Direct mail has been a staple dental marketing strategy for decades. But is it still worth it? Even if it might work, is there a better way? How does direct mail marketing work? And how does it compare to other dental marketing strategies?

After all, there may be many dental marketing strategies that can be profitable, but that doesn’t mean they’re all created equal. The key to choosing dental marketing strategies is finding ones that are repeatable, profitable, and flexible.

The best dental marketing strategies are ones that work over and over again. They’re ones that are predictably profitable. They’re ones that are flexible enough to allow you to target the exact types of patients you want to attract with that ad.

Here’s how direct mail stacks up.

How Direct Mail Works with Dental Marketing

 

 

Direct mail is one of the simplest dental marketing concepts. All you need to do is send a bunch of promotional postcards or other mailers to everyone who lives in a neighborhood, town, or city.

As simple as it sounds, direct mail often takes a lot of time and requires a substantial up-front investment. Even the United States Postal Service’s Every Door Direct Mail service costs more than 15 cents per person for postage. You still need to design and print your mailers.

While you could work from templates or examples that have worked in the past, direct mail marketing tends to take a long time and require a significant upfront investment when compared to other dental marketing strategies.

How Direct Mail Campaigns Compare to Other Dental Marketing Strategies

 

 

As familiar as it is, direct mail marketing has significant disadvantages over other strategies, such as Facebook marketing, email marketing, and using dental marketing funnels.

For example, with Facebook, you can have an ad up and running within minutes. You don’t need to wait for graphic designers or delivery time. Simply use a high-res image from Facebook’s massive free image database, set your audience, add your text, enter your budget, and you’re up and running.

You can also target people with much more precision, such as people who visited your website, engaged with your content, who have certain levels of income, and more. You can get much more specific with your targeting on Facebook than direct mail.

You have virtually zero upfront costs with Facebook advertising. Images are free, and you can set an ad budget of a few dollars a day to test your posts. As your ads start performing, you can increase your budget from there.

Another advantage of Facebook marketing over direct mail marketing is your ability to test your ads. You can also easily run split tests of your ads on Facebook, having multiple versions of your Facebook ads competing against each other to see which version performs better.

Split testing direct mail marketing is much harder, more expensive, and not as accurate. You’d essentially need to run two or more full direct mail campaigns at once and manually measure which one brings in the most patients. With Facebook, the process is an automatic and accurate way to measure and consistently improve your dental marketing return on investment.

Direct mail is also generally a one-touch marketing strategy. Sure, people may put your postcard on their fridge or keep it visible, but many times your ad will only be seen one time per person. With Facebook marketing, email marketing, and dental marketing funnels you can easily get multiple touchpoints, and many times for free. Those multiple touchpoints help you make a much stronger connection with people.

Have you used direct mail successfully?

 

 

Although Facebook marketing, dental marketing funnels, email marketing, and other dental promotions are generally more efficient and effective, many dentists still achieve positive results from direct mail campaigns. If you’ve found success with direct mail campaigns, share your experience in the comments or on social media. Also, continue the conversation in my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group.

If you want even more info on how direct mail compares to other marketing strategies, listen to my interview with Dr. Shawn Van de Vyver on the Delivering WOW podcast. Dr. Shawn Van de Vyver sends postcards to people within three miles of his practice. In his experience, direct mail can work, but he’s had better results with Facebook ads.

One of the best ways to make your dental ads stand out is by adding images. To be effective, the images must be high-quality and consistent with your practice’s brand. If not, you could make a poor first impression, attract the wrong patients, and push away the patients who would be right for you.

Because images are protected by strong intellectual property laws, you need to make sure you have the right to use the images you want. Too many people have gotten into trouble by pulling images from a Google image search, only to learn the hard way that those images aren't free to use.

If you’re a member of Dental Profit Academy, be sure to visit our social media image database. There you’ll find a complete library of images we created just for you!

If you’re looking for additional images or aren’t yet a member of Dental Profit Academy, here are four more places to find high-quality images for your practice.

 

Free Stock Photo Websites

Free stock photo websites, such as Unsplash.com, Pixabay.com, and Pexels.com, have come a long way. Years ago, most free stock photos available were poor quality or boring.

Today, many talented photographers upload a sampling of high-quality images to free stock photo websites.

Facebook Ads Manager even integrates directly with a database of high-quality stock photos you can use for free. We find many amazing images that way when running split testing Facebook ads for our practice and with campaigns we manage for other practices.

While the free stock photos have come a long way, your selection may be limited. Also, with many people searching for free stock photos, the higher-quality images tend to appear on many websites, which may make your practice come across as less unique.

That said, free stock photo websites or even Facebook Ad Manager’s image database can be a useful option for many practices, especially when split testing multiple images for a Facebook ad campaign.

Paid Stock Photo Websites

Paid stock photo websites, such as ShutterStock.com and DepositPhotos.com operate similarly to free stock photo websites in that they provide a database of images you can search and download. One noticeable distinction, of course, is you must pay a small fee to use images, typically $1 or less per image.

While some people question why anyone would pay for stock images with so many free options available, paid stock photo websites do offer many advantages over free ones.

Paid stock photo websites tend to have a much larger selection. The images are also more consistently high quality and high resolution. With so many people searching for free images, a larger database, and more consistent quality, the likelihood of a paid-for image appearing on other websites is lower.

The larger selection of high-quality images makes it much quicker to find images. In our experience, you can find a quality image on a paid website in a matter of a few searches. Sometimes it takes several minutes or longer to find the right image on a free stock photo website.

Your time is valuable. Thus, the minimal outlay in cash might be vastly outweighed by the time it saves you.

Hiring a Local Photographer

 

 

Hiring a local photographer often requires a much larger investment of money than stock photos. That said, you generally get many unique, high-quality images you can use over and over again.

You might get hundreds of unique images of real team members, your practice, your community, and more from just one session with a local photographer.

Want to show off your gourmet coffee and tea section? A local photographer can make it happen. Want to get a group of images that perfectly capture your culture? No stock photo website can compete with a local photographer.

