Last updated on February 28th, 2025 at 03:55 am
Want to grow your dental practice?
Here are five dental marketing strategies that can help you with that…
Avoid This Online Marketing Mistake!
It’s important to understand that the Internet is an extremely distracting environment.
The potential customer is probably scrolling social media with a bunch of tabs open in their browser while chatting with a friend on a messaging app and listening to a podcast that’s playing in the background.
This means that once you manage to get their attention, you only have a few seconds to get them interested in learning more about your offer. So how are you going to do that?
At this point, most business owners direct potential customers to their websites. But the problem is that traditional websites are designed to provide information, not to sell products or services.
In fact, from the potential customer’s perspective, traditional websites are confusing mazes of links. So they click around and then leave, probably to never come back again.
Remember the paradox of choice phenomenon: the more options we are presented with, the harder it is for us to make a decision.
Or, as salespeople put it, “A confused mind always says no”.
Do you see how driving traffic directly to your website is a huge waste of money?
Fortunately, there’s a better way to promote your business…
Grow Your Dental Practice With Sales Funnels
We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.
It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).
This sales funnel has four stages:
- Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
- Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service.
- Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.
Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.
The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:
- Start the relationship with that person by offering free value
- Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email
- Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage
Here’s how Russell explains it:
Okay, so now you understand the general concept of the Value Ladder sales funnel, but how can you implement it to grow your dental practice?
Case Study: Dental Practice Sales Funnel
When Russell went to his first appointment with his new dentist, he wasn’t prepared for this conversation:
“Are you a smoker?”
“No, I’ve never smoked in my life. Why would you ask?”
“Well, I noticed your teeth are turning a little yellow and I wasn’t sure if you were a smoker or maybe you drink coffee?” the dentist asked.
“No, no coffee either,” Russell replied. “My teeth look that yellow?”
“Yeah, they are. But don’t worry. If you want, I can make some custom teeth-whitening trays for you. You’ll have to use them for a few weeks, but if you follow the system, your teeth will be white again soon.”
Needless to say, Russell’s response was:
“Yes, please! I don’t want yellow teeth.”
A little while later, the dentist said:
“So, did you have braces when you were a kid?”
“Yeah, I did. How can you tell?”
“Your two bottom teeth are shifting pretty bad, and that usually happens to people who had braces.”
“My teeth are shifting? Seriously? What can you do about that?”
“If you want, I can build a retainer for you, which will help keep your teeth in place, or we can try Invisalign and get them straight again,” the dentist said.
“Yes, please!” Russell replied.
When he walked into the dentist’s office that morning, he had come in for a free teeth cleaning.
And after less than an hour, he walked out having paid over $2,000 for a teeth whitening kit and his new retainer. But how did that happen?
Here’s how Russell explains it:
This dentist had strategically taken me through a powerful process that I call…
A VALUE LADDER.
First, he had created bait (free teeth cleaning) that would attract his dream client (me).
Second, he provided value to me by cleaning my teeth, and while he was helping me, he noticed that my teeth had become yellow.
Because I had received value from him at this point, I naturally wanted to move forward and get additional value from him.
He then found another way that he could provide value to me – the retainers – and again, I naturally took him up on that offer as well.
Oh, it gets even better…
On my way out, the secretary scheduled me for another appointment six months later, adding me to their “continuity” program.
Continuity is where you continue paying on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis until you decide to cancel. This dentist had a perfectly executed value ladder!”
This dentist had a perfectly executed value ladder!”
You can use this exact same sales funnel in your dental practice if you offer these services!
Best Dental Marketing Strategies
Okay, so now you have a sales funnel, but what are the best ways to drive traffic to it?
What is Agile Marketing?
Before we get into specific marketing strategies, let’s discuss how you should approach marketing in general.
It’s important to understand that learning marketing, just like learning any other skill, will inevitably involve making a bunch of mistakes. That’s completely normal!
But the problem is that this can get expensive. It’s easy to burn through your entire marketing budget without having anything to show for it.
So how can you learn to market your business without going bankrupt in the process?
This is where agile marketing comes in. Here’s how it works:
- You come up with an idea for a marketing campaign.
- You create the minimum viable version of that campaign that allows you to get feedback from your target audience with the least possible investment.
- You launch the campaign, analyze the results, and make adjustments based on market feedback. Then you repeat the cycle again. And so on and so forth.
- Alternatively, if your campaign fell flat, you might want to drop it altogether, go back to the drawing board, and come up with something better.
This iterative approach protects you from catastrophic failures. You start small, so you fail small.
