How to Attract New Patients to your Australian Dental Practice
Hi, everyone Angus Pryor here, creator of the Dental Profit System, co-author of the Amazon crushing book The Better Business Book, bringing you this special video. Today.
we’re gonna look at how to attract new patients into your Australian dental practice. The reality is, dentists in Australia can be doing it tough and in any business, you do need to have a bit of a flow of new patients coming in, or new clients coming in, because it’s inevitable that some people will drop off. I really wanna focus on one word today, it’s around attracting more patients.
How to attract more patients to your Australian dental practice. You know, when you think about it, often what we’re doing is we’re going looking for patients, we’re seeking them, but wouldn’t it be better if we could have them seeking us? So, “seek versus sought.” So, it’s us going looking for them versus them coming looking for us, because this is about attracting more patients.
Now, in terms of seeking, that’s fairly self-evident isn’t it? Any form of external advertising you’re doing is basically seeking patients. It can be through Google, that’s a really obvious one, Facebook, other social media. I guess a referral system is probably seeking, and depending on how it’s done, signage. They can all be strategies for seeking, for attracting people but the one I really wanna focus on is sought, which is how to get the clients to seek you out.
One of the really important things to do in this area, is to establish yourself as an authority. So what does that mean? You know, the reality is that if you’re a client in any area and you have a need, then what you’re really hoping for is that the name of the paramount, the premier, business in that area, or business person, will pop into your mind and you’ll go, “Well that person’s the authority in that space, therefore they’re the go-to person for that service.” That’s the goal that you wanna be trying to achieve with your dentistry and the question is how do you become an authority?
Here’s a curious thing, from a science point of view, or from a sort of technical point of view, the client’s got an idea. It’s a little bit like you and me taking our car to the mechanic, we don’t really know if one mechanic is better than another. Unless you’ve done some study in that area, you don’t know and it’s the same for clients with you in terms of the science, the technical aspects. So you can’t be the authority in that area, even though I find a lot of dental practices wanting to do that. What you can do though, is you can be an educator and educate, absolutely you’re gonna draw on the science and the technical, but educate from the client’s point of view. That can make a huge difference.
So for example, YouTube videos. They’re something you need to do once and then it has the capacity to have people seeking you because they see you as the authority. You made a YouTube video about a particular circumstance, and as the consumer, I go, “Wow, he sounds like he really knows what he’s talking about, that’s who I’m gonna get in touch with.” You could be an educator through the media, whether it’s TV or radio, even community radio, newspaper, whether you do that through a press release … You could be a spokesperson for … the sort of go-to person for any of these guys on dentistry.
Here’s a website you really need to check out if you’re interested in doing this, sourcebottle. I would need to double check whether it’s got an “au” on it or not. This is the website that the media comes to looking for people to make a comment about something, and I can tell you, there is stuff in there, people looking for a dentist all the time, I would say probably every week. So that’s a way for you to establish yourself as the authority. You’ve been quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald. You’ve been quoted on the ABC News, or whatever. So, media … maybe have a column, maybe pitch a story to them, that sort of thing.
What else have we got? What about writing a book? Now, most of you would be tempted to wanna write a book about some real detailed thing about dentistry but if you just write it from a consumer’s point of view, it’s very easy to position yourself as an authority, as an expert, because 99.9% of the people reading it, they don’t realize, they don’t know any better. And of course, if you’re a qualified dentist, that’s sort of all you need, so writing a book’s a possibility.
And the other thing you can do, is you might want to position yourself in a specific part of dentistry. For example, your authority might be around dealing with kids, it might be around dealing with nervous patients, it might be around sleep dentistry, but think of it from the client’s point of view not from yours, not from, “I’m really good with …” I don’t know, ” … this piece of equipment,” or whatever. Now, what’s the client … what’s the thing that they’re looking for?
To give you an idea here, for example, like with a bakery, you’ve got a regular baker but then you’ve got something like a gluten free baker. Well, what if you guys could set yourselves up as … In fact, I’ll come to that, I’m just gonna write the word “green” there and then come to this fourth point, which is around branding. Part of positioning yourself as the authority could be that you say, “We’re the green dentists.” Now, does that work everywhere? No, probably not, but there’ll be certain parts of Australia, or wherever you are, that the locals really care about environmentally conscious, and if you can position yourself, “We’re the green dentists and this is how and here’s our video and etc., etc.” That’s a possibility. You could say, “I’m the wisdom teeth guy or girl.” What else? “I’m Dr. Hollywood smiles.”
Now, the fact is, any dentist … It’s not as though you need some special skills for this, any dentist can do that, but in creating your authority, you’re positioning yourself as, “I’m the wisdom teeth guy,” and therefore that’s how we get this sought stuff happening, rather than the seek. So, in terms of how to attract new patients to your Australian dental practice, “seek versus sought,” most of you are probably doing the seek stuff to a certain extent, but the sought … position yourself as an authority. Whatever materials you can use to just build that authority so that people come to you and even in the branding, “I’m the wisdom teeth guy,” “I’m Dr. Hollywood smiles,” whatever the case would be. All right, well that’s it for this video, from me, Angus Pryor, signing off, see you next time.