How to boost patient numbers at your practice without spending an extra cent on marketing – Part 4

In an increasingly competitive dental market, you could be forgiven for thinking the only way to win is to outspend your competitors. Think again. In this multi-part series, founder of the Dental Profit System, Angus Pryor will take you through the different methods to boost patient numbers at your practice without spending an extra cent of marketing.

Transcript:

Hi everyone. Angus Pryor, here, creator of the Dental Profit System and co-author of the Kindle smashing book, The Better Business Book, bringing you this week’s Marketing Monday. The weekly video show designed to boost the marketing at your dental practice.

Now, as you may be aware, we’ve been in a series for the last number of weeks, looking at how to boost the patient numbers at your practice without spending an extra cent on marketing. And that’s something that’s certainly appealing to a lot of people. And today, we’re going to look at another one of those. But, before I get into that, I want us to do a couple of things. Firstly, I wanted to give a shout out to the guys, I met a number of dentists on Friday in Brisbane. They’re really great value.

And secondly, this is being recorded today on what is the Queen’s birthday weekend in Australia. And something has occurred to me, which is that, with the Queen’s birthday, it’s the weekend and there’s a holiday today in Australia, which we all love, but the fact is that it’s not actually her birthday today. If you are a dentist, then what I’d like to get you to do is hang on til the end of this because I’m going to give you a present.

We’re talking about how to boost patient numbers at your practice without spending an extra cent on your marketing. As a reminder, we’ve talked about calculating our average patient value, we’ve talked about measuring the sources of your marketing. Last week, we talked about patient referrals and measuring how you convert inquiries into appointments. Well, today we’re going to talk about business referrals.

And to give you an idea with business referrals, I just want you to think about something. If your practice doesn’t have as many patients as you would like, the fact is somebody, some other non-competing business has got your patients. Some other non-competing business has already got a business relationship with people who you would love to have as your own patients. And so therefore, if you can set up a referral system, that is a much better way because that business has already got the trust of those patients. And it’s a lot easier to do that, to get that referral from another business than to set it up from scratch for you, where they don’t know you from Adam.

The question is how do you do this, and the answer is pretty simple. Go along to a number of the local businesses in your area, and what I’d suggest you do is stick within a health field. Now, that could be other healthcare professionals. Whether that’s doctors or physios or audiologists or even pharmacies. But also, it can be things like gyms. Maybe if there’s a Pilates or even beauty. Anything that’s loosely in the health space, that’s a good place to start.

And then the second part is to actually go in, introduce yourself. I’m your neighbor, et cetera, et cetera. How can we help each other to boost our businesses? And I can tell you for some of you … And I’ve got my t-shirt on. It says “unknown.” And for some of you, the challenge is stepping into the unknown. And you’re thinking well, how do I do that?

I’ve got a bunch of clients who are doing this and if you’re worried that you’re somehow going to be kicked out of the business, in most cases, the businesses that are approached for doing this, they’re welcomed with open arms. And wouldn’t you be? If someone who seems credible comes by, it’s a business that you’re probably aware of because they’re a few doors down or maybe only a minute or two away, and they say come on, now can we help each other? Then, mostly the experience of my clients doing this is that they’re really welcomed with opened arms. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is really it’s a matter of working together to try and work out what are the things you can do to promote each other’s business. The clients that I’ve been working with, they’ve come up with some brilliant stuff. I’ve got a client, a dentist, who is quite close to a pharmacy. And the pharmacist said, you know what would be really useful, we have people who come ask dental related questions all the time about pain or bleeding gums or whatever the case may be. If you could prepare something, like a brochure, to give to them, which gives them the information that they want and then refers them for an appointment, that’d be really helpful.

You don’t actually have to be offering massive discounts. You may choose to say, come and have a free appointment, or like you could do something with a physio and it could be about jaw pain because that might be one place where you’d overlap. And so you might say, well, come and have a free consult about that. But the fact is, it’s a matter of talking to them, finding out what their needs are, and then setting up a mutually beneficial system.

Now, I did promise you, or I meant to, if I didn’t, that I wanted to offer you a present for Queen’s birthday weekend. And what it is is I’d like to … because the pushback that I’ve had from my clients has been Angus, what do I say? And with that in mind, we’ve actually written a script which gives you all the things you need to say so that you can have this conversation go smoothly. And all I need you to do is, you can either just write below “yes, please,” or whatever, and I’ll send you the script. Or you can get across to dentalprofitsystem.com and just send us an email and we’ll send you the script. And that’s our gift to you for the Queen’s birthday weekend.

Now, if you’ve been watching this series and you’re thinking, “I really like the stuff you’re covering, Angus. That makes a lot of sense. But I’m just not going to have time, or I’m finding it hard to get it to do”, then the other thing that we’ve created is a six month, fast track program to help really optimize patient numbers at your practice quickly, within the six months. And a number of these steps that we’ve mentioned we’ll set up with you.

Head across to dentalprofitsystem.com. We’re just in the process of rebuilding the website. Send us an email and we’ll set up a time to talk to you about our fast track system that goes for six months. All right, well, that’s it for me for this week. Until next week. Signing off. See you later.