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Jul 4, 2022
It takes so much work to gain patient trust but it’s crucial especially if you want to build a dental brand that will thrive in the years to come.
So, what can you do to become a trustworthy dental practice?
By having dental branding that is centered around authenticity and customer data, you can show your honest self and attract the right patients to your clinic.
Trust is essential in dentistry. If a prospective patient doesn’t find your practice reliable, they’ll never consider booking an appointment with you.
The same goes with your existing patients. If they don’t trust you, they’re more likely to experience anxiety thinking about being in a dentist’s chair causing them to put off dental appointments and never return.
Through authenticity and transparency, you can show your ideal patients that your practice can be trusted. A survey showed that 90% of people consider authenticity when deciding whether or not to buy products or services.
66% of consumers also think that transparency is one of the most attractive qualities of a brand.
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To foster lifelong patients, your dental practice needs to build trust by being consistent with your dental branding. The more consistent your brand is, the more recognizable you are to your patients.
This helps provide a feeling of familiarity and reliability, allowing your patients to get to know your practice on a deeper level.
According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchasing decisions are more emotional than they are practical. And, the same can be said when choosing a dental practice.
Humans are driven by feelings. Therefore, selling a feeling as opposed to an actual product or service can be more effective in trying to win over new patients.
Take buying shampoo, for example. Why do you buy the same kind of shampoo despite the infinite number of choices? Because you know what to expect and you know you like the results when you use this particular shampoo.
By giving your patients and prospects a consistent, dependable experience across all touchpoints, you instill a feeling of familiarity, trust, and comfort, making them more likely to choose you as their go-to dentist.
Here’s what you need to do to provide your patients and prospects a dependable brand experience no matter what channel they use to interact with you:
Define Your Brand Boice And Messaging
Brand voice refers to your practice's personality and emotions seamlessly blended into your communications, visuals, and messaging. It plays a crucial role in making sure that your message stands out and makes a lasting impression on your target patients.
The most successful dental brands have a clear sense of purpose and a personality that resonates with their target patients. They have an established brand voice and deliver their message consistently across all channels.
Are you all about affordability and quality? Or premium dental services at a premium cost?
Your patients need to know who you are and what you’re all about as a dental practice.
If you want to be known as a friendly and affordable family dentist, then this should reflect in your logos, typefaces, photography, graphics, language, tone, and visuals to create a recognizable dental brand.
Align Your Branding Strategy With Your Practice’s Values.
Your brand values determine your practice’s identity, message, and personality. They dictate what kind of digital content you be publishing online, guide your brand story, and help with the decision-making process.
In other words, your brand values help ensure that you’re delivering a consistent impression of your dental practice across all touchpoints.
Before developing a branding strategy for your dental practice, you need to know what your values are first. It’s the key to making sure that your dental brand remains unique in today’s highly competitive landscape.
Despite the various platforms you use to communicate with your patients, your practice needs to consistently embody its core values by creating content that your ideal patients love.
Your blogs, videos, and social media posts should offer a unified look, voice, and topics.
Develop A Social Media Content Calendar.
Publishing regularly on social media is essential to creating a strong presence online and a dental brand that’s easily recognizable.
To make sure you’re posting regularly across various platforms, you need to create a social media content calendar and use automation to systematically publish content.
By allowing you to post during peak hours and even during times when you’re too busy to touch your phone, you can keep your brand marketing organized, boost your practice’s visibility, and convert new patients.
Being transparent means being open about where you source your dental materials, how you run your practice, how you treat your employees, and if you care about something beyond profit.
Modern consumers want to know what happens behind closed doors. They also want to know which causes the dental practice they support feel strongly about.
And, if you’re thinking about supporting every cause, even those that you're not passionate about, just to make your dental brand more appealing, think again.
Consumers can find out everything they want to know about you and if they can spot even the slightest form of insincerity, they won’t be so forgiving.
But, by being open about these things, you can boost the credibility of your practice, humanize the people behind it, attract potential patients and keep your existing ones loyal.
Here’s how you can be more transparent online:
Feature Your employees In A Behind-The-Scenes-Themed Content.
Give your target patients a behind-the-scenes look at what a typical day looks like in your clinic from the moment you open your doors up until handling the last patient of the day.
It’s a great way to show people that you and your team work hard to provide the quality service they deserve. This also makes you more relatable, which humanizes your dental brand.
Other behind-the-scenes- themed content are:
Showcase Your Procedures.
Patients trust experts. So, your goal is to show your ideal patients that you know what you’re doing and that you’re an expert in your respective field.
By walking potential patients through what happens during a certain dental procedure, what its benefits are, and debunking common misconceptions, you help them envision themselves undergoing a particular procedure, put their minds at ease, establish trust, and win them over.
Feature User-Generated Content.
