Growing your dental practice by understanding what patients want. 

While providing great services to your patients is vital, there is much more to achieving dental practice success than offering services your competition is likely also providing.

There are many strategies you can use to gain the edge you’re looking for—from evaluating your marketing strategies to improving the patient experience to honing your own skills. To help you stay ahead of the competition, consider these 5 tips:

1. Improve Your Marketing

If you don’t place much emphasis on marketing your dental practice, then now is an excellent time to begin. You need a multipronged approach when it comes to getting your name out to potential clients, and you may need to enlist the help of a marketing professional to do it. 

However, it’s important to keep in mind that just because you’re advertising a great deal and spending a substantial amount on advertising, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get the return on your investment you’re hoping for. 

That is why it is essential to enlist the help of your established client base in order to ensure you get that return and offset marketing costs. For example, your current patients can help by leaving positive reviews online.

When potential clients find out about you through your marketing materials, they’re most likely going to look into you online. When they do that, you want them to find great reviews left by happy patients. Do what you can to incentivize your patients to leave reviews and refer their friends and family to you.

2. Use Technology for a Better Patient Experience

One of the most important things to the modern dental patient is convenience. If your system for scheduling appointments, canceling or rescheduling, and making payments is slow, confusing, or difficult in any way, it’s going to be a strike against you for many clients. 

Fortunately, there are many ways for you to avoid these issues and stay ahead of the competition. Creating mobile-friendly interactive tools streamlines previously tedious and lengthy processes and lowers the margin for error significantly. 

You can use these tools to offer online appointments, provide availabilities via text or email, make payments online, and send confirmation and reminder texts.

3. Develop Your Relational Skills

Going to the dentist is not an appealing prospect for many patients. Because of this, you essentially begin each appointment with someone who does not necessarily wish to be there. If you want to change their minds, you’re going to need to employ some strong relational skills and forge a real connection with them. 

It is important to always hone your relational skills and become comfortable connecting with your patients. Noting personal details about your patients can help with this. Few things keep patients around more than a kindly dentist who remembers little things about them and their lives.

4. Provide a Comforting Space for Patients

Unfortunately, while many people do not particularly enjoy visiting the dentist, some find going to the dentist’s office a frightening experience. It’s not always easy to assuage the fears of someone with significant dental anxiety, but one way you can try to do so is by providing them with a comfortable environment that is full of amenities. 

Offer your patients coffee or tea, free Wi-Fi, places to plug in their devices, toys for the children, and books and magazines for the adults. Anything that can make them feel welcome is going to be another reason for them to come back to you, or even refer you to a friend.

5. Offer Comprehensive Services

One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is to offer services that others do not. Adding orthodontics to your practice can be an excellent method to achieve this, and you can do so with the help of orthodontic seminars for general dentists. 

Offering orthodontics can attract new customers from both outside and inside your current client base. It can also help you develop stronger relationships with your patients, which can in turn inspire patient retention. 

A modern patient is more likely to be attracted to a practice that offers comprehensive care, and adding orthodontic services is an effective way to do that.

Considering adding orthodontics to your dental practice?

The American Orthodontic Society offers orthodontic seminars for general dentists that can help you acquire the knowledge and the accreditation you need to provide a whole range of new services to your patients. Take a look at our available courses to learn how you can find dental practice success and stay ahead of the competition.