In this Ultimate Guide to Creating Goodwill in Your Community Through Dental Marketing, we are going to explore the message and the methods of dental marketing in some depth.
We’ll look at both the history of dental marketing and its modern shape with a focus on how dental marketing can create goodwill between your practice and your community.
We’ll start with an analysis of dental marketing both present and past, describe the importance and methods of maintaining goodwill with your dental marketing, and finally discuss the rewards and goals of maintaining goodwill.
In all of this, our focus is on fundamental attitudes in our dental marketing rather than another list of techniques, although we will include several practical pointers along the way.
All set? Let’s dive in.
What Is Dental Marketing in 2023?
Dentistry took its place as one of the fastest-growing sectors of the healthcare industry in 2022, for both short-and long-term reasons.
The short-term reason was that, with Covid-19 in the rearview mirror, dentistry welcomed a flood of new patients as the backlog of routine dental visits and procedures continued to be re-absorbed into the stream.
The long-term growth is due to the growing market for cosmetic dentistry as well as the dental needs of a swelling senior population who, in most cases, has plenty of money to spend on themselves and their healthcare. The US dental market, which was valued at $15B in 2020, is expected to double, hitting $30B by 2027.
Of course, inflation and concerns about a recession have taken their toll in early 2023, and it remains to be seen how it will all play out, but growth has been the overall outlook since the nation emerged from lockdown.
So in an age of growth, how are dentists reaching these customers?
We’ll look at some of the new marketing methods, but we want to examine what kind of message is going out to all these prospective patients. In short, what is dental marketing like in 2023?
To begin, the methods of dental marketing are very different from what they were even just a short 15-18 years ago.
In 2005, MySpace was the most popular US social networking site. Online dental marketing consisted of a basic website (which may, or may not have been, optimized for SEO), and the savviest dentists collected email addresses and marketed optional services to patients through an email newsletter.
The advertising of many practices circa 2007 (if any at all was done) consisted of an occasional mailer to both existing clients and new arrivals in the community.
No more. The recession of 2008 changed a lot, leading many dentists to begin advertising far more heavily. And in the last 15 years, the surge of social media participation, in tandem with an almost saturation point level of smartphone usage, has driven all marketing in a mobile, social direction.
Dentistry is no exception. Patients now expect to interact with their dentists on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and dentists are expected to post engaging content regularly to keep customers engaged.
All of this has had immense ramifications for dental marketing. User experience, mobile website performance, and fresh SEO-friendly content on both websites and social media have become the primary foci of dental marketing efforts.
We’ll look at each of these in turn and the ways that they can be maximized.
Dental marketing in 2023 requires intense attention to your website.
This is still where your dental implant patients will be directed from all your dental marketing campaigns.
Most websites typically have a shelf life of only a few years and one of the first things that begins to suffer is the user experience or UX as it is known.
Keep your website updated regularly with the latest upgrades to offer your patients the best experience possible and to maximize conversions.
Genuinely interesting content overall, as well as quality video content in particular, can also help to engage users. Featuring your biography can allow your patients and prospective patients to begin to learn to know you.
Optimizing your website is a relatively easy, but often overlooked, way to begin and maintain a relationship of goodwill with both your current dental customers and prospective patients.
You also need to maintain a strong focus on the mobile performance of your website since over 70% of today’s web traffic is coming from mobile phones.
Although the same content is shared on both desktop and mobile, the experience can differ substantially between devices. Use Google Analytics to see if there are gaps between your mobile and desktop traffic conversions and deal aggressively with any issues you discover there.
Content became king in 2023 and has been reigning for some time. Google has become smarter than ever at knowing what searchers are aiming for and it prioritizes truly helpful content.
SEO and all that it involves -keywords, alt tags, backlinks, etc. – are still important, but it has never been more important to truly serve your customers with helpful, well-written content.
Optimizing for voice search is also important. In this sense, Google can make the rewards of creating goodwill in your community, immediate. If they recognize that your content meets the need over and above your competitors, you will gain the top spot!