Local photographers will expertly frame images to show you, your team, and your practice in the best light. They can even professionally touch up images you intend to use as part of a media kit or branding package.

Having your own database of unique, high-quality images can also save you a lot of time searching for stock photos in the future.

Using Your Phone to Take Pictures for Your Dental Ads

 

 

Cell phone camera technology has come a long way in a short period of time. In fact, the cameras on newer cell phones are often better than professional cameras from a decade ago.

If you’re looking for high-quality, unique photos for dental ads and don’t have the time or budget to hire a local photographer, you might have a great solution right in your pocket.

Cell phone images generally give a more real-world look and feel to your pictures because you usually won’t get the level of framing, lighting, and editing you would with a local photographer. But sometimes that’s the look you want. You can take images of happy patients. You can record video testimonials. You can even snap day-to-day images that show you, your team, and your patients having fun. These everyday images are great for giving people a glimpse into your true practice culture.

Where Do You Find Images for Your Practice?

Your images will often be the first thing people notice when they see your social media posts or ads. If it doesn’t convey the visual message you want, you could be doing your practice more harm than good.

High-quality images are front-and-center when it comes to launching a successful dental marketing community campaign. If you want more patients from your community flowing into your practice — your first or next marketing campaign will need to be successful. But what if you’re not sure how to launch a successful marketing campaign?

TAKE ACTION TODAY:

Our upcoming Marketing & Practice Growth Challenge is for you. You will learn all the steps you need to make it successful, withOUT spending hundreds and thousands on ads. Click here to save your spot — and use the code CHALLENGE at checkout for 20% off!

You can also join my next Dental Facebook Bootcamp to learn how to use Facebook to bring in 30 or more new patients per month on autopilot – all while spending less than $500 on ads.

If you search online, you’ll find countless dental promotions. The sheer volume of them can feel overwhelming. But which dental promotions work the best? That’s what we’ll cover here.

The key to identifying the best dental promotions is more than just identifying which bring patients to a practice. We must make sure they’re worth the time and money it takes to run each promotion.

Here are examples of popular dental promotion ideas along with comments and questions you must consider before using them for your practice.

Discount Dental Exams or Cleanings Promotions

 

 

Discount dental exams and cleanings promotions are popular with big corporate dental practices. Because of that, many privately owned practices try to compete by discounting as well.

While that’s a natural reaction, we find discount promotions to rarely be worth it. In fact, we often advise people to leave discount exams or cleanings to big corporate practices and concentrate on other promotions.

You’ll never be able to make more and work less as an independent practice by offering discount exams and cleanings. You’ll have to work too hard to make the numbers work.

If big corporate practices are willing to do it, great. It might push you out of your comfort zone a bit. I get it. In the long run, other strategies will help you build a bigger and better practice.

Free Add-On Services, such as Free Teeth Whitening for New Patients

 

 

Strategically offering a free add-on service to a paid service can be a good way to offer value without discounting. If you’re looking to build a practice with people who are interested in cosmetic procedures, for example, offering free teeth-whitening for new patients can be a good strategy for attracting patients interested in cosmetic services.

Without having to deeply discount rates for the services that don’t fall within insurance programs, you can often quickly make up for the cost of the free teeth whitening by performing future cosmetic procedures on those patients. If the future cosmetic procedures include high-value procedures, such as dental implants, your return on investment can be very high.

Free Consultations for High-Fee Services

 

 

Some of the most profitable dental promotions you can run include offering free consultations for high-fee services such as dental implants, Invisalign, or crowns.

For example, we know that most new patients walk through four steps before becoming a patient. First, they become aware of you and your practice. Second, they become interested in you, your practice, or something you have to offer. Third, they decide to learn more about you and your practice. Finally, they make an appointment with you.

Let’s assume you want to attract dental implant patients. You could create a short checklist that helps people figure out whether they’re eligible for dental implants. Then you would promote it using Facebook ads.

That Facebook ad makes potential implant patients aware of you, step one of the four steps to becoming a patient. The checklist you deliver generates interest in your practice and dental implants, step two of the four steps. When they click on your ad and give you their email address to get the checklist, they take the third step.

Finally, after delivering the checklist and any follow-up emails to answer frequently asked questions, addressing common objections, and sharing before-and-after pictures and testimonials, you can ask them to make an appointment for a free consultation. If they’ve made it all the way through your checklist, pictures, and testimonials, they will have gotten to know, like, and trust you. At that point, they’re much more likely to move forward with a free consultation, the fourth step in going from a stranger to a patient.

With high-fee services, it only takes a small percentage of patients to move forward with the full procedure after the consultation to become extremely profitable.

What Dental Promotions Work Best for You?

When evaluating a dental promotion, be sure to not only consider whether a promotion will work to attract patients to your practice. Also consider whether it will attract the right patients to your practice. What might be a useful dental promotion for one practice may not be for another.

Start by setting your practice vision. Reverse engineer your profit goals. Then run dental promotions like these to attract the right people to your practice for the right procedures to help you achieve your vision.

TAKE ACTION TODAY:

If you want more help finding dental promotions that work best for you and your practice, you can join our Marketing & Practice Growth Challenge where we will help you implement your first or next successful marketing campaign from start to finish! Practices have seen increases of over 38,000% on their reach and have their posts shared up to 30 times during these campaigns. And we’ve helped over 300+ practices get results in this challenge: if that’s not a proven promotion then what is? If you would like our help from start to finish to run your next successful dental promotion, click here to learn more about the Marketing & Practice Growth Challenge and see what other practices have to say about it!

I talk with a lot of dentists about growing practices using social media and their websites. While many dentists are recognizing the power of social media and their websites, I’m often surprised by how many don’t think they work. Almost without fail, those dentists have been burned before. They’ll say they work hard to build a good-looking website and Facebook page but see no results. Nobody’s booking appointments. Nobody’s liking, commenting on, or sharing their posts. No patients come in.

