make a designated tab at the top of the homepage that reads “Videos” and links to a page with all of your video content.

17. Text Messaging With Patients Offers Flexible Patient Communication

Prioritizing communication with existing, potential, and new patients is essential to your dental practice’s success. One way to enhance patient communication is to use a platform that allows you to send automatic text messages to patients.

Weave is a digital marketing automation platform that uses innovative technology to send texts to patients and interpret their responses for you, saving you time and improving your communication.  Here is some more information about the types of text messages you can send with Weave.

Easy Two-Way Texting

Weave allows you to send personalized text messages that your patients can respond to with their own messages. This platform makes it easy to text back and forth with patients from any business device, such as a tablet, smartphone, or computer, while using your business’s phone number.

Some patients may feel more comfortable reaching out to your practice over text than through a phone call. Weave’s two-way texting platform can give these patients an easy communication method to ask you questions and schedule appointments.

Missed Call Text Messages

Many dental practices struggle with managing high call volume. One way you can remain professional and attentive when you miss patient calls is by using Weave to send automatic text messages to patients after they call your practice. These texts can save you time and ensure that patients feel heard when you miss their phone calls.

Review Requests via Text

You can also use Weave to send automatic texts to every patient after they leave their appointments, inviting them to leave online reviews of your practice.

Gather Positive Patient Reviews on Google & Facebook for a Stronger Online Presence

Your Google and Facebook reviews play a significant role in your online reputation. When patients leave negative reviews of your practice, anyone who searches for your office by name can read these reviews, shaping their opinions of your office.

While receiving negative reviews is inevitable for most dental practices, you can balance negative reviews with positive ones by requesting that patients leave Google reviews after their appointments. We recommend using Weave to send an automatic review reminder to every patient as soon as their appointment ends.

Using the right dental marketing tools and strategies is essential to getting new patients in your door and encouraging past patients to continue scheduling with your dental business. We recommend using a combination of digital marketing and local SEO tactics, organic messaging ideas, and Weave automation tools to create the most effective advertising strategy.

Are you interested in learning more about Weave? Contact us today to request a free Weave demo for your dental office.

Check out the other articles in our “Improving Your Dental Practice” series:

1. How To Use Dental Email Marketing To Grow Your Practice
2. Local SEO For Dentists Made Easy
3. Facebook Ads For Dentists (Getting Started)
4. The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Dentists
5. How To Attract New Patients To Your Dental Practice -8 Proven Tips
6. 18 Dental Marketing Ideas To Increase Your Dental Sales

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