(This post was updated and expanded on 8/22/23)
Who Else Wants a Solid Foundation for Their Marketing?
We’ve been talking a lot about foundations for dental implant marketing lately. Check out
Dental Implant Marketing – How to Lay a Good Foundation Part 1 – Collect Testimonials
Dental Implant Marketing- Part 2 – How to Truly MOTIVATE
Dental Implant Marketing – Part 3 – Focus on Fear Triggers
Let’s look today at another piece of the foundation of successful dental implant marketing.
Dental implant marketing is too often considered only in terms of cases closed and dollars earned.
And this is, of course, the ultimate metric.
In the end, dental implant marketing is about filling your calendar with implant patients and increasing the revenue of the practice.
However, what dentists often fail to consider is what moves people to spend those dollars on implant treatments.
Is it only the deals?
- “$1000 off Implants”
- “$500 Off Teeth-in-a-Day!”
- “Abutment and Crown for Only $995”
It shouldn’t be. Offering deals like this is not a good foundation for long-term success.
The Real Currency of Dental Implant Marketing
For maximum revenue, dentists need to think beyond cases and cash to something that more valuable. And the reason that it IS more valuable is because it helps to lay the FOUNDATION for those results.
What is this real currency of dental implant marketing?
TRUST.
The commodity of TRUST is increasingly the new currency and comes before either cases or cash.
TRUST is therefore king.
We’ll explain today what we mean by trust, how to build it through dental implant marketing, and how this concept can make you a LOT of money.
What is Trust in Dental Implant Marketing?
What do we mean by TRUST?
Here at Client Connection Group, we also often refer to it as goodwill.
What we are primarily talking about is “The level of positive or negative feelings that the people in your community feel about your brand and practice.”
Trust is largely the reservoir of goodwill that your practice builds up over time as people realize that you are interested in providing benefits to them and meeting their needs.
Every time people see your ads, they begin to associate you with a certain image. And the image that you want to build is that of the dental implant EXPERT, the trusted source for all of your patients’ needs.
Why Is Becoming a Trusted Expert So Important in Dental Implant Marketing?
Here’s why becoming an implant expert is so valuable:
- It allows you the authority to give out implant information.
- It helps prospective patients to trust that implants are the solution they have been seeking.
- It justifies in people’s minds the expense of the procedure.
- It gives them more faith in the long-term efficacy of the solution.
Each of these points either implicitly or explicitly includes the idea of TRUST.
Trust is especially necessary in implant dentistry because (1) Implant dentistry is complex – your patients often don’t understand much about it – and (2) Implant dentistry is expensive.
And trust is something that is built by a connection to a PERSON.
This is the fact that so many marketers neglect: the most powerful drawing card to the dental office is the dentist themselves.
They don’t realize that what people are looking for is the STORY, the human connection with a dentist who cares enough to speak into their life as the expert.
Without this understanding, the opportunity to create trust through dental marketing goes completely unrecognized.
Even though patients have many concerns such as “Can I afford this dentist?”, “What all is involved with implant treatment?”, and “Will it hurt?” most of these concerns can be allayed and dealt with if the prospective patient can feel from the very beginning, starting with the marketing, that the dentist truly has their best interests at heart.
Where Is the Prospective Patient?
In our dental marketing, we also need to have respect for where the patient is in the buying process. In general, only 3% of patients are ready to buy TODAY. These are the people who have already researched dental implants, shopping and clicking until they know exactly what they want and why.
The other 97% – Read The Forgotten 97% – can be broadly divided into two categories.
Roughly 30% fall into the information-gathering category. These people know they are missing some teeth, but they are still gathering information as their name suggests.
They are still comparing and deciding exactly what options they have for replacing their teeth. They may not be the dental customers of today, but they are the customers of tomorrow. The only question is this:
Whose customers will they be?
The remaining 67% can be thought of as incubators.
They are the people who may not even yet be aware that they need implants, but as their name suggests, seeds can still be planted in their minds through your dental marketing.
While the seed or idea may remain dormant for the time being, when the need for implant treatment arises either in their life or the life of one of their loved ones, their minds will quickly travel to the person who tried to tell them of a solution. These people are the customers of next month or even of next year.