Other important ways to build goodwill through content are to make sure to answer all common questions, put helpful resources in prominent places, and above all, seek to give value FIRST before asking for anything.
If you are always offering answers to people’s questions and explaining how their lives could be improved through your dentistry, you will soon be viewed as the expert.
This makes all of your goodwill efforts in dental marketing much easier because trust is already established.
These are all topics that we will explore more in-depth later.
Make sure you pay attention to maximizing the power of your brand. Seek to create awareness and especially focus your advertising dollars on creating maximum goodwill with the demographics that you are targeting, whether that is seniors for dental implants, kids for pediatric dental, or some other group.
Although it is unfortunate, the fact that many dentists do not make creating goodwill a part of their marketing strategy means that there is tremendous opportunity here for you.
By thinking consciously about and incorporating this often-overlooked concept into your advertising, your dental marketing campaigns can stand out in your community.
What is Goodwill in Your Dental Practice and Community
First, it may be helpful to make a greater attempt to define our terms, especially the term goodwill. What do we mean by this?
For accounting purposes, goodwill for a dental practice can be defined as it is in the following passage from an article in Dental Economics, “Every viable dental practice has goodwill. Goodwill refers to the intangible assets that either restrict or enhance the future earnings of the practice, and includes patient charts, recall systems, staff longevity, non-compete covenants, and the owner’s reputation within the community… Goodwill is the single most important asset of a practice. Preservation of goodwill is tantamount to ensuring ongoing success.”
Our definition here at Client Connection Group is somewhat different. We are primarily talking about the best way to make a return over the long term.
To achieve that goal, we define dental practice goodwill as follows: “The level of positive or negative feelings that the people in your community feel about your brand and practice.” By the very use of the word, goodwill, however, we are focusing on the positive side and the level of appreciation and trust that people feel about your practice.
Appreciation and trust are the two main pieces of goodwill as we define it. Appreciation is earned through freely given value and trust is built as customers reap the benefits of that value.
The earliest and most direct benefit is found when they receive answers to their question about dental procedures.
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.
We agree with the last sentence of the accounting definition of goodwill. “Preservation of goodwill is tantamount to ensuring ongoing success.” Since a large part of customer engagement with a business is through its advertising, promoting goodwill through marketing and community outreach efforts is of vital importance.
If goodwill is preserved and strengthened through every encounter with your brand, as the accounting definition says, ongoing success is ensured. Positive feelings about your practice are simply money in the bank.
Customers are always going to choose to do business with the place that pleases them the most.
A practice that consistently compromises goodwill in the community through its dental marketing could be compared to a new car that has experienced significant hail damage.
The interior is still completely intact and the engine still works perfectly but the cosmetic image has been damaged so significantly that the value has been substantially reduced.
This is a good picture of a practice that engages in dental marketing with a message that is detrimental to goodwill in the community. People will not be attracted to the practice on its own merits.
It will take the sheer force of a bargain to get them through the door, and over time this greatly reduces both the overall value and the bottom line of the practice.
History of Dental Marketing
Before we explore the benefits of goodwill in dental marketing, it might be helpful to look a little more at its history.
What has dental marketing been like through the years and how has its message and methods changed over time?
One point seldom considered anymore is the freedom dentists now have to market without undue interference from regulatory bodies.
As recently as the 1980s, the issue of who should have oversight of dental advertisements was a significant point of contention.
Dentists were subject to specific directives from state bar associations about how large their signs could be and what information could be included on them.
The bar associations believed that since laypeople did not fully understand the technicalities of professional work such as dentistry, vigorous professional advertising campaigns would give an advantage to unethical providers who would spread misleading messages.
They also believed that if any one individual or practice was allowed to advertise, every other dentist would eventually be forced into the world of advertising their services, and they were determined to prevent that.
Thanks to a series of court cases that included Bates v. State Bar of Arizona and CDA v FTC, the professional associations lost most of their advertising oversight to government organizations although they still retain the power of licensing which does include advertisement guidelines that continue to exceed the bare minimum of FTC regulation.
