What are the key ingredients in attracting more new patients to your practice and at the same time significantly increasing practice profitability?
After several years of successfully working with dental practices throughout North America to increase new fee-for-service (and other) patient flow, we have identified several key ingredients, the first of which we will review here.
1: Quality of Product and Service
Without high product and service quality, there can be no lasting improvement in the practice’s health. It will always be a struggle to maintain new-patient growth, and patient retention and referrals will also be very low. It is a marketing maxim that no marketing can really succeed on the back of a poor product, and that word of mouth itself is an important part of the marketing mix.
What do we (from a marketing point-of-view) mean by “Quality of product and service”? After extensive research and patient surveys in dental practices, we have identified many hot buttons that patients consider when evaluating the quality of service and product. These cover the staff, practice, doctor(s) and treatments.
Among these are universal buttons such as being friendly and helpful, and, of course, doing a good job for the patient, which is a major factor in long-term marketing success. If you want to find out what your patients’ and prospective patients’ hot buttons are, you can pull out your clipboard and survey them to find out what’s important to them!
Marketing specific dental services, such as Invisalign®, dental implants, veneers, etc., also comes into play under quality of service, as people perceive the dentist as more expert and experienced as a result. Of course, the more trained and experienced the dentist is in the specific service, the more a) word of mouth will be generated, and b) the more marketable the dentist is. It looks very good on a website to show a lot of continuing education in prestigious institutes, for example!
