You’ve just opened up a dental practice and you want to get patients to come visit. One way to do that is to make it stand out from the rest of the competition in the area – both in terms of your dental work and how your place looks from the outside. No matter how passionate and qualified you are, it’s still essential you have a comprehensive plan to make your business stand out and last the ups and downs of navigating the market. How do you attract new clients? And once you’ve met them, how can you create relationships that will last for many years? What can you do specifically? Here are some pointers on how to make your dental practice stand out.
Add Security Features
Your physical doors are one of the ideas on how to make your dental practice stand out. It’s important that your patients know that you take the task of protecting their data very seriously. One way you can do that is to install security doors that can withstand all kinds of break-in attempts.
Also, you can have an alarm system installed. It pays to be diligent and that extra layer of protection alongside the doors will make your office very non-appealing to any would-be thieves.
Another thing to think about is how to preserve your digital files. Hackers would love to get their hands on any billing information of your patients – including any credit cards. Have firewalls in place on your computer systems. You want your patients to be able to feel safe paying for things online or at your office. If you lose that trust, it’ll be hard to get them back.
Renovate Your Waiting Area
The waiting room tends to be one of the more overlooked areas of any kind of dental or medical office. ‘Just stick some chairs, a table, and maybe a TV in there and they will be fine.’ No, that’s not the case. You want to make the waiting area to be a relaxing place for them to sit and not be worried about their upcoming appointment.
One big part of this is the paint scheme. Hire some painters and have them paint the waiting area a nice pleasant color – don’t make it feel like they are in a hospital. Talk with them about any suggestions that they may have. That will answer one part of the equation on how to make your dental practice stand out.
Make sure that the waiting area is cleaned on a regular basis. Perhaps hang up some pictures. Are you a photographer yourself? You could put up photos of some of your best work – like if you went on a safari in Africa and took pictures of the wildlife there. It’s a great way to also show off a bit of your personality.
Accept More Insurance Types
One thing that keeps people away from the dentist is not being able to pay for their dental visits. This can lead to them winding up getting gum disease since only brushing and flossing can do so much. As a result, they could wind up losing teeth or even developing conditions like diabetes, heart disease, or certain forms of cancer.
Yes, you need to run like a business to stay profitable so that you can keep your practice’s doors open, but you also want to serve the community around you. Be as flexible as you can be so that people can get their dental care so that they can have a much better chance at long-term health.
You can help the people living in your area or nearby by accepting more types of dental insurance. They will be more likely to visit your office if they know that you are fair when it comes to accepting payments. You can also offer different types of financing, which will help them pay for their work over time. This is how to make your dental practice stand out since your patients will likely tell other people about how fair and accommodating you are with taking dental insurance. .
Give Your Exterior a Makeover
Have you ever driven or walked by a business and just kept on going if it looked like the owners didn’t care about how the outside of their place looked? Is the grass too long? Is the paint outside dull or chipped? If you give the impression that you don’t pay attention to the outside of your business, then why would people want to come inside? Any potential customers/patients might be afraid to find out what the interior looks like since it’s clear you neglected the outside.
Walk around your place and see what needs to be worked on. Take notes and think like a potential patient – would you really want to go in through the doors how it looks now? You want to get off on the right foot. Have someone cut the grass and perhaps even plant some flowers. Get exterior painters and have them paint the entire place so that it looks brand new. It will look a lot more inviting and it might draw in more of a crowd. Improving your exterior is a great example of how to make your dental practice stand out.
Add Entertainment to Your Lobby
While it’s true that a lot of people are using their smartphones to entertain themselves while they wait for appointments, you still want to keep any people who don’t have any phones occupied, too. That means you should have something for them to watch in the lobby or waiting room. Ideally, it would be a nice flat-screen TV. You just need to contact a TV mounting business to put it up for you. This is another excellent way to figure out how to make your dental practice stand out.
