Posted on February 12, 2021
When you’re an orthodontist that owns a quality practice, you may wonder how you get new patients without direct advertising. Not only can marketing budgets quickly balloon to astronomical heights, but you really should consider where you want your name out there. You could easily have your face, phone number, and practice information on a billboard, bus, or bench. But is this how you want to present yourself? Many orthodontists think that there have to be alternative ways.
Luckily for you, orthodontics office marketing is a developing niche that assists orthodontists with growing their practice. Not only by advising them on the best marketing strategies for orthodontists, but assisting each one in streamlining their practice to get more patients organically.
Here are some of the top orthodontist office marketing strategies that you should consider this year:
Every so often, orthodontic care is not covered by insurance. This can lead people who desperately need your care to shrug it off as too expensive. Instead of leaving these people out in the cold, you can invite them into your practice for free consultations, discounts on certain services, or other services that cost you little but benefit the patient.
You can also directly advertise that patients who pay the cost in full will get a discount immediately, netting you a tidy profit while ensuring a steady stream of work. Even providing simple gifts (such as a gift card or useful item) for referrals to your practice can do leaps and bounds for growth.
Where orthodontists practice, there also tend to be dentists. One of the top tips that orthodontics office marketing professionals recommend is to have great relationships with local dentists who can refer patients to your practice. You’re both dealing with teeth, but in different ways: a dentist will easily be able to gauge whether a patient needs braces or not and send them to you for quality treatment. You can then send the dentists gifts, a percentage of your proceeds, or food for their office. It always pays to have working relationships with other professionals.
It should be no surprise that in this digital age, many of your patients will find out about your practice online. In fact, 77% of prospective patients do their research through search engines to find what practice they’d like to visit or patronize. By writing content for your practice’s website and improving the search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll drive more traffic to your website organically and therefore attract more patients. If you’re not a decent writer, you can always hire companies to write favorably about your orthodontic practice and the many services you provide.
At the end of the day, most orthodontics office marketing professionals will be saying a similar thing: be creative and engaging. How you determine what this best means for your office will depend specifically on you, but we’re sure that you can think of ways to liven up how you reach out to patients. When you’re ready to grow your practice, rely on the experience and advice from OrthoSynetics.
