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Attracting and retaining patients

Date: June 2022

Author: Natalie Bradley

How can you attract new patients to your dental office? How can you make sure you retain your current patients and they don’t go somewhere else? Check out some top tips when acquiring new patients and keeping existing ones. 

1. Establish an active online presence

Make sure you have a website which is optimized and easy to access, navigate and link this with social media accounts. Social media can be a great way to acquire new patients by posting before and after pictures, but also introducing your team and posting patient reviews. 

You can use online platforms for advertising, and ensure you are top of the search engine algorithm when patients are looking for a new dentist. You can also have marketing strategies on social media platforms to acquire new patients, for example boosting posts, sponsored posts or working with social media influencers. There are also lots of other ways of online advertising such as posting blogs, pay per click, and offering online content to create a presence. 

2. Create a referral network 

Link with other health and social care professionals so that patients can be referred to you. This can be tricky as it may include potentially linking with a competitor dental office, but work together to see what you can both offer for patients. For example, do you have an in-house specialist that neighboring offices don’t have? Or do you have too many patients waiting for their routine hygienist appointments where your neighbors have lots of open slots? Work out a mutually beneficial relationship and work together to grow both of your practices

3. Nurture strong relationships with patients

Don’t forget your existing patients in all of this! Value their custom, send out reminders when they are overdue their appointments and make sure you make every encounter a good experience for them. Keep in touch with them between appointments by sending out information about keeping a healthy smile, or special offers for certain treatments for existing patients.

4. Consider offline advertising

While a lot of advertising is online as mentioned above, don’t underestimate offline advertising which may attract a different cohort of patients - for example articles and ads in local magazines, billboards or run local campaigns which give back to your community. This could be attending a health open day or festival to give oral health advice and signpost people to your office. 

5. And finally, be responsive and personable!

Whether they are a new or existing patient, people want to get individualized care and quick responses. Make sure your staff are trained in these values so that every patient encounter is optimized to make sure the patient is happy and will return to you!

 

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