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Promoting yourself and your services is part and parcel of building a successful dental practice. Once, it was enough to hang out your shingle and wait for your customers to pour in. These days, there’s a lot more competition in a lot more fields. General dentistry, orthodontics, dental surgery – you’ve got to work a lot harder to attract and retain your customers than your peers from just a generation ago. At the same time, there are conventions for advertising medical services that extend to dental services. Promotional products can help you stretch your advertising budget without stepping over the line into tacky or unethical advertising practices.
There are many ways to use promotional products in your dental practice. As with any other profession, the main aims of using promotional products include:
- prospecting for new clients (we call it building a practice)
- customer retention (maintaining your practice)
- rewarding loyalty
- building name recognition
In some cases, you can use the same promotional products in more than one category. Other categories, like rewarding loyalty, call for promotional products that have a bit more value. Here are some ideas for strategies to build and maintain your dental practice and appropriate promotional products to use with them.
Promotional products to attract new patients
The key to attracting new patients to your practice is targeting the right market and getting your information into their hands – and in front of their eyes. There are two excellent sources of new patients for any dental practice: new residents to the area and parents of young children. In either case, if you draw them to your practice, you’ll have a new patient for years to come, since most people will stay with the same dental practice for life.
One of the easiest ways to introduce yourself to new residents is to partner with an estate agent who offers a “Welcome to your new home” goodie package, or find a “welcome wagon” service in your community. Choose promotional products that are both representative of your practice area and useful to your prospective patient. An example of an inexpensive item that fits the bill is a tooth-shaped memo pad that mounts on the refrigerator. The tooth is clever and cute, and the memo pad will be useful to your prospective patient. Mounted on the refrigerator, it will keep your name and number on display where it will be handy when needed. Include an offer for a discounted price on initial x-rays and tooth cleaning and you’ll have an excellent draw to attract new patients.
Building your pediatric dental practice can be just as easy. Introduce yourself to day care providers and nursery schools in your area and offer to provide “new tooth” kits or educational materials about how to care for teeth to parents and students. The promotional products most suited to this type of promotion are educational leaflets, soft infant toothbrushes imprinted with your practice details and other products that relate to dental health. You can use the same types of promotional products to give presentations at local schools and youth clubs.
Promotional products as loyalty and customer retention gifts
The key things to remember when using promotional products as gifts to your existing patient list are utility and exposure. The more useful your gift is to your patients, the more exposure you’ll get for your practice. Two of the best promotional products to use in this way are sugarless breath mints in printed tins and breath strips in printed folders. Both are gifts that your clients will appreciate, and you’ll get an added benefit when they offer a mint to a friend.
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