It might be shocking to find out, but the share of marketing costs of your dental clinic’s gross revenue is almost half of it. Ranging from 20 to 30 percent, the money that you spend on traditional advertising could be deemed costly when compared to other low-cost methods such as internal marketing.
As a budding clinic and asking why it’s important to promote your business in the market, you might think that investing in external promotion is more effective. This would usually make sense as it would allow you to reach out to customers first.
However, in this cutthroat industry, where every dentist is gunning for the same patients, using the same methods would not allow you to stand out. Instead of contributing to the already -existing and overwhelming digital library of redundant content, why not increase your dental referrals by starting within your own company and using your employees and satisfied customers as agents for publicity?
A Brief on Internal Marketing and How It Can Help
Word-of-mouth marketing is among the most underrated forms of business promotion nowadays. This affordable way of highlighting your company’s products, services, and values uses actual people and lines of communication to spread the word about your dental clinic.
It’s a recommendation and review process that cleverly promotes your company without being too upfront or in the face about it. Internal marketing is a subtle form of modern advertisement that allows you to build a loyal and local patient base that trusts you based on their friends’ and families’ recommendations.
Why promote your business in this matter when you could simply post positive reviews on your website? Well, it’s a matter of authenticity that patients resonate more with, which can build better patient-to-doctor trust. You can achieve this easily by improving the patient’s experience with every appointment through ease in appointment, billing, follow-up check-ups, and clinic efficiency.
To maximize your market reach and boost dental referrals, you can digitize this internal marketing technique through social media, online websites, interactive mediums, and more.
Internal Marketing Tools
With the advancement of today’s digital market, the tools for internal marketing are endless. From social media posts, website guests, email outreach, discount offers, cold calls, recruitment award systems, and more you can employ a variety of techniques to succeed in getting more dental referrals at less cost.
However, you also have to be careful in applying these techniques as unchecked recommendations can cause misinformation and miscommunication among clients. So, if you’re selling services for denture repair in London, you have to be clear and concise in educating your patients so they can spread credible information about your dental clinic.
Internal Marketing Tips
You will increase the effectiveness of your internal marketing techniques with the following tips:
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Leave a Positive Impression
Customers and patients are more likely to advertise and personally recommend your clinic’s services to their friends and family if they themselves trust it. How can you do this?
You’ll have to make sure that you leave a lasting good impression with every visit. Persuade them into trusting your practice, not through words and propaganda, but rather with successful cases and concrete results.
So, if you’re a clinic specializing in Invisalign in Oakville, you have to maintain a consistent and premier service. You can also provide scripts for your employees that they can parrot and repeat with every patient if they ask about your clinic’s credentials and achievements. You can also do this subtly by hanging frames of your diplomas, certificates, and accomplishments.
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Create Referral Materials
Asking your patients and employees to promote your clinic can sometimes be awkward especially if you don’t know them that well and had just visited your clinic for the first time. It would be easier if you have materials already prepared that you can easily hand out.
Be it flyers, referral cards, brochures, and more, these printed materials are useful for your patients and employees when they’re talking to potential clients as they can use them as references when they’re being asked.
However, you need to make sure that these printed contents are well-researched and developed. It has to be engaging, simple, and comprehensive so that any average patient who doesn’t have any knowledge of dentistry can understand it. Lessen the use of dental-specific jargon and simplify complicated topics.
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Show Gratitude
Once your dental clinic has been successfully promoted by your patients, make sure to show your gratitude by giving them discounts, coupons, and more. You can also reward them with products and additional services to give them motivation on why they should promote your business.
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Analyze Marketing Performance
The success of internal marketing in its first few days of application is not that evident right away. To make sure of where to begin and how to improve your internal marketing techniques, conduct monthly or weekly marketing assessments. You can also trace which patients are the results of these referrals and track their future appointments.
The main goal of internal marketing is to build a bigger customer base on a loyal foundation. This is more economically effective when compared to external marketing as you’ll only have to invest in fostering trust among your existing pool of patients.
The need to compete with other dental clinics for potential clients would be less as you can gradually infiltrate the market with your own loyal promotional agents. So, invest in internal marketing now and save more on your profits.
