February 3, 2021 by bettyhayden

Dentist Office Marketing Tips and Ideas for March 2021

Hello Friends,

What do you have planned for March to help your patients have a great visit to your office? Are you on track to reach or exceed your first-quarter new patient and established patient reactivation goals? If not, there is still time to end this first quarter strong!

You’ll find that the Marketing Tips and Ideas that I share each month target the following 3 different areas to help you grow and improve your practice:

In-Office / Exceed Patients Expectations – Ideas that exceed your patients’ expectations and gets them talking about you, your office, and your team (in a good way) to their friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers after their appointment.

Social Media – Look for and create opportunities to help your patients and potential patients to see the personality of the practice. It is a good way to simply keep your name in front of your active and inactive patients too.

Community – Ideas to help you build and strengthen relationships within the community.

Marketing Tips & Ideas for March

Product/Service Feature: Teeth Whitening

Theme: Tropical Luau (March is a great month to bring a little warmth and fun to the practice!)

Special Offer: Offer teeth whitening at a reduced price or BOGO (encourages patients to bring a friend) or donate a portion of teeth whitening collections to a local charity.

Remind your patients that gift certificates are available!

Product/Service Feature: Orthodontics

Theme: March Madness (Bracket Madness)

Our Office Patients are a Slam Dunk! OR

May all your straight teeth “swishes” come true!

Patient Appreciation Gifts– little basketball kick balls (Oriental Trading) or little oranges (clementines) that you use a food-grade marker to draw basketball lines onto them.

Contest/Give-Away – Basketball Themed Gift Basket. Filled with snacks, a basketball, toothbrush, floss, mouthrinse, and whatever else you’d like to add.

External Marketing Ideas to Build Relationships Within Your Community:

Celebrate Your Name Week March 4-10 – Fun & Inexpensive give-away idea: Pick 2-4 names each day (that the office is open) to post on Facebook/Instagram, the persons with those names can come by the office on that day only to pick up a FREE toothbrush (or lip balm). An easy way to get posts shared! (Get your name out there!!)

National Nutrition Month – Deliver some healthy snacks to a few local businesses and be sure to include a special offer and/or information about your in-office savings plan.

Educational Opportunities –

National Kidney Month – Both tooth decay and gum disease can lead to infections that can cause problems for people with kidney disease. A study in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology reported that people with kidney disease and those on dialysis are more likely to have periodontal disease and other oral health problems than the general population.

Sleep Awareness Week® 14^th – 20^th – It is estimated that sleep-related problems affect 50 to 70 million Americans of all ages. Your goal is to help improve their overall health and well-being with better sleep.

Social Media Post Ideas to Improve Engagement during the month of March:

National Caffeine Awareness Month

National Procrastination Week: 7^th–14^th

American Chocolate Week: 21^st – 27^th

World Compliment Day 1st

Pi Day: 14^th

Kick Butts Day 17^th

Pecan Day 25^th

What are your plans to make March a great month? Please share your plans and ideas with me!

Here are some Practice Management & Leadership Tips & Ideas for March 2021

I would love and truly appreciate for you to please leave a review/recommendation for me here on GOOGLE and/or FACEBOOK. Would you kindly do that for me, please? Thank you!

Are you receiving my complimentary Practice Management, Leadership, and Marketing Ideas in your email inbox each month? If not, please start following today. If you prefer, send me your email address at bhaydenconsulting@gmail.com and I will send you an invitation to follow my blog.

Yours for Greater Success,

~Betty – Dental Coach

P.S. Please stop by and say hello to me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest

January 20, 2021 by bettyhayden

Ten Ways To Keep In Touch With Your Active and Inactive Dental Patients

Hello Friends,

How do you encourage referrals and build relationships with your patients when the average dental patient comes in only 2 times per year for their continuing care hygiene appointment? Think about this, you get to spend 2-3 hours out of 8,760 hours per year with those patients. Are they even thinking about you in between appointments? 😉

Or perhaps you have some patients with unscheduled treatment plans that may not have said yes to schedule when the treatment was diagnosed and presented to them. Just because they didn’t say yes at that time doesn’t mean that they aren’t ready to say yes now. You reaching out to them might be the little reminder they need to get their mouth healthy again.