This eventually opened the door to advertising by all professions, including dentistry.
Another interesting issue is the view that different cultures regard marketing by learned professions such as dentistry.
Here in the USA, professional entrepreneurship is taken for granted and encouraged. Professionals such as dentists, at least since the above-mentioned court cases were decided, are expected to reap the rewards of their expertise by marketing themselves and seeing higher-paying patients.
In countries such as Great Britain for instance, professional advertising has always been seen in an even stronger negative light, although dental advertising is quite common now in Great Britain as well.
Dentists still need to be careful what claims they make, and the ADA Principles of Ethics and Code of Conduct should always be adhered to in all advertising.
One of the most important statements in Section 5.F. Advertising of the ADA Code which reads as follows: “Although any dentist may advertise, no dentist shall advertise or solicit patients in any form of communication in a manner that is false or misleading in any material respect.”
Claims of care that cannot be substantiated or fulfilled are a recipe for eventual investigation by the FTC.
So how has the message of advertising changed over the years? Here’s a look at some examples of dental marketing from the 1940s and 1950s.
Due to the above-mentioned regulations, these advertisements are for products rather than the practice itself, but they reflect the dental marketing message of the time.
These ads reflect the change to what is often called lifestyle advertising in reaction to the article-style ads, written on a specific subject by a medical expert, that had predominated before WWII.
(Radio advertising emerged in 1922, but in its early years, it followed the same pattern as printed advertisements.)
The late 1940s and early 1950s marked the beginning of the modern consumer economy.
Pictures began to be used predominantly (as can be seen from the ads above) and TV advertising, for the first time, surpassed print and radio advertisement revenue levels.
Dental ads tended to focus on specific ailments with messages such as the following:
- “Save the life of your tooth enamel.”
- “Stop bad breath with Colgate. Fight tooth decay all day!”
- “Teeth whiten – 3 Shades in 3 Days.”
Hard-selling tactics, although always used in one form or another, began to grow in importance over the next three or four decades.
Door-to-door selling was followed by telemarketing, and in the 1990s the beginnings of electronic versions such as spam emails and online ads as the Internet began to be utilized.
The frustrations of consumers over these marketing methods found expression in “No Soliciting” signs, the Do Not Call Registry, and finally, the Can-Spam Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in Dec. 2003.
Many dental practices, as well as many businesses in general, were more focused on promoting products and strong-arming sales than they were on creating goodwill in their community through their use of these hard-selling tactics.
Strategic marketing – using demographic-specific and opt-in mailing lists, Google ads triggered by chosen keywords, and sidebar and banner ads related to online searches – has contributed to a much more targeted consumer focus.
While strategic marketing is not without its privacy dangers, it provides a much better framework for promoting goodwill if the content is truly helpful and patient-focused.
This approach is also much more cost-effective for dental practices and businesses in general.
The current stage of dental marketing could probably best be described as a combination of strategic marketing and relationship building.
While relationships have always been integral to dentistry success, social media- LinkedIn profiles, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, and Yelp reviews, to name a few – has allowed relationship building to be integrated into dental marketing in a more powerful and immediate way.
If a dental practice can fulfill its part of this new relationship structure by posting content that promotes goodwill, long-lasting dental relationships can be developed.
Truly, dental marketing has come a long way from the days of those newspaper ads to its current state! Where might it go in the future?
But unlike dental procedures, dental marketing will never be an exact science.
Considering how much it has changed in the last 100 years, it’s vital that your practice stays current on best marketing practices and works hard to maintain the goodwill of your community no matter what new innovations the future brings.
Utilizing the Dominant Themes in Dental Marketing
Dental marketing can be grouped into a number of themes as it attempts to reach consumers using the mediums available in 2023.
Dental themes are important because they can give coherence to your marketing, help you to connect with your target audience, and differentiate your practice in the minds of your prospective customers.
