Dentistry Must Incorporate Solid “Business” Principles
Certainly, if you’re going to be at your most healthy, you need to take dental care into account. There’s been a link found between heart disease and improper care of one’s gums. Flossing can, apparently, help diminish the negative impact on the heart. Rotted teeth aren’t good for health. Varying microorganisms can live in the mouth, and diminish health overall.
So dentistry should be a wing of healthcare that is as integral to overall healthy living as anything else. For whatever reason, this is seldom the case. What tends to happen is that many patients who desperately need the sort of health services dentists provide end up avoiding those services.
Sometimes this hearkens back to childhood fears of the dentist’s chair, sometimes the reason is financial, sometimes a lack of overall hygiene is the culprit. Whatever the case, people don’t come to the dentist as often as they should, and see such services as optional; even when realistically they aren’t—at least where long-term health is concerned.
What this means for many dentists, such as Rio Rancho Smiles, is they have to comport their practice in a way more akin to traditional business than many healthcare practices. The goal is to acquire patients, make them repeat customers, and keep them coming back over the long run. Doing this properly requires taking a marketing approach combined with an expansion approach.
Built-In Proactive Expansion Potential
Your dental practice needs to design services for proactive expansion, and that means things like specials, discounts, promotions, and packages offering things like “free” cleanings. For example, if you’ve got a patient who needs fillings, you might put them on something like a “gold” plan where they get one free cleaning a year as they maintain that plan.
Different tactics here will be more or less effective for different dentistry practices. However, to determine what is or isn’t working for you will require keeping metrics. Often gains are “mild”. They’re hard to distinctly pin down. Accordingly, you need some method of measuring profits and losses. One way to do that is to secure the right dental software for your practice.
Another method may be observing how competitors comport themselves and acting accordingly. Sometimes they do things that work, sometimes they don’t. Take what works, avoid what doesn’t. There’s always a balance.
Beyond specific options designed to help keep track of profits and losses, there are other software solutions out there as well. Varying CRM (Customer Relationship Management) options exist. These make automated outreach much easier. Beyond CRM, it’s possible to use basic software solutions like spreadsheets through Microsoft Word (or a free knockoff).
Realistic Features Of Keeping Metrics
Now granted, doing things more “manually” will likely take a bit longer and be a bit more complicated than if you were to use software specifically designed for the purpose. But however you go about it, a software approach to optimizing your dentistry practice will definitely work more efficiently than doing things by hand.
Also, software can be leveraged toward automated outreach solutions. There are ways to post across all social media avenues simultaneously with the click of a mouse, rather than copy-pasting a message individually. Dentistry is about oral health, it’s not about marketing. However, without proper marketing, it’s hard to get clientele requisite to profit.
Finding Your Balance
Some dentistry practices handle outreach all on their own, others work with outsourced marketing professionals specializing in things like SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What’s probably best is a hybrid approach that utilizes affordable software to determine metrics and optimize outreach internally, and outsourcing as feasible for things like SEO content.
Every dentistry practice will be different, but it’s also considerable that similarly-aligned practices may have already “blazed a trail”, as it were, and you don’t have to reinvent any marketing wheels if you follow their example. Either way, using tools like software for metrics in terms of outreach or expansion represents real profit vectors for most dentistry practices.