For example, someone recently told me they spent $20,000 for a marketing company to brand their website and social media channels, but they saw no results. That gets me pretty frustrated and upset because I know exactly what happened as well as the results they could have received by using that $20,000 more effectively.

The truth is, effective online marketing doesn’t have to cost that much money. I’ve seen it happen time and time again where practices spend less than $500 a month and regularly attract new patients. Practices regularly attract 50, 100, or more patients per month on a $500 budget.

That $20,000 could have lasted more than three years on that budget and delivered dozens of new patients per month along the way. Instead, they feel like they got ripped off and think online marketing doesn’t work.

The Problem with a Branding Approach

 

 

There is a problem with taking only a branding approach to social media and your dental website.

A large amount of misinformation is out there about online branding for dentists. Because of that, a lot of people think if you’re intentional about your branding, you’ll get more patients. So they spend thousands of dollars building a beautiful website nobody visits. They post on their Facebook and Instagram pages highly produced videos that nobody watches. They spend lots of time and money posting consistently on social media channels.

What they don’t understand is none of your branding matters if nobody sees it. Your videos don’t matter if nobody watches them. Your social media content doesn’t matter if it doesn’t reach anybody.

I liken it to investing in traditional marketing strategies. Imagine spending thousands of dollars to rent a billboard nobody sees or to design a beautiful ad for a magazine that nobody reads. Nobody in their right mind would do that. They’d look for billboards or magazines they know will be seen by ideal customers. It’s the same thing with social media. A beautiful profile and great content is a waste if nobody sees it.

The same is true with dental websites. Too many dentists spend thousands of dollars building beautiful websites that have no way to convert visitors into patients.

A Better Way to Approach Social Media

 

 

When I work with people, I make sure to tell people the truth. And the truth is, you need to invest in getting people to see your content. That means investing a few dollars in advertising for your website and social media posts.

People I work with can get dozens of new patients per month because they invest in showing their posts to people, and the right people. Their content is great, but their money is directed more toward boosting their posts on Facebook or paying to promote them on Instagram and less on expensive branding.

I’ve seen many people spend less than $500 to advertise and get dozens of new patients per month by running targeted ads. Dr. Shaina Holman gets more than 100 patients per month using social media on a budget of $500 per month.

If you’re doing great things online, invest a few dollars in targeted ads to go from branding to converting. Boost your posts, and run ads for Instagram. It’s easier than you think. Both platforms allow you to get very specific with your targeting. Here are three high-impact Facebook ad targeting audiences to help you to get started.

A Better Way to Approach Your Dental Website

 

 

When setting up your website, a clean look is important, but a conversion focus is key. Have calls to actions on there to give visitors the ability to create an online appointment.

You could give visitors a way to take a quiz and see if they’re candidates for high-revenue procedures such as Invisalign or dental implants. If they qualify, help them make an appointment right away.

You could incorporate chat bots using Many Chat or Chat Fuel to answer common questions from patients using automated responses. For example, if someone asks a question about crowns, you can set up an automated response to ask if they want to see images of crowns you’ve done, the process of the procedure, the cost, or something else. If they select one of the three, you could show them an automated response you’ve designed. If they select “something else,” you can ask them to enter their question and contact information and have someone reach out to them directly.

Connect and Convert

Are you using social media and your website to actually connect with more people and convert them into patients?

TAKE ACTION TODAY:

Having high-quality content definitely isn’t a bad thing, but if it isn’t generating leads — that’s not serving your practice and it’s wasting your money. This is why we want to show you how to take simple, inexpensive actions to grow your practice and implement effective marketing in our upcoming Marketing & Practice Growth Challenge. Learn the first simple steps that you need to be focusing on to achieve consistent growth for your practice!

When many people think of dental marketing, they think of two things.

First, they think of where they will advertise their practice. Traditionally, this includes things such as direct mail, television ads, and phone-book advertising. Now, many dentists also think of Facebook marketing, dental marketing funnels, or strategic alliances. This is especially true if you’re a member of  Delivering WOW U or my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group and have witnessed the power of these strategies.

Second, people think of what they will offer to entice people to make an appointment. This traditionally included things such as discounted or free services. Members of WOW U or my free Facebook group are more likely to market their VIP services and WOW experiences. They’re also more likely to market their practice vision, story, and culture. These help you differentiate yourself from other practices. They can also help you attract a high-end clientele and avoid competing with big corporate dental practices.

One part of marketing your vision, story, and culture that many practices overlook, however, is dental technology. When you invest in dental technology, using it to perform procedures is only one way to earn a return on your investment. Another way to earn a return on your investment is to use it to attract new patients to your practice.

Marketing Dental Technology to Dispel Patient Concerns

Patients delay or avoid dental procedures for many reasons. Some fear high costs of procedures. Others think their dental care will take a lot of time out of their busy schedules. Still others think the procedures will be painful or uncomfortable.

While some procedures cost more than others, technology has helped control costs, speed up procedures, and limit patient discomfort. If you’ve invested in technology to make a procedure more cost-effective than ever, highlight that fact. If your technology reduces the number of visits a patient needs to complete treatment, emphasize that. If your technology helps ease discomfort, let them know.

Marketing emphasizing how affordable, fast, and comfortable you can make procedures can go a long way to getting patients in the chair.

Marketing Dental Technology to Help Patients Visualize Their Future

Another reason patients delay or avoid procedures is they are not sure how a procedure would work for them. If you’ve invested in technology that can give insights about that, let them know.

For example, we have an iTero scanner in my office. One feature of iTero scanners is to simulate patient outcomes, so we use that in our marketing. Together with what we know about prequalifying patients for Invisalign, we’ve created a very effective, low-cost Invisalign marketing campaign on Facebook.

Specifically, we use a pre-qualification quiz with our Facebook ads to let patients know if they qualify. If they do, we invite them in for a free consultation and let them know we can show them what their smile will look like after their treatment if they come in. With our iTero scanner, this is simple to do. When people come in and see their simulated smile, they get emotional and excited about their future. That makes it much more likely for them to move forward with Invisalign. We do a lot of Invisalign treatments in my office. Investing in an iTero scanner and using it in our marketing has been a big factor in building such a high-profit part of our practice.