Update Your Plumbing
When you run a dental practice, it involves a lot of water. Your patient is going to be rinsing out a good amount of the time. Your staff will be washing their hands in between appointments. People will have to use the bathroom. That’s why it’s important to have excellent plumbing. The last thing you want to do is to have to close for a bit to call a plumbing company. Make sure that your place has new pipes. This might not be the most obvious sign of how to make your dental practice stand out … but if something goes wrong, people will remember it for all the wrong reasons.
Install New Windows
There are a number of reasons why you want to install new windows. The shiny glass will make the place look nice. Also, the change of the old windows, which might have had issues with their frames, will draw the attention of people who are driving or walking by your office. Let’s not forget about the inside, too. When the workers are finished and they have sealed all the windows, that will keep any outside air from coming in, which is very important on some really cold winter days. When you’re trying to think of how to make your dental practice stand out, having a place that is comfortable for you, your patients and your staff will do just that.
Get Your Roof Fixed
Here’s a solution that will help your business in terms of both looks and safety. If people pass by and see rotted or loose shingles on your roof, it’s going to give them a very bad first impression. That’s not the only problem, though. Those shingles will be letting in rain, which will then create moisture in the attic. As a result, mold can grow there and, over the long term, it can weaken the overall structure of the house where you have your dental practice in. If you have a roof in need of repair, then you need to hire roofers to come take care of the situation. Having a brand-new roof is a great investment in how to make your dental practice stand out.
Ideally, you will have this work done before you open your practice. You don’t want to have to shut down for a bit or have to worry about your patients possibly getting injured by something falling off the roof when they’re coming for their appointment. Think ahead and get this out of the way. Being proactive in this situation is a good thing – it can also help keep everyone in your dental practice healthy since mold can make people sick.
Try New Marketing Strategies
In this day and age, you need to use the internet and social media to market yourself. More people are using their smartphones to get their news rather than the printed newspaper. There are various things that you can do, including using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get the website for your dental practice to rank high on search engines like Google.
The thinking with SEO is that you can write phrases that people will look for, like ‘dentist in New York City. When people see you show up on the first page of the results, they will likely click the link to go to your site. Another thing you could do is Pay-Per-Click ads, which is where you put certain phrases, like ‘dentist’ and your zip code. If people look for that, your site will show up as an ad atop the listings. People are still likely to click on the link if it looks like it will answer their question, which is an excellent chance to get another patient. .
Talk to content marketing agencies about how to boost your visibility. They may also hire freelance writers to compose blog posts that have keywords that are specific to your practice in them. You can have videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Doing that can increase the sense of familiarity for any potential patients since they will have seen your face and gotten a sense of who you and your staff are. This is another way to think of how to make your dental practice stand out.
Make signing up for appointments very easy. Try to space out the appointments so that you’re able to see each patient on time. You don’t want to be known as the dentist who always keeps people waiting. Yes, things can happen, like emergency procedures, but always communicate with the people who are waiting – either you tell them or you have a staff member dedicated to that who will be able to explain things in a sympathetic and patient way. Keeping people in the loop is another excellent way of how to make your dental practice stand out.
Running your own dental practice, especially very early on, requires you to do a lot of different things to get people’s attention. Perhaps you decided to leave a group practice to start your own. In that case, if you had patients there, they might follow you to the new practice, provided that it’s a reasonable commute for them. You’ll still need to do other things to get new business, though.
Go to networking events and talk to people about your practice. Have marketing materials mailed out to people. You can also have people sign up for email updates where you can let them know about any particular specials you might have – like a $99 dental exam for new patients. Your existing patients might send over a family member or friend when they learn about this in one of your emails.
These are just some of the things you can think about on how to make your dental practice stand out from your competition. Ultimately, what it comes down to is your being able to make your patients feel welcome the very second that they come to your office and also doing an outstanding job of helping them regain their oral health. Then those patients will gladly tell other people about you and pass along recommendations. Then you will be successful as a dentist.
