Your One-Stop Guide to Dental Patient Referral Marketing

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Your One-Stop Guide to Dental Patient Referral
Marketing
Dental referral marketing (or word-of-mouth
marketing) is a powerful marketing strategy and
one of the best tactics for acquiring more
patients and improving conversion rate. However,
finding the right ways to motivate your existing
patients to refer their family and friends to
your dental practice is hard work. Like all
healthcare marketing strategies, referral
marketing is effective when managed properly and
optimized to attract the right patients. However,
building an attractive dental referral marketing
campaign is only half the battle ensuring that
you actively encourage the referrals which
means your existing patients recommend your
practice to their family and friends is the
real challenge. This is where referral marketing
companies like Practice Builders come into
play. To help you understand dental patient
referral marketing and to inspire you to include
this strategy in your marketing arsenal, we have
put together a quick guide on referral marketing.
Read on! What is dental patient referral
marketing? It is precisely what it sounds like
the process of one of your existing patients
referring your practice and services to family
and friends and returning to the practice after
the recommendation.
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Unlike other ways to grow your dental practice
(social media marketing and content marketing),
referral marketing happens organically. This
means marketers may or may not get involved in
the referral process. However, a referral
marketers role is to boost the process so that
more patients share about your services with
their friends. Why is referral marketing so
effective? Referral marketing provides knowledge
and a level of trust, as the opinions of family
and friends are trusted more than paid
advertising or other marketing tactics. In fact,
according to a Nielsen report, patients are four
times more likely to consider a dental practice
when a close family member or friend refers
it. Is Influencer marketing a form of referral
marketing? Pretty much! This is because
influencers are trusted and respected by their
followers. A product or service recommended by
influencers will
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have the same impact on followers minds as a
personal recommendation. How to implement dental
patient referral marketing in your overall dental
marketing strategy? 1. Make the patient
experience share-worthy There are several ways to
build your patient experience to be share-
worthy. By making sure their experience is
share-worthy, you can subtly encourage them to
post about it on social networks and third-party
review sites. But social media platforms are not
the only places where you can encourage word of
mouth marketing. There are many more ways to do
it. The experts at Practice Builders can help you
leverage positive patient experience to acquire
more new patients.
2. Provide exceptional service
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Always remember that happy patients share more.
Now the question is how do you get happy
patients? By giving exceptional service! Despite
constant reminders (we keep publishing blogs) on
how patient experience can drive profitability,
excellent service is still a rare commodity. Most
dental practices provide the minimum
expected. However, if you want your patients to
share about you, you have to give exceptional
service. You may want to read about 5 Strategies
to Improve Patient Experience here. Providing
exceptional service doesnt have to be a fancy
affair. Including essentials like sending
pre-appointment reminders, training your staff to
be courteous, making sure your staff knows
patients by the first name, ensuring accurate
billing, minimizing wait times, and maintaining
overall hygiene inside your office. 3. Create
and share relevant content Dental referral
marketing is an excellent concept! But you will
need to focus more on your audience, to make it
relevant for your dental practice. I mean,
despite having the best staff, how many blogs can
you write about almost painless tooth
extraction? You will have to come up with
innovative content ideas. How? You can consider
making videos where your patients are talking
about almost painless tooth extraction. Problem
solved! These videos will serve dual purposes
market your services and act as positive patient
reviews. Patient reviews work as effectively as
referrals because prospects watching such videos
will trust them more than they will trust a paid
marketing campaign.
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The idea is to chance upon an opportunity and
take full advantage of it. All you have to do is
find out which content type will perform best in
your local market, optimize it and promote
it. 4. Partner with influencers Influencers
recommendations are crucial to determining your
referral marketing programs success and whether
your service quality and brand awareness go
viral. You can consider working with influencers
in different capacities and get them to recommend
your dental practice to their followers. Remember
, referral marketing is typically a
cost-effective marketing strategy. You need not
make it an expensive, large-scale campaign. You
may want to read about Influencer Marketing Big
Impact Even With a Small Budget here.
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• Announce a patient referral scheme
• A referral scheme is a planned, systematic way of
  incentivizing your existing patients to refer
  your dental practice to their family and friends.
• Two components incentives and promotion play
  an integral role in ensuring your referral
  campaigns success.
• Incentives are essential as they will motivate
  your patients to spread the good word about your
  services. According to experts, getting the
  incentive right is 80 percent of your referral
  programs success. You must think clearly about a
  meaningful incentive for your existing patients
  and the friends they are referring to.
• Promotions are essential because, without
  promotion, your existing patients would not know
  about your referral program. You can let patients
  know about your referral program by adding a link
  to it on the homepage of your website. You can
  also consider sending an email to your existing
  patients and inviting them to join.
• Make it easy for patients to refer
• A successful dental patient referral program
  makes it easy for existing patients to share your
  brand with others. If a patient has to jump
  through hoops just to send a referral, he or she
  will likely give up.
• By giving your patients a few different ways to
  share, you might be able to increase the
  likelihood of them sharing. In addition to social
  media posts and website headers, you can consider
  traditional methods like handing out printed
  flyers or pre-filler coupons to your existing
  patients so that the process is easy, making it
  more likely for patients to participate.
• Conclusion

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Patient referrals can come from anywhere a
happy patient, a family member, or even through
an influencer. The key is to leverage these
referrals using a well-designed referral
marketing program that incentivizes word of mouth
and boosts patient loyalty. Dental referral
marketing programs are insanely effective. They
have the potential to help you acquire
higher-value patients that convert faster, trust
you more, and stay for longer all of this at a
minimal cost to you. It is much, much cheaper to
acquire patients through referral marketing
instead of other dental marketing methods. When
starting a referral program, it helps if you
already have a solid relationship with your
patients and understand what will incentivize or
motivate them to share. Also, focus on making the
referral process as easy as possible. What do
you think? Considering having a referral
dental Marketing program in place for your dental
practice? Our experts have the knowledge and
expertise to help you and make your program
a roaring success. Contact us today!