Are you marketing your dental technology?

Does your dental technology makes procedures easier to afford, quicker to perform, or more comfortable for patients? Are you able to help patients visualize outcomes?

Many practices invest in new technology. Not many practices use technology effectively when marketing their practice. Because we do, we’re able to quickly earn a return on our investment.

TAKE ACTION TODAY:

If you want more help growing, running, and marketing your practice, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.

You can also check out our upcoming Marketing & Practice Growth Challenge where you will learn how to launch your first or next successful marketing campaign and learn how to utilize the resources in your practice to make that campaign successful — learn more here!

Imagine building a dental practice in such a way that you get more accomplished in a matter of months than most dentists achieve in years. What would it do for your practice if you could consistently increase revenues from existing patients, decrease operating costs, and build and market your brand to attract new patients?

For some dentists, that sounds too good to be true. Their practice and personal life feel so busy and stressful, they can’t even begin to imagine building a profit-generation machine like that!

I see dentists accomplish this incredible feat all the time (and even help them do so through my business bootcamps). In my business bootcamps, we help dentists become better leaders, build a unique practice culture, and inspire your team to help get results.

With the right focus, all of that is possible in just a matter of months. The key to doing so is to simultaneously implement three simple strategies into your practice. Individually, each of these can help you increase revenue, decrease costs, build a stronger team, or grow your brand and marketing.

Together, these three types of strategies turn your practice into a profit-generation machine! Here are the three types of strategies every dental practice needs in order to generate real dental practice growth.

Dental Office Profit Strategies

Profit strategies are ways you and your team can increase revenue from existing patients. To be clear, this doesn’t mean upselling patients on procedures they don’t need. It means doing things like getting every patient who calls to schedule their next appointment, checking for unscheduled family members when scheduling someone’s appointment, and working outstanding claims on a daily basis to get claims processed faster.

There are dozens of ways to increase your profits by helping patients make appointments, afford their services, and get paid faster through insurance.

By building profit strategies into your routine, you can see an instant revenue boost, less unscheduled time, and faster revenue receipts.

Dental Office Systems Strategies

Dental office systems strategies are ways you improve the efficiency of your office and strength of your team. They involve things such as setting your company’s vision statement, creating team vision boards, setting a time for a weekly leadership meeting, scheduling team training and lunch and learns, and more.

Systems strategies help you improve your leadership, strengthen your team, and get everyone on your team moving in the same direction.

Dental Office Brand Development or Marketing Strategies

Dental office brand development or marketing strategies help you add new patients to your practice. The best brand development or dental marketing strategies include Facebook for dentists, dental marketing funnels, collecting video testimonials, and scheduling an office photo shoot to use for website, social media, brochures, mailers, etc.

Dental marketing or brand-building strategies are especially effective when combined with systems that get your team moving efficiently in the same direction, and profit-building strategies maximize revenue per patient.

The Value of Using All Three of These Types of Strategies

Some dental practices regularly use only one or two of these types of strategies. For example, they might implement systems and marketing strategies, but not profit strategies. Practices that do that cap their growth potential, because the practice isn’t maximizing the revenue per patient.

Other practices implement profit and systems strategies but fall behind with brand development and marketing. Those practices limit their growth, because they can only increase profits as much as they can schedule appointments, collect payments, and operate efficiently. They won’t experience the explosive growth they could get if they introduced new patients into such a well-running practice on a regular basis.

TAKE ACTION TODAY:

In our Marketing & Practice Growth Challenge, we’ve shown hundreds of practices how to create simplified versions of each of these 3 systems. Practices have created their 12-Month marketing campaign, launched successful marketing campaigns that grow their notoriety and build relationships with small business owners in their community, and implemented whiteboards to reverse-engineer goals for more success and more profit. Want to learn how you get our help to achieve this level of growth too? Sign up for our next challenge here and use the code CHALLENGE to get 20% off at checkout!

With so many things competing for people’s attention today, it’s more important than ever that your dental advertising dollars are invested wisely.

For example, if your ads are too complicated, people will move on. Additionally, if your ads don’t make an emotional connection with the right people, the people won’t be likely to act. Finally, even high-performing ads often have one or two things about them that keep them from performing at their best.

If your ads aren’t performing as well as they could, it could be costing you thousands of dollars in lost revenue, so here are two questions to ask yourself to improve your dental advertising results.

1. Is the ad being shown to the right people?

You can create the best ad in the world, but if you’re showing your ad to the wrong people, it won’t matter. This is why I prefer Facebook ads for dentists over traditional advertising methods.

With traditional dental advertising, it’s extremely difficult to effectively target the right people. You can target people by geographic location by advertising in the phone book. You can also target people by interest and general geographic location with a local television commercial, radio ad, or magazine ad. But you can’t get much more specific than that.

With Facebook ads, you can get very specific about your target audience. For example, if you want to attract new patients to your office, you can target people who live near your office, have visited your website recently, and are not on your patient list. Although the number of these people might not be very big, the people who will see your ad will be more likely to be interested in you than an audience created by general demographic or geographic information.

You can also target what Facebook calls a “lookalike audience” of your patient list or website visitors. With a lookalike audience, Facebook uses the vast data it collects from its users to generate a list of people with similar characteristics to your patient list or website visitors. You can then limit the audience further, such as by geographic location, to get even better results.

If your ad isn’t performing as well as you want it to, it might be because it’s being shown to people who aren’t likely to act, so be sure to ask yourself who your ad is being shown to.

2. Am I trying to do too much?

Sometimes dental ads aren’t performing well because we try to do too much with an ad. It’s important to remember that dental advertising is only one part of a good dental office marketing plan. For example, if you’re looking to attract new patients, you’ll need to get their attention, build trust, and get them to take action on some type of offer.

You might be able to do that with a high-value offer targeted to the right prospects, such as a free exam offer targeted to people who have visited your website this month but aren’t current patients; however, that might not be the type of offer you want to make.