Again, the only question is whose customers they will be.
We can think of it this way: dental marketing that builds trust and meets people where they are has the potential to reach over 33X more people than dental marketing that doesn’t (3% vs. approximately 100%)!
And here’s the crucial fact: This tremendously valuable commodity of trust CAN be built through your dental implant marketing!
Focusing on building this trust in your dental implant marketing carries SO MUCH more value than simply pitching deals in an attempt to get people through the door.
Here’s why:
If your marketing never builds trust, you will never get beyond offering deals on low-ticket items like cleanings and whitenings, or at the very least, you will be forced to offer huge discounts on implants.
If you never build trust, you are always dealing with an ice-cold audience that may come in, take the freebies, and without any loyalty to your practice, simply leave again.
Or you are forced to perform expensive implanting for thousands less than you could otherwise make. Either of these options puts tremendous financial stress on a dental practice.
Another way to look at the situation is as a value ladder with cleanings on the bottom and regularly priced implant treatment at the top.
Trying to pull people in from the bottom and hoping they will climb the ladder or lowering the top rung through discounts doesn’t work.
The trick is to build enough trust to pull in the full-paying implant patients at the top and let them descend the ladder into lower-priced treatments afterward. Swimming upstream on the value ladder doesn’t work; allowing your patients to descend with gravity does.
The reason is simple: If a patient trusts you enough to allow you to place dental implants in their mouth, they trust you.
Why wouldn’t they trust you farther down the value ladder with their hygiene needs? It’s not that hard to sell down the value ladder from implants into recurring care and is far, far more profitable.
Trust built through quality dental implant marketing can also be stored for the future. People might not need the implants right now, but they will retain their positive impressions for the future either for them or their loved ones. When they need it in the future, guess who they will think of first?
So How Do You Build Trust Through Your Dental Implant Marketing?
This is, of course, the most important. How do we do it?
Here is a summary of what we have already discussed:
- Position yourself as the expert
- Focus on educating patients about implants and the options available
- Give VALUE first. Give before asking for anything.
- Answer their questions – Use real Google search queries to find out what people are asking about dental implants
- Show your face in your ads.
Answering questions is an important way to build trust. Feeling that knowledge loop close as we receive a satisfying answer from a respected source is a highly valuable experience, yet few advertisers exploit the possibilities of this to full advantage.
Every time we answer a question for a customer, we deposit into their account and their instinctive response is to make a corresponding deposit into our account in the form of a heightened regard and appreciation for your practice.
Reminders for Building Trust
- A foundation of trust CAN be built through dental implant marketing.
- Whatever you can do to build trust through your dental implant marketing will help you to close dental implant treatment that much more easily in your office.
- The expense of implant dentistry makes this trust extremely important. You’re not selling a low-ticket item where you can simply bark out the discounts as though you were selling treats at a stand in the street. You need to educate and allay the fears of your potential customers.
Wrapping it Up
Although people’s trust levels are low, human nature never changes. If a dentist is truly seeking to meet their needs, patients WILL trust them. They can’t help it.
And the doctors who build this kind of foundation for their dental implant marketing are going to win the game!
They are the ones who will see the great ROI on their advertising dollars and regularly find their implant calendars full. They are the ones who will never need to resort to steep discounts, low-ticket cleaning offers, and other small potatoes.
Trust and goodwill are money in your pocket – LOTS of it. Knowing how to build a foundation of trust through your dental marketing will give your practice a commanding advantage every time.
For a full overview of the subject, check out
The Ultimate Guide to Creating Goodwill Through Dental Marketing
Dental Implant Growth Partner
Wouldn’t you like to help build up genuine goodwill for your practice through your dental implant marketing and start seeing greater ROI?
Want the help of a practice growth partner that makes building goodwill and long-term trust their entire focus?
Reach out to Client Connection Group today!
This process may take some time but it can be YOURS. Through our top-quality dental implant marketing, Client Connection Group specializes in positioning dentists as the experts in their communities and we boast a long list of satisfied dental clients from coast to coast!
Explore the Client Connection difference today.