To be successful, you know your orthodontic practice needs to maintain a steady flow of patients. As you’re sending your patients out the door with their new smiles, you’ll need new patients coming in that door to begin their own orthodontic journey.
But it’s difficult to focus on future business when you’re wrapped up in the day-to-day treatment of patients and the operation of your practice. To help ensure you don’t experience a lull in new patients, you need to be taking proactive steps to attract new patients to you, even when business is booming.
Here are a few tips to help you turn your practice into a magnet for new patients.
The first step to effectively attracting new orthodontic patients is to ensure you have a clear picture of exactly who you want those new patients to be. Having a good understanding of the type of patient you are trying to attract will help ensure you take the proper steps to reach them.
Consider your current and past cases and identify which were the best for you and your business. You can define “best” based on what’s important to you in a patient: timely payment, profit margin, length of treatment, how pleasant they are to work with, or something else.
Try to identify any common characteristics that make them stand out. Are they of a similar age range? Did they have similar clinical needs to address?
These types of details can help you create a detailed profile of the “ideal patient” you’d like to attract.
It should come as no surprise that many of your future patients will likely have their first contact with you online. Whether they find you through search, come across your website, or interact with you on social media, they’ll almost certainly be doing some online research before contacting your office.
When patients are looking at available options, they tend to choose the one that looks more reputable and experienced, so having a solid online presence can help create trust and increase the likelihood of patients reaching out to you.
There are a few recommendations to grow your presence online, such as:
Many people usually look for information online about dental conditions, pain sources and available solutions before deciding whether to seek out a professional’s help.
By starting a blog on your website full of educational information, you not only prove your competence by sharing your expertise but you also increase the chances that a patient’s online search brings them to your site for answers, helping new patients to discover you.
When somebody reads your content and finds it helpful, they may be more inclined to choose your practice over other options.
Dental treatment often involves multiple professionals and specialists, which means your fellow dental professionals can be a valuable source of referrals and recommendations.
Take time to reach out and connect with local dentists to establish a professional relationship that earns you referrals. Pediatric dentists could prove to be valuable connections too, as they might recommend you to patients who are aging out of their care. Connect with other specialists in your area, too: endodontists, periodontists, oral surgeons, and more.
Be sure to treat these relationships as the exchange that they are, referring patients back to other professionals when able. This creates a healthy community of dental professionals that support each other’s businesses, but it also creates a much smoother patient experience by saving them the hassle of searching for and deciding amongst multiple options.
One of the best ways to increase the flow of new patients is actually your current and past patients.
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful types of marketing, since a recommendation from a friend or family member is far more trustworthy than a recommendation from a stranger.
By treating patients well, creating a positive patient experience, and making a genuine request as the appropriate time, you can help generate more referrals from existing patients.
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Although a positive treatment outcome is probably the best way to generate patient referrals, some other small details can make a patient more prone to refer you:
Be polite and build a friendly rapport with patients
Offer multiple payment methods, payment plans, and/or financing
Make your office a comfortable and welcoming place to spend time
Send follow-up emails to check on your patients after treatment ends
Lastly, be sure to actually ask for those referrals! After all, there’s a good chance that some of your patients would be happy to refer someone, but simply hadn’t thought of it!
No matter how great your treatment is and how much your patients love you, you’re not the only part of your practice. Between scheduling, billing and time in the waiting room, your patient’s experience is likely influenced by your staff as much as it is by you.
Get your entire staff aligned on the goal of making your patients’ experience excellent, from the very first inquiry call to the final appointment. Offer education and encouragement so that staff feel empowered to ask for online reviews and referrals.
You might even make it a competition or offer incentives to staff members who get mentioned in positive reviews.
Time to get growing
It can be difficult to find time to go out and get new patients when you’re so busy working on the patients you currently serve.
But with a clear understanding of your ideal patient, a robust online presence, a fantastic patient experience, and a staff excited to build a library of positive reviews, you’ll be well on your way to having those new patients come to you.
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