You might prefer to attract new patients by offering a deal on a premium service, such as by offering a deal on Invisalign to people who come in for a cleaning. With a high-value procedure like Invisalign, you aren’t likely going to be able to build the level of trust you need to get many people to make appointments in just one ad.

You would be much better served by creating an Invisalign dental marketing funnel. Your funnel could begin by offering a free guide answering frequently asked questions about Invisalign. After people download the guide, you could then build a relationship with them over email, such as by introducing your practice culture and team members and then showing them before-and-after pictures before asking them to make an appointment.

In this context, your ad is only trying to get people to download a free, helpful guide. It’s not trying to build enough of a relationship with them that they’ll immediately go from a complete stranger to booking a high-value procedure.

Improve your results by asking yourself these two questions.

Although there can be a number of reasons an ad isn’t performing as well as you’d like, many times an ad is underperforming for these two reasons. Sometimes, changing your target audience is all you need to improve your results. Other times, you’re asking your ad to do too much.

To learn more about these and other ways to improve the performance of your dental ads, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.

You can also join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices.

When marketing your dental practice, it’s hard to know what strategies will work best for you. With so many options available, it can be challenging to narrow your options down to strategies that are reliable, repeatable, and profitable.

Because of that, many dentists stick with traditional dental marketing strategies of placing ads in newspapers, phone books, radio programs, and on television. Although traditional dental advertising strategies are familiar, they have three disadvantages to newer strategies, especially when your goal is to attract new patients to your practice, who won’t already know, like, or trust you.

First, traditional dental advertising strategies are expensive to produce in terms of time and money. It takes time and money to properly plan, produce, and place traditional ads. You can spend thousands of dollars and spend months planning before you know if you’ll see any return on your investment.

Second, traditional dental advertising strategies are inflexible. If you need to change a television or radio ad, you need to reedit or rerecord the ad, which can take a lot of time or money.

Third, traditional dental advertising strategies are inefficient. Your ability to target the right audience is very limited with traditional dental marketing strategies. That’s because the audiences are broad by nature. They may have common interests or characteristics, but most people you reach through traditional dental marketing strategies will be unlikely to be ideal prospects.

Here are three newer dental marketing strategies that my team and I have found to be much more effective at getting strangers to know, like, and trust you and your practice.

Networking with Local Businesses

My two favorite ways to network with local business owners are strategic alliances and host beneficiary programs.

In short, with a strategic alliance, you and another local business work together to promote each other. For example, you could offer a deal on teeth whitening to a bridal shop, who might offer a discount on alterations to your patients.

Host beneficiary programs are similar, except instead of offering a deal to the other business’s customers, you offer it to their employees. For example, you could offer a new patient promotion, such as free teeth whitening with a cleaning, to the employees of a local bank.

Using Facebook to Attract New Patients

One of my favorite features of Facebook for dentists is the ability to target very specific groups of people. For example, you can target people who visit your website. You can target your patient list by uploading it to Facebook. You can target people who engage with your page. You can target people by location, demographic, income, and more. You have great control over who sees your ad.

What makes this even more powerful is your ability to exclude people from seeing your ad. For example, if you’re looking to get more likes for your dental Facebook page, you can target people who have visited your website and exclude people who already like your page.

When trying to attract new patients, you can ask Facebook to exclude people on the patient list you upload. Although there’s a chance an existing patient will use different contact information for Facebook, the ability to exclude your patient list makes the chances much smaller.

This helps you avoid a situation where an existing patient sees a new-patient offer and gets upset. You can’t do that with television, radio, or phone-book advertising.

Using Online Funnels to Promote Specific Procedures to New Patients

High-end procedures like Invisalign or dental implants offer a great opportunity for dentists to use online funnels to attract new patients because they automate many of the steps every person goes through before choosing a dentist.

For example, most new patients walk through four steps before becoming a patient. First, they become aware of you. Second, they become interested in something you have to offer. Third, they decide to learn more about you. Finally, they make an appointment for treatment.

My team and I have used online funnels to help me and other dentists automate this four-step process for dental practices and then present the funnels to people using targeted Facebook ads.

For example, if you wanted to attract people to your practice for dental implants, you could create a short checklist that helps people know if they are eligible for dental implants and present it to people through a Facebook ad. Your Facebook ad will make them aware of you and generate interest. By clicking on your ad and giving you their email address in exchange for the checklist, they make it through the second step, becoming interested in more information.

After sending the guide, you can automate follow-up emails that answer frequently asked questions, show before-and-after pictures, and present an offer and call to action, such as asking them to make an appointment for a free consultation or present another special offer.

By answering their frequently asked questions, you will build trust with them and get them interested in learning more about you.

Your call to action for a free consultation or special offer will present an opportunity for them to take the final step.

Here’s an example of a funnel sequence you can use to promote Invisalign!

Are you ready to regularly attract new patients to your practice?

By using local networking, Facebook, and online marketing funnels, you can take more control of your new patient marketing than ever before! Better yet, you can get started with each of these strategies this week!

To learn more about these and other dental marketing strategies, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.

You can also join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices. Click here for 31 additional ways to market your practice. Finally, for more free info on using Facebook for dentists, check out my free guide: Facebook for Dentists: The Definitive Guide to Regularly Attracting New Patients to Your Dental Practice right here.

With so many pressures facing dentists today, getting the best return for your marketing time and budget can feel overwhelming.

Because of that, new and improved ways to market a dental practice don’t just help dentists make more money; they can make their lives better.

That’s what happened with me when I started using Facebook to market my dental practice after using traditional marketing tactics and getting traditional results for years. For example, I received 1,500% and 5,000% returns using Facebook, far exceeding the results I could expect from traditional marketing. I continue to get great returns using Facebook and dental marketing funnels on a regular basis today. After building a team to help other dentists do the same, we began seeing more great returns for other dentists, too, such as Dr. Ashley Joves, who used a simple funnel and Facebook to get 1,000 Facebook fans, grow a patient waiting list of almost 300 people, and have 50 people schedule appointments before she even opened the doors.

