4 strategies to attract new dental patients

Joy Gendusa

Everyone needs a dentist. I don’t need to tell you that! But that doesn’t mean patients will automatically file into your practice without any effort on your part. If you’re not generating leads for your office, you’re losing patients to your competitors. It’s just a fact: other practices are marketing themselves, even if you’re not. So to keep your chairs full and your practice growing, you need to be proactive. However, that doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of money or even a lot of time. To that end, here are four proven strategies for generating your own leads.

Bring in 110% more leads with a patient referral program

Many dentists rely on referral marketing—and with good reason. Referrals are the easiest and cheapest leads to acquire. But while 83% of happy customers say they are willing to give referrals, only 29% of them actually do.1 That means you need to ask for them! This is as simple as saying to each patient, “Please tell your friends and family about us,” or handing out care-to-share cards. Even better, create a referral program.

For example, a client of mine, Jason Monroe, DDS, ran a month-long contest among his staff last year. He offered Apple products to those who brought in the most leads. His staff delivered: his new patients more than doubled that month—from 100 to 210!

But no dental practice can thrive on referrals alone. If you really want to grow, you need to embrace external marketing, too.

Reach 93% of potential patients with a robust online reputation

When you’re looking for a local business, where do you go? Google, most likely. But more specifically, Google Maps. Now, when a prospective patient googles “dentist” in your local area, the first result beneath a few ads is a large Google map. More and more prospective patients are conducting their searches directly on the Google Maps app for local results. These local map results are extremely valuable to dentists for two reasons:

1. Location-related searches have been growing 50% faster than mobile searches.2