For our purposes, we are concerned with themes that promote solid goodwill with prospective customers.
The best themes focus squarely on the customers and their motivations for seeking treatment. The better that we as dental marketers can work with our customers’ motivations, the easier goodwill will be to produce and maintain.
Some of these main themes of dental marketing include education on dental treatments, improving the quality of life of the patient, the importance of a clean white smile, and offering limited-time promotions, to name a few.
For our focus, the question becomes this: How do we build goodwill with the dental marketing theme that we choose?
To build goodwill, our theme needs to tap into the 3 general motivations of the people in your community who are seeking dental care. Those 3 motivations are:
- Pain
- Beauty
- Health.
Pain is the most important one. This is the reason that drives people most strongly to visit the dentist. You can run ads for people in pain but 80% of them will visit the dentist anyway. The goal with these people is to bring them into YOUR practice rather than the one down the street. Building goodwill can help you to build that reservoir of trust that will bring you to the top of your mind when the next wave of agony hits them.
Beauty is next. The hope of beauty is extremely powerful and building goodwill will assure those with this need that you can be trusted to help them look their best.
Health is the most underutilized because many people are not proactively motivated by their health, although this number is growing. Your dental marketing needs to give them a reason to take off and visit the dentist because of problems that they could avoid in the future!
This list includes an increased likelihood of dementia and cognitive impairment, poor self-rated health, lower life expectancy, and increased risk of oral cancer.
So how can our dental marketing themes tap into these motivations most effectively?
Discuss your dental marketing theme (or the way that you could satisfy these motivations) in a helpful, informational way.
This could mean adding explanations to different treatment options on your website or brochures in order to simplify the buying process. It could also mean toning down the fear-mongering by showing the dangers of waiting, choosing the wrong option, etc. in a more conversational, approachable tone.
Above all, it means focusing your theme on the prospective patient instead of ourselves.
This does not mean that our dental marketing needs to be less forceful or hard-hitting.
It simply means that our theme starts from where the CUSTOMER is instead of where WE are! We are beginning with THEIR concerns and creating urgency by giving them more information, rather than trying to impose OUR concerns on them!
How Do Consumers View Dental Marketing?
Since most dental marketing is not designed to create goodwill, we should probably not be surprised that little goodwill is generated with consumers through the majority of dental advertising.
Some dentists create their own ads, but many use marketers. Many marketers want to be expensive.
Few marketers want to be valuable.
This means that most ads created for dentists are designed to simply push as many people as possible through the door of the practice.
Emphasis on the word push, as we will discuss in more detail.
These marketers neglect the most powerful drawing card to the dental office – that is, the dentist themselves.
These dentists and marketers don’t realize that what people are actually buying is the STORY, the human connection with a dentist who cares enough to speak into their life as the expert.
We will look more in the next section at the principles for creating goodwill, but for now, we simply recognize that since they are not followed, the opportunity to create goodwill is not only wasted but also goes completely unrecognized.
Even though patients have many concerns such as “Can I afford this dentist?” and “Will he hurt me?” most of those 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.
Patient testimonials and social proof are important to feature in your marketing and on your website. These also help to allay patients’ fears.
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 done their homework and shopped and clicked until they knew exactly what they wanted and why.
The other 97% – The Forgotten 97% – can be broadly divided into two categories.
Roughly 30% fall into the information-gathering category. These people know they have a need, but they are still gathering information as their name suggests.
They are still comparing and deciding exactly which avenue they will take to meet their need. 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 have a dental need, 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 dental 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 next year.
Again, the only question is whose customers they will be.
In other words, dental marketing that builds goodwill has the potential to reach over 30X more people than dental marketing that doesn’t!
Building goodwill is part of building your brand – the image of your practice that comes to mind when people think of you.
If people can feel that you have a genuine interest in their well-being, that will spring to mind each and every time they see an ad, have a phone conversation with your front desk, or walk into your office.