These results are unheard of with traditional dental marketing. As a result, I recommend Facebook for dentists and funnel marketing for all dentists looking to make their marketing more effective.

Simply put, these online marketing strategies are more powerful, affordable, and effective than traditional marketing.

If you’re looking to work them into your marketing plan, you have two choices. First, you can do it yourself, using independent research or guided advice, direction, and support from places like Delivering Wow U or my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group to help you shorten the learning curve and learn from others. Getting advice, direction, and support can help you overcome common myths that hold dentists back.

Second, you can outsource it to a dental marketing company to help you as my team helped Dr. Joves and others with their Facebook and funnel marketing.

No matter what route you take, it’s important to understand three things the best dental marketing companies do to get results for their clients.

1. Deliver the Right Message

Your marketing will only be as effective as your ability to connect with people. The first step to doing that is to create the right message for the goal you have for your marketing.

For example, if your goal is to attract new patients, the most effective messaging centers around why someone who isn’t a patient would want to be. This might include messaging that showcases your practice vision culture, celebrates team members and patients, and makes emotional connections. This messaging helps you build trust and show people what makes your practice different than others.

If you’re looking to get existing patients to come to you for additional services, you won’t have to build as much trust because you’ve already done so. Thus, your messaging might focus more on the benefits of the specific service to them, rather than what makes you the right person to do it.

Because of this, before beginning any marketing plan for your practice, it’s critical that you get your messaging in order.

2. Target the Right People

Once you know the message you will deliver with your marketing, you’ll focus on presenting each message to the right people who will be more likely to be receptive to it, as the best dental marketing companies do.

For example, if your goal for a marketing campaign is to attract new patients to your practice through a new-patient offer, like the best marketing companies, you would include audiences that are more likely to become patients and exclude current patients. In general terms, this would include people who have interacted with your practice before and live in the area. This might include Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers, and website visitors who are not yet patients.

If your goal is to offer a new service to existing patients, your audience would obviously be current patients.

No matter what method you use to connect with people, you will get a much better return on investment if you match your audience with your messaging for each advertising campaign.

3. Use the Right Tools

After you create the right messages and identify the right audience to achieve your marketing goal, the final step to your best results is to use the best tool to connect your messaging with the target audience.

Whether you do it yourself or utilize a dental marketing company, the right tools can make the difference between a profitable campaign and a waste of time and money.

This is another reason online marketing with Facebook so effective. Facebook, through its Facebook ads manager, gives you an unprecedented ability to connect an ad to the right people in minutes.

For example, you can upload your patient list to Facebook’s ad manager to display ads for a new service to current patients. You can attract new patients by creating an audience of people who have visited your website in the past ninety days but who haven’t made an appointment, or by targeting newsletter subscribers who aren’t on your patient list.

You can even ask Facebook to create a “lookalike” audience of people based on these audiences to create better “cold” audiences. Lookalike audiences utilize Facebook’s vast data and business partners to find people with similar characteristics to existing audiences to get better results than by targeting people based on manually generated criteria.

This provides a significant advantage over phone books, television, radio, or direct mail, which take much longer, cost much more, and offer more limited targeting capabilities compared to Facebook.

The Secret to Your Marketing Success

With so many competing demands on your time and marketing money, it can be hard to know what will work. The best dental practices and dental marketing companies do these three things to get better results, at a lower cost, in less time.

If you want to learn more about how to do this for your practice, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.

You can also join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices.

Finally, for more free info on using Facebook for dentists, check out my free guide: Facebook for Dentists: The Definitive Guide to Regularly Attracting New Patients to Your Dental Practice

Dental marketing has come a long way since the days of phone-book advertising and TV or radio commercials. Traditionally, the only ways to attract patients to a dental practice were slow, expensive, and ineffective. With dental internet marketing, however, marketing your practice has never been faster, more affordable, and effective.

Here are three of my favorite ways to get patients online.

1. Facebook Marketing for Dentists

Facebook for dentists is one of my favorite tools for growing your practice online. From setting up free dental Facebook pages to sophisticated targeting through Facebook’s advertising platform, Facebook is the fastest and most effective way of building relationships with potential patients.

If you’re just getting started with Facebook, building and optimizing your dental Facebook page is a free first step toward building your Facebook presence.

After building and optimizing your Facebook page, your next step is to share stories, images, and videos about your practice. The best dental Facebook posts show people your vision for your practice, describe what makes your practice different than others, and celebrate the amazing things your practice, patients, and team members are doing in the community. These types of posts make deep connections and get noticed.

With a Facebook page up and running, you can then take advantage of Facebook’s powerful advertising network. Want to offer a special to people with upcoming birthdays? Facebook can connect you with local people with upcoming birthdays. Want to post an offer to current patients? Facebook lets you upload their contact information and present ads to any who have a Facebook account. Want to attract new people who are more likely to be interested in becoming your patients? Facebook lets you target people who visit your website but aren’t yet patients.

This is just the beginning of how powerful Facebook can be to build your practice.

2. Online Marketing Funnels for Dentists

Imagine being able to onboard patients 24/7/365 without even having to pick up the phone. That’s what funnels can do. Online marketing funnels are an automated way of walking people through the process of becoming a patient in your practice.

Typically set up through a series of webpages and emails, which can all be set up in a matter of clicks with my favorite funnel software, ClickFunnels, marketing funnels allow you to automate some of the most time-consuming and expensive parts of onboarding a new patient.

For example, you can use a funnel to promote a new procedure to your existing patients by emailing your patient list a link to your funnel. When they get to your funnel, you can introduce the procedure, answer frequently asked questions and common objections, make an offer for a free consultation or ask them to make an appointment, and let them schedule an appointment right within your funnel.

There many types of funnels you can use to grow your practice by targeting existing or new patients. You set up your funnel the same way, presenting an offer, answering frequently asked questions or resolving common objections, and making a call to action.

