As a dental practice owner, your primary goal is to deliver the most advanced care for your patients, but you also need to stay abreast with the latest dental marketing trends to run a successful business. Analysing data that gives you insights about your patient satisfaction is what successful dental practices are doing today to track their growth.
In this article, we will be discussing how the digital environment is changing to keep up with dental trends today to deliver the ‘wow experience’ that your patients expect from your practice.
- 9 dental marketing trends: best practices for patient outreach
- Stay ahead of the curve with NexHealth
9 dental marketing trends: best practices for patient outreach
Let us look at the latest marketing trends for dental practices to get you a headstart on making you more discoverable to reach more patients.
1. Enable online patient scheduling
Online self-scheduling has now become a feature that most people expect from their healthcare practice. Since privacy is a top concern when it comes to healthcare, patients prefer booking their appointment themselves on a system instead of having to call up an office.
Why it’s important: By giving your patients the option to schedule their appointments they are no longer dependent on your office hours, since it may overlap with their work day. On using a real-time scheduling software like NexHealth, your visitors can see your availability and book their appointments on-demand from any location or device. This instantly syncs with your practice management system leaving your staff with less manual work.
2. Offer patients 1-Click Booking for the smoothest experience
With traditional online booking methods, you are losing patients by making it too hard for patients to book an appointment with you. On average, it takes 15 minutes for a patient to book an appointment as they have to navigate through multiple screens and fill up a bunch of redundant information.
Why it’s important: When a patient decides to choose your care, you want to be able to offer an end-to-end digital patient experience that makes the little things easy and strengthens their belief about making the right choice.
With NexHealth’s 1-Click Booking, your patients can book their appointment with just one tap. Since NexHealth integrates with your practice management system, your office hours and the appointment types are sent to your patient in an email or SMS with embedded time-slots. Once the patient chooses their appointment time, NexHealth automatically opens up a screen with all the patient information confirming the booking, which then syncs with your practice management system.
3. Make the patient experience a core pillar of your practice
Today, patient experience means more than just good clinical care. It begins from the time your patient discovers you online, decides to contact you, and walks into your office. Your practice has to stand out among the crowd to offer convenience in the form of online payments, reminders, and a warm and welcoming attitude to make sure your patients feel cared for when they are in your office.
Why it’s important: When your patients are used to a modern experience in all other aspects of their life, why wouldn’t they expect the same with their healthcare? By choosing NexHealth you are sure to improve your patient satisfaction scores that will result in higher revenues, leaving you with more time to focus on your patients.
4. Offer patients convenient communication: SMS, email, + more
Your patients don’t want to pick up the phone to call you for every little thing, nor do they want to be disturbed from their work with a phone call about their appointment. Giving them multiple convenient ways to reach you allows them to choose how they want to correspond with you.
Why it’s important: Your patients may have varying levels of comfort and preferences with technology. As a business, you must provide them with different ways to communicate with you to ensure they keep coming back for your services. With NexHealth you can communicate with your patients anytime and from any device using HIPAA-complaint SMS messaging. Your patients can conveniently reply to your messages without the need to create an account or download an app.
5. Create a waitlist and fill cancelled appointments (+ even no-shows)
While your goal should always be to keep your schedule full, you don’t want to send away patients just because you can’t accommodate them at a given time. Instead, allow them to schedule their appointment for a future date with the option of adding them to a virtual waitlist that moves up their appointment in case of a cancellation, ensuring 100% patient satisfaction.
Why it’s important: Your patients may find themselves in unavoidable circumstances that may lead to a cancelled or a missed appointment. While you can’t control everything, with NexHealth’s waitlist management feature, you can fill gaps in your calendar automatically, as your patients simply have to respond to the waitlist outreach text if they’re interested. To ensure your patients keep their appointments, NexHealth’s automated text and email reminders can help you reduce your no-shows and cancellation rates.
6. Perfect your website and optimize for performance
Your website is the first touchpoint that helps potential patients decide if they want to come under your care or not. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you give them as much information as possible and make navigating through your website easy so that they can make an informed decision.
Why it’s important: Even before stepping into your office, your patient wants to know exactly what they are signing up for. Along with learning about your services, where you are located, and other such details, they want to know what your current patients are saying about you. With NexHealth, you can manage your web ratings and reviews so that your patients can trust and choose your care. On top of that, you save your staff’s time with the automated feedback outreach feature.
7. Offer virtual and telehealth options for patients
When you offer your patients ways to connect without having to come into the office (such as virtual appointments or telehealth services) your patients are more likely to reach out to you, thereby improving your clinical workflow and reducing costs while still ensuring quality care for them. By adding telehealth to your list of services, your practice earns a reputation for offering a modern patient experience which is a convenience that will be well received.
Why it’s important: General health queries and routine check-ups that don’t require a physical examination may take up a significant chunk of your calendar space and can be replaced by phone calls or video consults that will save your patient the commute and free up your time for more work.
8. Use social media to connect with patients and build loyalty
If you are just starting to build your social media presence, you could begin by asking your patients to follow you on social media. With your patients’ permission, you can co-create content to share their experience in your care that they can also promote on their personal pages too. By doing this you are strengthening your relationship and building loyalty.
Once your patients engage with your social media page, it ensures that your practice shows up on their news feed, giving you more opportunities for engagement. Your patients may be nano-influencers or micro-influencers and their testament to your practice will be more reliable than any big social media influencer who may have a larger following and also promotes other brands on their platform.
Why it’s important: Since your patients use social media for all other aspects of their life, that is where you’ll find them. It’s extremely important to use social media as a way of connecting with both potential and existing patients. By spending some time building loyalty with your patients, you’ll ensure that you are in the back of their mind for the next time they want dental care. Learn how you can perfect your Instagram bio for the greatest impact on your first impression.
9. Expand your reach with social media influencers
There are plenty of creative ways to collaborate with social media influencers today to promote your practice. You could offer them a discount to use and promote your services on their page or even allow them to earn referral money when their audience books your service using a unique discount code.
Why it’s important: Customers today will consult and research your business on social media before buying your services. This makes it imperative that you build a presence and take advantage of the platform to reach out to new patients.
Stay ahead of the curve with NexHealth
As the future is automation, your goal must be to streamline your day-to-day operations to build an efficient system that enhances your workflow processes. With a comprehensive scheduling platform like NexHealth that is designed to help you acquire more patients, you are always ready to embrace any market trend and deliver the best patient experience.
Find out why NexHealth is the solution that your practice needs by scheduling a demo with us today!
