Your patients have several dental practices to choose from, so why should they come to you for their cleanings, exams, and treatments? Brand building is important for attracting new patients to your office and retaining your existing patients to keep them coming back. Establishing a solid brand identity for your dental office will let current and future patients know who you are and what they can expect when they visit for their appointments.
Brand building can seem intimidating for a small dental practice. You’ll need to develop certain skills and collect data about your business and patient base, but it can be simple and effective if you follow these tips.
Why Is Brand Building Important for Dental Practices?
Developing a brand identity for your dental office that matches your workplace values and the services you provide gives potential patients and employees a curated idea of who you are. Your branding is the first impression that people will have of your business. However, branding involves much more than just a fancy logo and website.
Your chances of gaining new clients will increase greatly if your dental practice utilizes strong and unique branding. In addition, employees who feel confident in your company’s branding may have increased drive and pride in their work.
1. Determine Your Audience
One of the most important steps in building a quality marketing strategy is to know who you are marketing to. You can understand your target market by narrowing in on the type of patients in your area and whom you want to offer services to. When determining your target audience, think about their age, employment status, lifestyle, and the types of dental services you predict they’ll need.
Once you know who you are marketing to, you can build your practice’s branding around that demographic.
For example, some dental practices work exclusively in pediatrics, so their kid-focused marketing would differ from that of an office that works mostly with adult patients.
2. Research Your Competitors
Knowing which dental practices you compete with for patients can help you build a brand that encourages those patients to choose you for dental services. You can check out the competition’s branding and decide what works well and what doesn’t. From there, you can decide which aspects may be beneficial to work into your branding in an original way.
3. Determine the Look of Your Brand
Your brand’s visual identity is one of the most important tools in enticing new clients and potential employees. The look of your branding draws people in and encourages them to look further into the services you provide.
Keeping the visuals consistent across your website, social media, and paperwork will help you along your brand building journey. This includes your logo design and the colors, fonts, and images you associate with your brand. These choices should align with your brand’s mission and values.
4. Develop Branded Content
An important marketing strategy is to develop strongly branded content that appeals to your target market and remains consistent. This content can be as simple as your business cards and as complex as long-form blogs for your website.
It is just as important to make sure this content reaches your audience. Optimizing your content with SEO can help boost your business to the top of many online search results.
5. Use Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool. You can attract new patients by developing a strong brand and applying that branding to your social media.
You can think of your brand’s social media presence as digital word of mouth. The benefits of social media for dentists include:
- Inexpensive marketing
- Engagement with current and future patients
- Increased traffic to your website
Social media is a low-effort method of putting your dental practice’s information in front of many eyes.
6. Be Unique
It is okay to use branding that strays a bit from the typical branding in your market. People are more inclined to interact with an advertisement or social media post that is fun or that differs from what they usually see. Those interactions have the potential to turn into dedicated clients and increase revenue.
Dental Intelligence Can Boost Your Brand
At Dental Intelligence, our mission is to help dental practices gain loyal patients and grow their businesses with digital solutions for payments, communication, marketing, and more!
Brand building can be simple with our state-of-the-art analytics and engagement systems. Schedule a demo today!