Breathe client Emma Prentice has a lovely practice in Bangor NI which she is growing and developing (see: www.brunswickdentalpractice.com).
Emma is a great example of a determined practice owner who understands that she has to be thinking about marketing day in day out if she is to achieve the growth she has envisaged.
Recently Emma took on a new associate dentist and after the relief that she had found a suitable associate had worn off, she realised she would need to ramp up her new patient numbers pretty quick in order to keep her new associate fed.
She used a number of tactics including: a reactivation campaign targeted at patients who were overdue check-ups, a local billboard poster and internal marketing. However, the one thing she did that outperformed everything else by a country mile was this little video which she produced herself!
Emma loves social media (unlike me who positively hates it!) and she has been experimenting with Facebook as a marketing tactic over the last 12 months with mixed success. On July 1 she placed this video on her practice Facebook page and within two weeks it had created 54 new patients. This week she had to take the ad down because the practice simply can’t cope with any more new patients for a while!
This year, social media seems to have (at last) come into its own as an effective marketing tactic for dental practices. We work with several practices who have harnessed their social media to find implant, adult ortho and facial aesthetic patients as well as general patients (such as in Emma’s video). The most successful tactics seem to be a mixture of social media (particularly Facebook advertising) in tandem with landing pages and Infusion Soft. Here’s the sequence:
- Put a post on the practice Facebook page.
- Pay Facebook to promote it (circa £15/week) to:
- Your chosen target audience, say women from 24-50 in chosen postcodes,
- So that every time they go onto Facebook they are served your post for a week.
- The headline and the photo are critical to get attention.
- Calls to action that seem to work well are: time limited offers (have it done before Christmas etc…) and before and after images.
- Facebook has strict rules about what you can and can’t say or show in an ad, so it’s worth checking.
- Humour works well such as this for a facial aesthetics ad.
- Your Facebook ad needs to direct leads to an Infusion Soft landing page.
- There you can show before and after images and have some calls to action.
- Many patients book themselves using online booking without going near your reception!
These are low risk, low cost, DIY tactics. You can make the video on your iPhone! It’s time to get creative.
If you would like some help with growing your practice, contact me for a chat:
e. simon.hocken@breathebusiness.co.uk.
m. 07770 430576