Marketing in the dental industry

Dentists must strive to make their dental marketing plans reflect patients’ needs in order to ensure that their ties with patients are not limited to standard relationships based exclusively on medical aspects.
If a dental marketing scheme is to have the right balance between medical and economic aspects, it must be based on two core concepts:

• Respecting patients’ needs and making them loyal.
• Establishing outstanding communication.

These concepts are so closely interrelated that you cannot have one without the other. Good dentist-patient communication must go beyond interpersonal contact and direct interaction during normal services to reach an almost individual level. Establishing good communication with patients helps to build a trusting relationship. The patients will feel that the dentist listens to them, understands them and cares for them in both dental and human terms. In turn, this approach paves the way to loyalty and word of mouth, which has always been a timeless, effective indirect marketing tool.

The basic reason behind this lies in the unconscious conditioning effects of communication on the impact and perception of the dentist’s professionalism, which is bound to influence the economic aspects. Consequently, it is clear that dental marketing is built on a trusting dentist-patient relationship, thus ensuring that there is a calm atmosphere during appointments and patients are more inclined to carefully follow the advice given and take the recommended treatment.

Direct relationships are still unquestionably the cornerstones of a business, but interaction with customers can also involve additional communication systems on top of standard ones, through the growing use of the internet and the web. With this in mind, dentists may decide to adopt a dental marketing style that embraces new communication trends and approaches, as well as the digital changes that are having an ever larger influence on our daily lives. To proceed along this path and meet patients’ needs halfway while expanding their practices’ businesses, dentists can follow well-structured marketing plans that are designed to communicate on a number of levels.

In addition to direct interaction, communication can take place through multimedia and digital systems that are widely in use today. For example, dentists can:
– Create a website for their dental practice.
– Publish details of singular case studies.
– Write a blog to connect with users and potential customers.
– Advertise on the most widely used social networks.
– Post informative videos online.

A website to showcase a dental practice was once enough to publicize it on the web, but now it is no longer sufficient. Good dental marketing must involve interaction and qualitatively relevant content.

Good marketing schemes aim to focus attention on the professional activities and quality of a dental practice, following thorough communication guidelines that never neglect patients or their needs.

14/03/2017