With all of life’s distractions and responsibilities, how can you ensure that they don’t forget about you?

Stay In Touch. Keep your name in front of them by planting little reminder “forget-me-not” seeds.

Today, I’m going to share with you 10 Easy & Effective Ways to Stay In Touch With Your Scheduled and Unscheduled, Active and Inactive Patients

Social Media – Active Social Media pages are a must. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, & Pinterest are excellent ways to engage and build lasting relationships with your patients. Remember to take advantage of your Google My Business listing too! If you struggle with what to post on your pages, visit here for social media content ideas.
Freebies – Give away free items imprinted with your office name, website, and phone number to each patient at their appointment. Such as; toothbrushes, magnets, calendars, pens, masks, hand sanitizer, and lip balm.

Cards – Send cards to your patients, Just Because, Thank you for your referral and/or Special Occasion cards. People appreciate getting an “old fashioned” handwritten greeting card via snail mail. Make it convenient by keeping a variety of greeting cards on hand.
Telephone – Pick up the telephone and call your patients. Here are a few reasons you may have to call: Continuing care appointment reminders, Thank you for your referral, Post-op (just checking in to see how well you’re doing), Refill reminders (due for a refill on whitening gel, toothpaste, electric toothbrush head replacement, etc), and Special Occasions. Right now, during this Pandemic a call to your unscheduled patients simply to check in and see how they are doing would be well-received.
Letters – Send out letters for incomplete treatment, congratulations on completed treatment, welcome to our practice, and thank you for your referral. Tip: providers and team members should personally sign their letters. Include a brief note or comment if appropriate.
Newsletter – Send newsletters out to your patients. Include sharable content, dental health tips, recipes, community news, office happenings, dental education, and special offers.
Emails – Dental Hygiene Tips, Office Happenings, Continuing Care Reminders, and Special Offers. Be sure to ask and record the email addresses of your patients. Periodic Email communication is inexpensive and easy. Just don’t spam your patients with too many emails.
Website – Keep your website fresh, easy to navigate, and attractive. Include videos, info & pictures about the doctor(s) and team, community events, special offers, ability to schedule appts online, FAQ, dental services and education, office hours, directions, social media pages, contact information, etc.
Local Businesses – Look for ways to reach out to and build relationships with the businesses in your community. Take advantage of the opportunities to engage with businesses on their social media pages, too. When you engage with the local businesses you’re not only getting your name in front of potential new patients you’re also keeping in touch with your patients at the places that they may work or do business with.
Community Involvement – Be involved in local health fairs, charity events, sponsor local sports teams, etc. Just a thought, when you and your team are out participating in community events, consider wearing t-shirts that clearly identify (advertise) your office and give away a lot of imprinted gifts. Or you can open your office as a drop-off location for donations of non-perishable food items, winter-gear, books, school supplies, etc. for those in need in the community.

Friends, do you know how many of your active patients have a future appointment and how many do not? Do you know how many new patients you are welcoming into the practice AND how many patients you’re losing each month? To help you get that data quickly, like within minutes – if your PMS is either Dentrix, Eaglesoft, or Open Dental you can request a complimentary, no-obligation practice data snapshot here: Game-Changing Awareness from Dental Intelligence – Within minutes we’ll identify your practice’s strengths and uncover hidden opportunities. I am happy to assist you with this at no charge and with absolutely no obligation to do anything further with me.

There you have it, 10 ways to stay in touch with your dental patients. Doing some or all of these things will help to build lasting relationships with your patients and encourage referrals.

Of course, the very best way to ensure your patients remember to come back and to refer their friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers is to get them talking about their experience after they leave your office. How do you that? Be consistently great! Consistently exceed expectations! Plan to make sure that each and every appointment is great from the initial greeting at arrival, during their appointment, and when you say your thank you and goodbyes as they leave.

Doctors, if you would like to grow and improve your dental practice and have wondered what it might be like to work with me and what coaching is all about… please feel free to reach out to me to schedule a complimentary, no-obligation coaching call at bhaydenconsulting@gmail.com.

At your next team meeting, discuss what you are currently doing to stay in touch with your patients and how you can improve in planting more reminder seeds.