Marketing that builds goodwill can do amazing things since it doesn’t depend on dragging an ice-cold audience through the door on the strength of deals alone. We’ll discuss this in more detail later.
- How Do We Create Goodwill Through Dental Marketing?
This is of course the main question of this discussion. Although we looked at it from the angle of best utilizing a dental theme, let’s look at it squarely and broadly here.
How can we create goodwill for our practice through our dental marketing and avoid the negative perceptions that many dental promotions have engendered?
Here are 5 general principles and then we will look at them more individually as well as consider some other smaller, more particular ideas later.
Building Goodwill Through Dental Marketing
- Position yourself as the expert
- Focus on educating your prospective patients about the options available to them
- Give VALUE first. Give before asking for anything, including their business.
- Answer their questions.
- Show your face in your ads. In today’s digital world, people value the human touch more than ever.
First, position yourself as the dental expert in your community.
This may, at first, seem counter-intuitive. Don’t people resist being told what to do? Why would they listen to someone who proclaims himself as the expert on a subject?
Everyone has a rebel streak, of course, but when it comes to personal subjects like their health, many people feel a deep sense of ignorance and simply want to tap into the wisdom of someone who knows.
They want to lean on the wisdom of a doctor, who is seeking their highest good.
And of course, that brings us to the old saying, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
All of us can relate to this; we have to know that our expert not only knows about the problem but also cares about us if we are going to place our total confidence in him.
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.
And this is because TRUST is both the big idea behind and the real reason why Becoming the Implant Expert in Your Community is the best dental implant marketing plan you can come up with.
Marrying these two components together in your practice and then disseminating it through your marketing is the ticket to building genuine goodwill in your community. As we have mentioned before and as you can see, trust is truly necessary if goodwill is to be created.
But here’s the good news: Both trust and goodwill CAN be built through your marketing!
This is where the second point – Focus on Educating Your Prospective Patients – comes in.
In fact, this is the piece that ties it all together. Educating your patients and prospective patients is a primary way of positioning yourself as the dental expert in your community.
It also demonstrates your knowledge of the subject – a primary way people recognize an expert. And, finally, educating your patients shows how much you care since you are willing to expend yourself pouring dental knowledge out for others to receive.
This education is especially effective if it follows the third principle from our list above and comes FIRST. As we said, give VALUE first.
Give it before asking for anything else including their business. Giving value freely also demonstrates an abundance mindset, which again helps to position you as an expert in your field.
People with an abounding knowledge about a subject are always sought-after sources for all those with questions in that area.
And that is the fourth point: answer the questions that people have.
Answer them both in your advertising and in your daily interaction.
Answer them freely, as was mentioned, and with a genuine focus on the person and the need behind the question.
One way that we can do this, especially in our marketing is to research actual Google search queries to find out what people are asking about dental procedures. This will not only allow you to tailor your answers to fit the customer but will also give you a broader idea of what may be behind the question.
And finally show your face in your ads.
This is the way that we can best connect with people and show our recognition of their need for information from an expert.
In all of this, it is helpful to remember the percentage breakdown of the market from the previous section. Since only 3% are ready to buy today, we show our respect for the other 97% by meeting them where they are.
With the 30% who are information-gatherers, we can give that valuable information and with the 67% who are incubators, we can plant the seed of an answer to a future question.
The point is that, in our marketing, we are not forcing them into our definition. We are respecting them as people and try to meet their needs.
This is what building trust looks like and it is how you create goodwill in your community.
Now for some specific ideas on how to accomplish some of these goals in your dental marketing and on your website.
- Publish an FAQ page on your website to not only increase traffic but to allow easy access to the answers your patients need.
- Also, on your website, make sure to state your years of experience, training, and certifications to help build your image as an expert. Whenever you achieve additional levels of certification, make sure to add them to your website and possibly even send out a dedicated notification as well.
- Use before-and-after pictures – These give hope to people who are hopeless about changing their lives due to the crooked, colored, or missing teeth that they have lived with for so long. These pictures also serve as a portfolio of your transformative work for future reference.