Because they allow you to solve all the time and cost problems with traditional advertising, funnels are the best way to experience real practice growth. That’s why I believe every dental practice needs at least one funnel.

With a funnel in place, all you need to do is send people to it, evaluate how your funnel is working, and tweak anything that needs to be adjusted.

3. Online Review Marketing

A third way to grow your dental practice online is through online review marketing.

Online reviews help you in many ways. For example, they are great for SEO, helping you rise up in Google and other search engine results. They also allow you to let your happy patients tell people how great your practice is. As great as your marketing may be, having a real patient sing your praises in an online review makes an even greater impression on people.

Better yet, by using software such as BirdEye reputation marketing software to automate the review process, and training your team to ask for reviews from your best, most-satisfied patients, you can make online review marketing easy!

Dental Internet Marketing Made Easy

Dental internet marketing has never been as easy as it is today. With support and tutorials like those in DeliveringWowU, done-for-you services like my team does for dentists, and software help like BirdEye and ClickFunnels, internet marketing is faster, easier, and more cost-effective than ever for dentists and dental offices.

If you want to learn more about these and other dental marketing strategies, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.

You can also join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices. Finally, for more free info on using Facebook for dentists, check out my free guide: Facebook for Dentists: The Definitive Guide to Regularly Attracting New Patients to Your Dental Practice right here.

Not too long ago, dental marketing campaigns took weeks to plan and required investing thousands of dollars before you had a hope of recouping a single dollar. With that level of investment required, it took a lot of new patients to even hope to break even.

The thought of achieving returns of 1,500% and 5,000% returns on investment with a marketing campaign like I’ve done using Facebook wouldn’t have even crossed most dentists’ minds.

Today, between Facebook for dentists, the amount of information available, and unprecedented ways to connect with people, we can take marketing campaigns live with the click of a mouse, learn more and better information from people in and outside the dental industry, and build mutually-beneficial relationships with people to help each other grow.

Here are three dental marketing ideas you can get started with today to start building your practice fast.

1. Facebook for Dentists

Facebook is the most powerful online tool for connecting with potential patients. With the new algorithm changes announced in January 2018, it will be difficult for dental offices that don’t create compelling content to achieve organic reach. Although that created a lot of angst in the online marketing world, it creates opportunities for dentists who create compelling Facebook posts or use Facebook’s powerful advertising network to post highly targeted promotions to current or prospective patients.

Depending on your experience with Facebook, here are three things you can get started with today that can pay off big in the future.

Set Up a Dental Facebook Page

If you don’t have a dental Facebook page already, you can set up a great Facebook page in five easy steps today.

If you already have a great Facebook page, start content that shows people your dental practice vision and story, shares community events you’re attending or hosting, highlighting great things about your team members, or testimonials for happy patients.

Cost: Free

Create Engaging Facebook Posts

Images and live or prerecorded videos are the most engaging types of Facebook posts. If you’re comfortable on video, jump on a Facebook Live and give an office tour so people can see how great your office is. Ask a team member to talk a bit about the great culture in your office. Or just snap a picture of some things that make your practice so great. Even one post a day can help you build connections with current and potential patients to attract them to your office. Here are some more ideas for how to create the best Facebook posts.

Cost: Free

Place a Facebook Ad

If you already have a great Facebook page and regularly post compelling content, you might benefit from a targeted ad campaign on Facebook. With just a few clicks of a mouse and less than ten dollars, you can start testing Facebook ads for dentists. That’s right, no stuffing envelopes, no paying for postage, and no postcard design needed.

If you’re searching for ideas to get started, consider using Facebook ads with a budget of just $3–5 per day to advertise a previous successful offer and adjust the budget as desired after letting it run for a few days.

For the best results, here are some of the best groups of people to present your ad to on Facebook.

Cost: As little as a few dollars.

2. Promote a “Service of the Month” to Current Patients

A great way to generate revenue is to designate a “service of the month” and promote it to current patients.

Basically, the way it works is you offer a promotion relating to a service you want to promote. A good service would be something that’s cosmetic, like teeth whitening. You can even set a limit so only a certain number of new and existing patients can take advantage of the promotion.

Once you decide what you’ll promote that month, email your patients, tell them about the promotion, and let them know how many spots you have open.

Many people will see it as an opportunity to get a great deal on something they’ve always wanted but couldn’t get themselves to invest in at full price.

Cost: Free

3. Create a Strategic Alliance or Host Beneficiary Program

Strategic alliances and host beneficiary programs are similar to a service of the month but promoted to a local business.

With a strategic alliance, you partner with another local business that serves the same people as you to promote each other. To form a strategic alliance, you can reach out to local businesses you like, introduce yourself, and let them know you would like to form a mutually beneficial relationship. You can even offer a service discount or other promotion to their customers to encourage them to promote you. That benefits their customer, makes the business owner look great, and gets you new patients. It’s a real win-win-win. For example, we offered brides a deal on teeth whitening as part of a strategic alliance with a local bridal shop. That went over very well!

Similarly, with a host beneficiary program, instead of offering something to another business’ customers, you offer it to their employees. We often offer a discount for new patient cleanings to employees of local banks, investment firms, association, and even bakeries. Again, it creates a great win-win-win. The new patient benefits, the other business looks great, and we get new patients.

To get started with a strategic alliance or host beneficiary program, decide what promotion you’ll make, pick an easy local business to get started with, such as one you or a team member is already connected with, and give them a call. Let them know what you want to offer them and offer to email them something they can easily share, like an email they can forward to employees or a simple flyer they can print and post on their wall!

Cost: Free

Dental Marketing Ideas Don’t Have to Be Complicated Anymore

Dental marketing used to take a lot of time to set up and a lot of money to build momentum. With these three ideas, you can get started for as little as nothing. You can even start with the dental Facebook ads for just a few dollars. Your only additional cost is whatever you offer as a discount or enticement, but that’s a cost you can control and would be required for any marketing campaign. Only with these ideas, you get to deliver it to people for as little as free!