If you have an extra minute I would love and truly appreciate for you to please leave a review/recommendation for me here on GOOGLE and/or FACEBOOK. Thank you!!!

Don’t miss out on any of the ideas that I share each month! Are you receiving my complimentary Practice Management and Marketing Ideas in your email inbox each month? If not, please start following us today. If you prefer, send me your email address at bhaydenconsulting@gmail.com and I will send you an invitation to follow my blog.

Yours for Greater Success,

~Betty

P.S. Please stop by and say hello to me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest

December 9, 2020 by bettyhayden

Why Dental Marketing Matters

Hello Friends,

What is dental marketing? Do you need to market your practice? Does dental marketing even matter?

Oftentimes, dentists will proudly tell me that they don’t do any marketing in their practice and that they don’t need to market because they’re still growing with new patients each month. Others invest quite a bit of money to attract new patients to their practice. And some, tell me they need to start marketing because their office isn’t growing as they need it to.

It’s clear to me that people define what marketing is and why they would need it or not need it in different ways – in fact, here are a few dictionary definitions of marketing that I found:

“the act or process of buying and selling in a market.”

“The strategic functions involved in identifying and appealing to particular groups of consumers, often including activities such as advertising, branding, pricing, and sales.”

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as, “the activity, set of instructions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

From these definitions, we can see that marketing your practice involves so much more than just spending money on advertising. And the offices that tell me they have never done any marketing have been marketing their practice without even realizing it was marketing that they were doing to retain their patients and attract new patients. Why do I say this?

Everything that you do, everything that the patient (and potential patient) sees, hears & feels is a form of marketing. Everything you do or don’t do, matters.

Marketing your dental practice is like planting seeds. Some seeds sprout right away, others may take a while. You may have written some seeds off as a loss and when you least expect it, there it sprouts and produces beautiful results. And some may sprout where you don’t even remember planting.

” If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not. Speak then to me.”~ William Shakespeare

What are your marketing seeds? Marketing Seeds Include (but are not limited to):

Current Patients/Referrals
Social Media Platforms
Google My Business
Online Reviews
Direct Mail
Patient Appreciation Gifts
Staying in Touch with your Patients
The Patient Experience
Digital Marketing (Website, SEO, Emails, Mobile Devices, Google, Etc.)
Your Brand / Culture
Community/Charity Involvement
Local Business Partnerships
You and Your Team
Office Appearance (Inside and Outside)
Office Systems and Protocols

Take some time today and think about what you are sowing & producing.

Look at your practice through the eyes of your patients and potential patients.

Look closely at yourself, your team, the exterior, and interior of your building, all office systems, your lab, sterilization procedures, website & social media sites, marketing materials, marketing programs and the patient experience. Weeds can sneak in very easily if you don’t work to prevent them or if you ignore them when they are small.

Be wary of these two especially dangerous weeds: Poor telephone call systems and poor team member attitudes. See How to Effectively Answer the Dental Office Telephone & Happy Team

Examine your referral sources & patient retention numbers, this will be a key indicator as to the quality & quantity of the seeds you and your team are planting.

Friends, Do you know how many of your active patients have a future appointment and how many do not? Do you know how many new patients you are welcoming into the practice AND how many patients you’re losing each month? To help you get that data quickly, like within minutes – if your PMS is either Dentrix, Eaglesoft, or Open Dental you can request a complimentary, no-obligation practice data snapshot here: Game-Changing Awareness from Dental Intelligence – Within minutes we’ll identify your practice’s strengths and uncover hidden opportunities. I am happy to assist you with this at no charge and with absolutely no obligation to do anything further with me.

Who is referring the new patients and who isn’t? And why? Are you known as the go-to dental expert in the community? If not, why?

Do you provide your patients with a consistent & quality experience over the telephone? What about during & after their visit? Are you exceeding their expectations?

Are you and your team members involved in the community? Are you tracking, acknowledging, and rewarding those that refer to you?

Again, everything matters!

Don’t give up and please, don’t ignore any of the areas we’ve talked about – you might not see results right away but seeds are being planted, impressions are being made. You never know where and when they will take root and bloom!