- Deliver your advice through funny and creative ads and memes to counter the terror that many people experience when they think about going to the dentist. This also increases the chance that you will get free advertising as people share your ads with their friends.
- Make heavy use of video content on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. In content marketing, videos tend to garner more engagement from viewers than text or even images alone do. More than 55% of social media users spend the bulk of their time watching videos. YouTube alone has 122 million active daily users.
- Video content for dental marketing should include attractive welcome and daily routine videos featuring your friendly staff, complex procedure explanations, before-and-after overviews, and a heavy dose of satisfied patient testimonials. All content should be educational and patient-focused.
- Use consistent branding in all the language of your ads, social media, and website content.
Other points for communication with your patients that will promote maximum goodwill.
- Urge (and educate) patients to focus on preventive dental care
- Send friendly reminders focusing on the following: your commitment, the steps you take to reduce phobias, and the value that your treatments provide.
- Offer dental hygiene tips – valuable info on topics such as when to schedule a dentist appointment or lesser-known ways to keep teeth healthy.
- Suggest gift ideas from your dental office – recommended toothbrushes, tooth-shaped planters, dental gift baskets, and whitening toothpaste.
- Schedule events at your dental office for children and families. Teach youngsters solid principles for lifelong dental health.
What Are the Results of Creating Goodwill Through Dental Marketing?
Practices that dedicate themselves to creating goodwill in their community through their dental marketing and communication may not experience huge results immediately, but they will get results and those results will be sweet.
Dental marketing that consistently prioritizes community goodwill builds astonishingly high trust levels in prospective patients.
These practices will discover that their soaring case acceptance rates mean that the work is completed by the act of the patient walking through their front door.
If a practice employs this goodwill marketing for high-value services such as dental implants, they should also be prepared to reap attractive rewards due to something called the value ladder.
What this means is that although these patients enter their practice to acquire the topline – implants, they stay for the regular cleanings and fillings as well, or in other words, they swim down the value ladder.
This is due to the simple fact that if a patient trusts a dentist enough to sign up for $40,000 full-arch implants, they are certainly going to have the level of trust needed for regular semi-annual cleanings after that.
Taking advantage of gravity in this way represents incredible ongoing value for a practice. It is also a huge improvement over the inefficient attempts that some dentists make to swim up the value ladder! Without any trust or goodwill built in their community, they are forced to simply hawk limited-time discounts such as “Free Whitenings!” or something similar as they try to pull cold people in off of the street in hopes that they will then swim up the ladder and access the more expensive treatments.
This has been proven not to work. Many times, these patients simply take the freebies and depart, instead of becoming regular customers.
Using this analogy, blaring deals on high-value procedures such as implants could be thought of as trying to lower the top rung of the ladder in hopes that people will be better able to hop aboard.
Both of these methods are hard on the bottom line of a practice and they are so unnecessary! If we begin with a solid foundation of goodwill in our community, a profitable edifice rises almost on its own with the rewards only growing over the years.
The other sad fact is that dental marketing done without regard for building goodwill neither costs less money nor takes less time than dental marketing that builds trust in the minds of prospective patients.
A poor job at building community goodwill is truly a lose-lose situation and should be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, due to ignorance of a better way, it is still the norm in many dental practices.
Another reason for the growing value of goodwill built through dental marketing is the fact that it can be stored for the future.
Although people may not need dental services immediately, they will retain their positive impressions for the future either for themselves or their loved ones.
When they do face the need in the future, guess who they will think of first? It’s going to be the practice that first left that powerful positive impression on their mind.
And the rewards of building goodwill through your dental marketing are simply too good to ignore. We’ll look at some specific doctors and what they have to say about goodwill dental implant marketing in the next section.
Why Is Goodwill Worth Creating in Dental Marketing?
The answer to this one should be obvious by this time. Because of course, we all want our brand to be liked! It’s simply common sense.
But let’s talk about some real numbers and see just how valuable creating goodwill actually is!