If you want to learn more about these and other dental marketing strategies, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program. You can also join thousands of other dentists helping each other in my Free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook Group!

Finally, for more free info on using Facebook for dentists, check out my free guide: Facebook for Dentists: The Definitive Guide to Regularly Attracting New Patients to Your Dental Practice right here.

When dentists haven’t received good results from Facebook ads, it’s almost never because their practice is so unique that Facebook can’t help. It’s almost always because they only tried using it once or twice to boost a post or two, didn’t see results, and moved on.

When my team and I help dental practices with their Facebook ads, our clients are often surprised by how effective it can be to use Facebook for dentists.

The first step to using Facebook ads well is to understand what you’re trying to accomplish with each ad you post. Only then can you design effective copy, add an appropriate image or video, and target the right people.

Here are eight common goals for dental ads that Facebook can help you accomplish.

1. Building practice culture awareness

If you’re following the Delivering WOW way of building your practice, you know how important it is to stand out. One of the best ways to stand out is to develop an irresistible practice culture. Developing a practice culture helps you build a stronger team and make deeper connections with your patients. If you’ve developed a great practice culture, Facebook ads can be a great tool for building awareness with people in your community.

2. Showing people what makes your practice different

In addition to showcasing your culture, Facebook ads can be used to let people know of unique things about your practice. Do you offer an on-time guarantee? Do you serve specific groups of people? Do you offer luxury, VIP amenities? You can use Facebook ads to show people why your practice is different.

3. Talking about how you can help people

What services do you want to be known for? What procedures lead to people wanting more services? Use Facebook ads to talk about the benefits of those services and how you can help people with them.

4. Highlighting testimonials of happy patients

Have you been collecting online reviews or testimonials from happy patients on video, Facebook, Google, or your website? Reviews from other people go a long way toward attracting people to your practice. Facebook ads are a way to showcase your best testimonials to more people.

5. Attracting people into a dental marketing sales funnel

Have you set up an automated dental marketing sales funnel? Facebook ads are a great way to get people into your funnel.

6. Filling last-minute cancellations

If you have a last-minute cancellation, you can send an ad to your patient list by uploading it to your Facebook ads account as a custom audience. My practice has filled many cancellations using Facebook ads for very little money.

7. Promoting a specific procedure

Are you introducing a new procedure? Or do you want to promote your most profitable procedure? Facebook ads are a great way to promote it. For example, you might record a video talking about the most frequently asked questions and give people a call to action to get a free consultation or send them to an automated dental marketing funnel to sell that service.

8. Introducing a new dentist or other team member

Introducing a new dentist or other team member using Facebook ads is a great way to build brand awareness, show the personal side of your office, and encourage people to make an appointment to fill up any additional capacity your new addition will create.

Have you tried these types of dental ads?

Once you know what you want to accomplish with your Facebook ads, you will be much more prepared to target the right people and put together the best copy, imagery, and calls to action.

Which of these types of ads have you used? What others have you used?

My team has helped hundreds of dentists increase profits, attract new patients, improve social media presence, and lower their advertising costs using Facebook. If you want help, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.

You can also join thousands of other dentists helping each other in my Free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook Group!

One of the best ways to maximize your results on Facebook is to set up and save highly converting Facebook ad targeting audiences. Once you set up your targeting audiences, you can use them for future boosted posts or ad campaigns. This allows you to reach people you know to be more receptive to your ads.

The Three Main Types of Facebook Targeting Audiences

Although there are many options within each type, there are only three main types of Facebook targeting audiences: custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and saved audiences. Here’s what each of those are and how they can help you get better results from your Facebook ads.

Custom Audiences

The first main type of targeting audience is the “custom audience.” A custom audience is an audience you set up based on their interaction with you, such as your patient list, email subscribers, website traffic, or people who watched your videos or engaged with your Facebook page. Essentially, this is an audience Facebook customizes for you.

Lookalike Audiences

The second main type of targeting audience is the “lookalike audience.” Lookalike audiences are audiences Facebook creates to match users to your custom audiences. The people in your lookalike audiences are people Facebook believes share important characteristics with the corresponding custom audience.

Although the people in lookalike audiences won’t be warm leads because they won’t know you already, Facebook thinks they share important-enough characteristics to be more likely to like your page, engage with your posts, and take you up on your offers compared to other users.

Saved Audiences

The third main type of targeting audience is the “saved audience.” Saved audiences are audiences you customize based on a number of factors you can choose. You can combine audiences to form a new saved audience. You can narrow down audiences by location, age, or any number of other factors, and save them as a new audience. Or you can add additional targeting features.

For example, if you wanted to get more page likes, you might create an audience of people who have visited your website and a lookalike audience of web visitors who do not like your Facebook page.

This way, you’re showing your page to an audience of people who will be familiar with your practice and people who Facebook believes are similar to your web visitors in a significant way, but you won’t pay to reach people who already like your page.

To build this audience, you will first need to create a custom audience of web visitors and a lookalike audience to your web visitors.

You would then create a saved audience that includes your custom web visitor audience and your lookalike audience, but exclude people who like your page already by selecting the “connections” option and choosing “exclude people who like your page.”

If you wanted to limit your audience even more, you could do that when you set up your saved audience. For example, if you wanted to promote a special for kids’ cleanings to current patients, email subscribers, and lookalike audiences, you could create a saved audience that combines those lists but limits the list to parents of young kids in the detailed targeting section.

Create Key Targeting Audiences Ahead of Time

By setting up key targeting audiences, you’ll lower your costs and get better results from your boosted posts and ads. Moreover, if you set up audiences you know you will be using ahead of time, you’ll also save time because you will have several groups of warm audiences waiting when you’re looking to boost a post or create an offer.

To start, I suggest setting up custom audiences of patients, email subscribers, and web visitors, plus lookalike audiences of those groups. If you know you’re going to be targeting groups within those, such as parents, you can set up a saved audience, too.

For more help using Facebook ads to grow your practice, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.

You can also join thousands of other dentists helping each other in my Free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook Group!