One simple way to achieve authenticity is to feature user-generated content. By showing others how your patients are loving their new smiles, how satisfied they are with your services, or how they commend your dental office for being so welcoming, you can instill trust and convince potential patients to book an appointment with you.
Compile A Side-By-Side Picture of Before and After Results.
Show people what your dental clinic can do and what they can expect if they undergo a certain procedure with you by publishing before and after pics.
It’s a great way to demonstrate your abilities and convince people to book an appointment with you.
Acknowledge Any Lapses from Your Side.
Part of being transparent is owning up to your mistakes and responding to negative reviews. By admitting that you made lapses, offering to resolve issues, and addressing any concerns a patient might have, you can keep your existing patients loyal and attract new ones.
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Your website could be a potential patient’s first interaction with your dental practice. Make sure you make the right impression by personalizing the content of your site and aligning its aesthetics with your dental branding.
Here’s how you can use your website to boost your dental brand’s authenticity:
Create A Page Dedicated to FAQs.
Before anyone undergoes a dental procedure, most people do their research to gather as much information as they can about it, such as cost, side effects, and how painful it’s going to be.
You want to provide your target patience with every information they need and go as far as addressing concerns before they even thought of them.
This helps them move swiftly across the customer journey and reach a final purchase decision faster.
Publish High-Quality, Educational Blogs.
Your dental practice should always aim to educate its patients and prospects by sharing helpful information that’s relevant to their needs and wants.
This helps them see you as a trusted source of information and consider you as an authority in your field.
To be more authentic this 2022, you must be intentional with your engagement with your patients and prospects online.
By responding to chats, comments, posts, user-generated content, reviews, emails, and whatnot, you’re letting them know that you truly care about what they have to say and that you’re there to listen and meet their needs.
Here’s how you can be more intentional with your engagement online:
Segment Your Patients Based on Their Behaviors, Demographics, And Interests.
To encourage engagement and motivate people to respond to your posts on social media, email, and other channels, you need to send the right message to the right people.
Context is everything. If you want to target patients from an older demographic, then create an ad copy focusing on restorative treatments and run them on Facebook.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to target the younger generation, then you want to bank on the fact that they’re very much concerned about their looks.
So, you might want to promote cosmetic dental procedures on TikTok or Instagram.
Respond To Both Positive and Negative Reviews.
Responding to feedback and reviews (both the negative and positive) is one of the ways you can engage with your patients and show them you care.
However, to be more intentional and authentic, you need to implement some of the suggestions and act upon their complaints.
Doing so shows your patients that you’re true to your word. Gathering feedback also gives you the opportunity to determine what your patients want and need so you can constantly improve your dental offerings and keep them satisfied.
Feature User-Generated Content
By reposting the reviews and recommendations that your patients make on social media, you can make your patients feel heard and important. Plus, it also motivates them to talk about your practice on social media for a chance to get featured on your account!
Social listening is also a great way to keep track of all the conversations that are happening around your dental practice. This can help you better understand what patients think of your offerings and insights and what they want.
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Another way you can show your authenticity is to collaborate with your most loyal patients and turn them into brand ambassadors. If you haven’t built a customer base yet, you can also tap into influencers within your community to encourage people from your area to give your dental practice a try.
Here are some ideas on how you can tap into influencer marketing to boost your authenticity:
Create A Brand Ambassador Program or Collaborate with Micro-Influencers.
Brand ambassadors and influencers are going to be the face of your dental practice so choose individuals who have the same beliefs and values as your brand does.
People also put a lot of trust in influencers and brand ambassadors. Creating a strategic relationship with the right people can help you promote your practice while remaining authentic.
Stay Active In Your Community.
What better way to spread the word about your dental clinic and make your presence known than by being active in your local community?
You and your team can take part in bringing awareness to specific causes, collaborate with other clinics to offer free dental checkups, partner with other businesses to raise funds for charitable projects, and volunteer in a coastal clean-up drive.
Investing time in doing charity work and other activities that aim to give back to the people in your area is a great way of showing authenticity and attracting a community of loyal patients.
Become An Advocate Yourself.
Short-form videos are so popular right now that’s why the platform, TikTok, is a major hit among users.
Dentists can use it to their advantage too! You can advocate for your practice and showcase your expertise by posting tips, and dental advice, debunking myths, answering questions, and engaging with your audience.
It’s a great way to showcase your authenticity while establishing trust and authority in your field.
Be more authentic this 2022. It’s by showing who you are as a brand and humanizing the people behind your practice that you can build trust, keep your existing patients loyal, and win over new patients.
Just remember that being authentic doesn't mean "appearing" authentic. It's about being who you are truly and reflecting your brand values in your messaging, visuals, and marketing efforts.
At Digital Resource, our team of social media marketing experts will work with you to create a custom social plan that will put your brand story in front of the right audience and attract the right kind of patients. Contact us today to get started!
Think you've got what it takes to hang with the pros at Digital Resource? Check out our Careers page to browse current job openings!
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