We’ll listen to what dentists who have used this method have to say about their ROI and overall results.
These quotes come from customers of Client Connection Group, a dental implant marketing agency that uses the goodwill method exclusively.
- “$297,509 in 6 months from $25,000. You can’t beat that ROI.” – Dr. Reinol Gonzalez, Regency Square Dental
- “The patients are coming in ready. It’s like you are doing half the work for us.” – Dr. Tarek Assi, Alpha Dental Practice & Implant Center
- “For every 3K, I get 30K out of it.” – Dr. Ralph Becker, Blue Summit Dental Group
- “It checks all the boxes… It’s about being there and meeting the needs of the patients.” – Bridgette, Impression Dental
- Collected $901,367 From $93,335 Ad Spend in 17 months – Dr. Khaimov, Grand Smile Dental
- “I’m very happy with the results. The ones that go through are very good cases, we need more of that!” – Rebecca Lazaroff, Sargon Dental
- Collected $1,066,400 From $69,565 Ad Spend in 11 months – Dr. Hsue, West Valley Dental
- “I checked a month ago and we were already at $60 something thousand that was already paid and there was pending a couple hundred thousand of treatment plans.”– Sargon Dental
- “So far 92K through your portal.” – West Valley Dental
- “We’re having great feedback with the patients and … we’re filling our chairs.” – Bridgette, Impression Dental
Is goodwill worth creating in your dental marketing? It sure is to these satisfied customers!
And if there’s one statistic that captures the value, it is the one we mentioned earlier:
Since most dental marketing only reaches the 3 percent of customers that is ready to buy today, then dental marketing that reaches the incubators (67%) and the information gatherers (30%) is reaching over 30X MORE PEOPLE simply by building goodwill in their minds toward your dental brand!
No wonder the doctors above saw these results and reaped these gains!
Building Goodwill in Dental Marketing Produces Long-term Trust
In the end, it’s all about the goal.
Let’s recap those main concepts for creating goodwill in our dental marketing.
- Position yourself as the expert
- Focus on educating your prospective patients about the options available to them
- Give VALUE first. Give before asking for anything, including their business.
- Answer their questions.
- Show your face in your ads.
All of these points boil down to building TRUST.
Although trust and goodwill could be thought of as synonyms, the effect of consistently building goodwill in dental marketing is long-term trust in your practice. And that is every dental practice’s goal.
Trust is highly necessary for dental practices because of two simple facts: (1) dentistry can be complex – your patients often don’t understand much about it – and (2) dentistry is often expensive.
The more uncertainty, ignorance, and risk of loss a transaction entails, the greater the need for trust between the parties involved in it.
A high level of goodwill built up through dental marketing and interaction allows this relationship of long-term trust to grow despite of the complexities and expenses of dentistry.
The expense of dentistry underscores the need for this trust. 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.
After you have followed the principles in this guide for building goodwill through dental marketing, how do you continue to maintain that goodwill and build long-term trust?
- Truly act in your customer’s best interest – EVERY TIME!
- Don’t settle for pretending and demonstrating
- Make every attempt to see issues from the patient’s point of view
- Carefully explain everything to them
- Truly seek to meet their needs
Although people’s trust levels are low, human nature never changes.
If a dentist follows the points above, patients WILL trust them. They can’t help it.
Seriously, the doctors who do this best are going to win the dental marketing game -EVERY SINGLE TIME.
New patients will simply flock to them, leaving other practices to wither away.
This process may take some time but don’t let that deter you.
Both building goodwill through dental marketing and growing long-term trust off of that foundation is eminently doable. And doing it well makes all the difference between mediocrity and top-tier status.
Conclusion:
Goodwill and long-term trust are literally money in your pocket – LOTS of it. Knowing how to build a foundation of goodwill through your dental marketing that merges into a long-term relationship of trust will give your practice a commanding advantage every time.
Wouldn’t you like to help build up genuine goodwill for your practice in your community 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!