And sure, losing a few hundred bucks on ads still stings, but that’s inevitable when you are learning. You should view these losses as tuition fees.
What’s important is that you minimize the losses as much as possible so that your marketing experiments won’t threaten the existence of your business.
Validate your ideas, optimize your campaigns, and only then scale them. And once you start scaling a campaign, make sure to do so gradually even if everything seems to be going well!
Dental Marketing Strategy #1: Google Search Ads
Google Search ads that are displayed at the top of search results are the best way to get the attention of people who are actively looking for the dental services that you provide.
Implementing this strategy will require learning the basics of search engine optimization (SEO), especially keyword research because you will need to pick the right keywords if you want this to work.
Your best bet is targeting keywords along the lines of “[dental service] [geographical location]”.
If you live in a town or a small city, then you can use its name as the location, but if you live in a large city, then you might want to consider using the name of your area or neighborhood instead.
For example, if your dental practice is based in Milton Keynes, UK, then “teeth cleaning Milton Keynes” might work well.
But if it’s based in London, UK, then “teeth cleaning London” may not work as well. Why?
Because the city is so huge it’s unlikely that someone living in North London will travel all the way to South London just to get their teeth cleaned.
If you are based in South London, you’d probably be better off targeting keywords like “teeth cleaning South London” or even “teeth cleaning [South London neighborhood]”.
You will have to experiment with various keywords to see what works best for your business.
Dental Marketing Strategy #2: Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are probably the best way to drive traffic to your sales funnel. Why?
- It’s the largest social media platform in the world with around 3 billion monthly active users. Of course, its popularity varies from country to country, so you need to take that into consideration. But if you live in a place where pretty much everyone has a Facebook account, then you can easily reach your dream customers there.
- It’s also one of the largest advertising platforms in the world. As such, it offers amazing targeting capabilities that you can use to make sure that your ads are only shown to people who meet your dream customer profile.
Create an ad campaign designed to promote your free offer and start running it with a small daily budget. Once you figure out how to run ads profitably, you can begin gradually scaling your campaign.
Dental Marketing Strategy #3: Leafleting
Leafleting is an old-school marketing strategy that can work well in the digital age.
Local businesses typically use it to promote special deals. The leaflets tend to either be purely informational or serve as coupons.
We want you to add one simple tweak to this approach: use the leaflets to promote your free offer but make it clear that in order to redeem it, the potential customers need to go to its landing page.
Also, add a QR code and draw attention to it with an arrow and text along the lines of “Scan This Code to Redeem Your FREE Teeth Cleaning!”
That way you will be driving targeted traffic to your lead magnet landing page and growing your email list.
Dental Marketing Strategy #4: Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is likely to be somewhat of a hit-and-miss marketing strategy but you might still want to experiment with it.
Consider taking this approach:
- Create a special offer for teeth whitening. It doesn’t need to be free but it should be a great deal in terms of price.
- Reach out to local influencers and offer them free teeth whitening in exchange for a shoutout.
- Use that shoutout to promote your teeth whitening special offer. Make sure to create a custom link for each influencer so that you know how much traffic they are sending your way.
We suggest targeting nano-influencers and micro-influencers in the health, beauty, and lifestyle niches. Instagram and YouTube are probably the best platforms for this.
Dental Marketing Strategy #5: Email Marketing
Not everyone who subscribes to your email list will take advantage of your free offer. But now that you have their email address, you can nurture that relationship.
We recommend creating a week-long email course where you explain the basics of dental hygiene and using it as your welcome sequence that is automatically sent to every new subscriber.
After that, let the new subscriber know that you will be sending them an in-depth guide on a topic related to dental services once a month.
E.g. “Everything You Need to Know About Teeth Whitening”.
At the end of each of these guides, ask the subscribers if they have any questions and reply to every email that you get.
Set up an ongoing email sequence that you can keep adding new guides to. One guide per month means that you only need 12 guides to have an entire year’s worth of content!
Of course, it’s important to make sure that the information in these guides is always up to date, so sometimes you will have to edit them. But that takes much less effort than creating them in the first place.
Finally, you want to send your subscribers one-off broadcast emails to let them know about time-limited special offers.
The purpose of all this is to stay top of mind with your email subscribers by regularly providing free value.
That way, whenever they need dental services, they will immediately think of your dental practice!
Build a Sales Funnel for Your Dental Practice With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to build a sales funnel for your dental practice:
- Sales funnel and landing page templates.
- A visual editor that you can use to customize those templates.
- An email marketing functionality that allows you to set up automated email sequences and send one-off broadcast emails.
We also offer a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk.
So why not start building your Value Ladder sales funnel today?