How to attract new patients to your cosmetic dental practice

So, you know who your audience is, and you know your goal – to get new patients for your practice. Now you need to figure out how best to reach them.

You don’t want to inundate them with your message, but you do want your business and services to be something your potential audience sees more than once. Hopefully, they will be thinking about you when they need a dentist or a service that only a dentist can provide.

There are two ways to deliver your message. There are traditional ways to advertise on the radio, or on television. And there is the digital realm. In either space, you can pay a person or a team to do your advertising work. With digital marketing, your team can create the content and then spend the time to promote you on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, or on Yelp or Google. You can also pay for ads in these digital spaces and let the algorithm work for you.

Say someone searches for your service online and comes across your ad. If they need a dentist right away, then you may have a new patient.

What’s the best use of your dollars?

Let’s look at your ad spend more carefully. As an example, say your ad spend is going to be around $4,000 a month. That amount includes your team doing the creative – or the content – and then promoting it on various platforms.

To break it down further, you are paying someone to spend 30 minutes a day to create content. If their hourly rate is $50 to $60 an hour and they’re doing it 30 minutes a day, that’s 2.5 hours each week, or 10 hours a month. With more than one person doing that, it could turn into 20 hours a month.

That adds up. The monthly cost might run you anywhere between $1,500 to $2,000. With traditional advertising, you’d still need to pay for the placement of your message on top of the creative. Your spend for digital placement will vary on the hours clocked by your team.

With the opportunity for paid digital ads, there is an investment too, but there is also more of a guarantee.

What is a guarantee?

With paid digital ads, you can tie the product to the process. There is more of a track record with a program Google Ads. You can look at a similar campaign and see how many patients a set spend would likely get you. There’s a lot of data already there and strategies that have been proven to work for other companies.

Back to the scenario of your $4,000 budget. Just one loyal, a new customer has a lifetime value of between $5,000 to $15,000 to your practice. Maybe the paid ad brings you 10 patients. That is plenty of future potentials.

You still need a team to create the content but maybe not as much or not as often if you also choose to go with paid advertising as well. A paid campaign can target your audience in the right way and at the right time to convert them.

You are building that relationship with the customer even if they don’t know it. By the time they have an immediate need and see that ad on Google, Bing, or Yelp, they recognize your brand and your logo. They have been moved further along the process by some of your content. And when they walk in your door, they are primed to be more than a one-time customer. The rest is up to you.