The success of your dental marketing relies on your ability to understand your prospects. When you understand your prospect’s motivations, and how to hit their hot buttons squarely in the bull’s eye, you’ll instinctively know what makes them tick, what fosters their hopes and desires, and where their fears and frustrations stem from.

You’ll know exactly how to present your dental services so it resonates with your prospects. So it doesn’t just spark a “need” for your service, but rather a burning realisation that they’ve got to have your dental service NOW!

It will put you front and centre in their minds so they’ll bond more closely to you more than any of your competition.

Without it, you’ll struggle. Each new sale will feel like a massive effort. You’ll rarely get any kind of referral business because you don’t get referrals from people who aren’t passionate about what you do.

But with this understanding, you can move to a whole new level of success in your dental marketing. It will transform you in your prospects and patients eyes. They’ll see you as more than a dentist. They’ll view you as an advocate instead of a “threat” just trying to make a sale.

Because this approach will feel much different for your prospects, compared to dentists who use the more conventional methods for marketing.

So with that said, let’s dive in …

Let’s start with some common traits of your prospect because these explain why it’s necessary to adapt your approach to your dental marketing.

#1: Your Prospects Are Temperamental

Their behaviour is one thing you can’t be sure of. Their reasons for choosing another dentist over you can be made up of many influencing factors, and not just one. They can be affected by impulse, information, price, convenience, perception, peers, and many more factors. It is therefore difficult to predict the reasons why they make their buying decisions.

#2: They Need Time To Make Their Decision

Many dentists make the mistake of thinking prospective patients will buy as soon as they arrive on their site. But there are many reasons why prospects won’t make an immediate decision the moment they arrive on your website.

In a recent study conducted by Nielsen, it showed that 92.5% of adults regularly research online before making their decision to purchase. And 80% of online shopping time is spent researching rather than buying the product or service itself. As a result, today’s prospects rarely become patients straight away. They need time to research, compare, and educate themselves.

#3: They Have to Trust You Before they Will Buy from You

You have to consider that your prospects have different fears, anxieties, and financial circumstances. There is also your competition to take into consideration. This is why gaining the trust of your prospect plays an important role in influencing their decision. By gaining their trust, you put yourself in the driver’s seat, and once you have this kind of bond with your prospect, they are much more likely to choose you.

…Now, Let’s Take a Look at the Old Way of Marketing

I’m going to share with you our conversion strategy which is really key, and the driving force behind the success of our dental marketing system getting more patients.

And when I talk about getting more patients and selling more of your dental services. I’m not talking about selling more of the everyday type of services such as “check-ups” or “fillings.”

I’m talking about the higher-priced, more profitable services where one patient can generate thousands of dollars in revenue and have a far greater impact on your bottom line.

But first, let me give you the reason why most dentists aren’t getting enough patients from their dental marketing…

That reason is that they’ve been sold a lie. They’ve been sold the conventional, yet outdated, marketing method.

It’s the “old way” of doing things, but sadly it doesn’t work anymore.

The method most dentists are using has been shown to significantly reduce conversions and overall sales. Without even realising it, they’re sacrificing the big money they could easily be making with just a little extra effort.

And by simply shifting their belief that “traffic” is responsible for more sales.

That if you get more people to your website, then automatically, you’ll get more sales and be more profitable.

But this flaw in thinking doesn’t consider that most dentist websites are performing poorly and as a result, are getting low conversions.

Therefore the problem for dentists is not a lack of visitors, the real problem is a lack of conversions.

So, what we often see is this—the dentist spends his marketing budget getting more visitors to his website. But because he has no strategy for converting visitors into sales. Few, if any of those visitors pick up the phone and book an appointment. He spends more and more money on website traffic, yet that traffic doesn’t result in more patients and sales.

So when the website performs poorly, if it doesn’t “convert” the traffic into leads, then spending more marketing budget on more “traffic” is not a smart idea. Because you’ll actually lose more money than you make back in sales.

The Power of a Conversion Strategy

This is why the conversion strategy is so important to you. Because when you increase conversions, you get more leads and sales from the same volume of traffic.

Now, an “average” conversion rate for a website that doesn’t have a conversion strategy is somewhere around the 5% mark—give or take a little—depending on the product, service, or industry.

This means just 5% of traffic converts into leads!

Or, put another way, 95% of your visitors leave the website without taking any action!

Which also means 95% of your marketing budget is flushed down the drain, because all those visitors have left your site without taking action.

And this is really important because most dentists are doing the same thing … their marketing and websites look and sound the same.

Furthermore, they’re pitching to their prospects the moment they arrive on their website. But for whatever reason, they’re not taking action, and they’re not ready to buy. Maybe they need to discuss it with their partner. Maybe they need to gather all the information before making their decision. Who knows. The reasons are different for each person.

This is the main problem with your marketing and why you’re not able to sell more of your higher priced dental services.

The point is, the majority of prospects will not visit your website with the intention to buy—at least not at first. So, a strategy focused on selling your services to your prospects on their first visit is actually alienating the majority of your prospects.

The good news is that while your competition are focused on “selling” to their prospects straight away and don’t have a proper conversion strategy, you can take capitalise on a huge opportunity by doing your dental marketing differently.

And this new approach will become even more important as your competition intensifies and your prospects become even more sophisticated.