Bring in some fresh eyes if you need to, ones that will see, hear & feel what you are missing, and ones that will give you the push and help to get rid of any weeds and plant seeds of greatness daily & consistently!

When considering your office needs and marketing plans, remember to…

Know Your Target Audience
Set Goals
Create a monthly marketing calendar
Track all your marketing efforts. What’s working? What needs improvement? What needs to be eliminated?

Do you enjoy the dental leadership, management, and marketing tips and ideas that I share each month? I would love and truly appreciate for you to please leave a review/recommendation for me here on GOOGLE and/or FACEBOOK

Have you signed up to receive my complimentary dental marketing and practice management ideas that are sent right to your email inbox each month? If not, take a second and sign up. Or send me your email address (bhaydenconsulting@gmail.com) and I will send you an invite to follow. This way, you won’t miss a single idea

Yours for Greater Success,

~Betty (Dental Coach)

P.S. Please stop by and say hello to me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest

March 3, 2020 by bettyhayden

Dental Office Tips and Ideas for Oral Cancer Awareness Month April 2020

Hello Friends,

April is Oral Cancer Awareness Month and Oral, Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Week is the 5th – 12th of April – An excellent opportunity for you to raise oral cancer awareness and the need for early detection in order to save lives.

According to the American Cancer Society, over 53,000 Americans will be diagnosed with oral cavity or oropharyngeal cancer this year. An estimated 10,750 people will die of these cancers, killing roughly 1 person per hour, 24 hours per day.

While smoking and tobacco use are still major risk factors, the fastest-growing segment of oral cancer patients is young, healthy, nonsmoking individuals due to the connection to the HPV virus. See more: http://oralcancerfoundation.org/events/oral-head-neck-cancer-awareness-month/

Here are some Oral Cancer Awareness Tips and Ideas to get you Started:

Hygiene Continuing Care Opportunity: Encourage your inactive patients to come in for their important free oral cancer screening.
Partner with a local business to do free oral cancer screenings at their location.
Open House/Oral Cancer Screening Event at your office. (See Tips and Ideas for Dental Office Open House Event )
Donate a portion of service/product sales (ie: teeth whitening, fluoride, Invisalign) to Oral Cancer Research.
Host or Participate in Oral Cancer Research 5k Walk/Run.
Give away Free T-shirts or Bracelets to every patient that makes a donation toward Oral Cancer Research or Just Because 🙂
Create a video to share on your social media platforms demonstrating how oral cancer screenings are quick & painless.
Bring in your local dermatologist for a lunch n learn to demonstrate oral, head & neck cancer screenings.
Have a gift card or gift basket raffle that your patients can enter to win during the month of April.

Consider offering complimentary oral cancer screenings during the month of April or on a designated day…

Your offer is this:

April is Oral Cancer Awareness Month

our office is pleased to offer

FREE Oral Cancer Screenings

a National Effort to END ORAL CANCER!

How can you promote your offer?

Send a Press Release to local newspapers & TV stations.
Create a one-page flyer for your patients to share with their friends, family members, co-workers, and neighbors.
Talk about it on all of your office Social Media sites!
Create a Facebook Complimentary Oral Cancer Screening Event.

If you’re looking for additional marketing ideas not related to oral cancer awareness for April, please visit here: Dental Marketing and Practice Management Ideas for April

Remember that when your patients are healthy – your practice is healthy. For your patients to smile healthy they need to schedule the treatment you’ve diagnosed and to come in regularly for their hygiene continuing care appointments and oral cancer screenings.

If you’re struggling to reach your practice goals – feel free to contact me for a complimentary, no-obligation 30-minute telephone consultation at bhaydenconsulting@gmail.com to see if a coaching relationship is right for you.

Did you like the complimentary tips and ideas I shared in this article? I would love and truly appreciate for you to please leave me a review/recommendation here on GOOGLE and/or FACEBOOK.

Don’t miss out on any of the ideas that I share each month! Are you receiving my complimentary Practice Management and Marketing Ideas in your email each month? If not, please start following us today. If you prefer, send me your email address (to bhaydenconsulting@gmail.com) and I will send you an invitation to follow my blog.

Yours for Greater Success,
~Betty

P.S. Please stop by and say hello to me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest