Taking Your Dental Implant Marketing to the Next Level: Best Advertising Strategies

January 2021--You might be surprised by the number of people who could benefit from dental implants and don't even know they exist. 

That means you can reach many untapped dental patients if you run your dental implant marketing campaign well.

How many people are likely to need dental implant procedures? The American College of Prosthodontists says that 120 million Americans are missing at least one tooth, and about 36 million have no teeth. 

Tooth loss is more common as people get older. According to one study, 12.9% of Americans over 65 and 17.8% of Americans over 75 have no working teeth.

Dental implant treatment is becoming the standard of care and can generate high revenue. So that makes dental implant marketing strategies very important.

More dentists are equipping themselves to provide implant procedures, putting them in greater competition with each other.

Elijah Desmond will help us better understand dental implant marketing strategies and how to take your implant advertising campaigns to the next level.

He has taken his Driven Dental Implant Marketing company to the next level. He is making his clients happy with an innovative strategy that delivers financially qualified patients ready to proceed with implant treatment.

Table Of Contents

• Traditional Dental Marketing Doesn’t Guarantee Financially Qualified Patients
• Dental Implant Marketing Strategy: What Are The Best Ways To Approach Implant Advertising?
• Other Ways To Improve Your Implant Advertising Strategy
• The Importance Of Virtual Patient Advocates
• Top 3 Mistakes Dentists Make When Marketing Dental Implants

Traditional Dental Marketing Doesn’t Guarantee Financially Qualified Patients

Traditional digital marketing motivates implant treatment shoppers to call your phone. Then what?

It isn’t easy to persuade callers to make that first appointment

Implant callers are cost conscious and shopping around. They hope to hear reassurance that they can afford this, the doctor is very experienced in doing implants, and they will have a wonderful experience.

After the front desk succeeds in scheduling a caller for a complimentary consultation, the dentist spends a significant amount of time evaluating the patient and explaining the options.

But with 95% of patients not moving forward due to the cost of treatment, frustration runs consistently high.

You don’t want to waste time on calls that will not convert to treatment

What’s the best way to increase revenue? Lowering the cost of new patient acquisition by increasing conversion to booked appointments and accepted treatment.

Address the gap between marketing and successful sales with digital technology and human coaching. As a result, your revenue and the patient experience will go up.

Dental Implant Marketing Strategy: What Are The Best Ways To Approach Implant Advertising?

That’s an important question to ask, considering how big the dental implant market is. Even though the audience for dental implants consists primarily of older people, online marketing is still one of the best ways to reach them.

Here are 7 proven dental implant marketing ideas to help you attract new patients.

Market Dental Implants to the Right People

When figuring out your target audience for dental implants, there are two key things to keep in mind. The first part of dental marketing is limiting your audience to where they live.

Unless you live in a small town where there isn't much competition, your dental office will likely have to compete with others in your area to get new patients. You'll need to know which cities, towns, or neighborhoods are in your target area.

The second part is related to what we've already discussed: you need to know your target market for dental implants and how to teach them about it.

You can learn a lot about your area's demographics by doing research online. Still, you can also use the demographics of your current patients to figure out who your target audience is.

Assuming that your patient records are computerized, which is the case with most dental or medical practices today, you can make reports based on the demographics of your current patients.

Social Media Is Great For Dental Implant Marketing

Once you know who you're trying to reach, you can decide which social media platforms to use. A lot of digital marketing is based on trial and error. Still, for your first launch, using more than one social media platform is always a good idea.

For a dentist's social media marketing plan, it's best to start with three or four of the most popular social media sites. You can start with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Just be careful not to take on more than you can handle. It's better for your business to not have a social profile than one that isn't being used.

Here are some tips to help you make the most of your marketing on social media:

Another vital thing to consider is what will interest the people you want to reach. What will make them pay attention?

Someone in their 60s might not care about something that would interest someone in their 20s. So, make sure that what you post on social media is relevant to the type of person you're trying to reach.

This means you'll have to figure out who might be interested in dental implants and then make your social media campaigns appealing to those people.

Use Paid Ads to Attract Dental Implant Leads

PPC ads are an excellent way to get new patients to see your practice. They do best when they focus on one service or promotion at a time.

By 2021, businesses earned an average of $2 on Google PPC ads for every $1 they spent. If you do it right, advertising dental implants can give you a good return on your money. Which means:

• Choosing the right words or phrases
• Trying to reach the right people
• Making an ad that makes potential patients want to click on it
• Creating a landing page for your dental implant ads that people can't resist

To make a good PPC ad for dental implants, you'll need the following:

• A catchy headline that will get the attention of your audience
• Your most important keywords in visible places
• A description of what people can expect if they click on your ad.
• A call to action that can't be ignored
• A relevant image

Lastly, ensure that the call to action on your landing page, such as a link to schedule an appointment, is above the fold. This means that readers won't have to scroll to find it. You might want to have more than one "call to action." If one is at the top of the page, that's a great idea.

Use before and after pictures in your marketing for dental implants

One of the biggest problems for people who offer dental implants is that people who could use them don't know much about them. Sometimes a picture is the best way to show what dental implants can do.

Dentists and orthodontists have been using "before and after" pictures to market their services for a long time. Two big ones are getting your teeth whitened and getting braces.

You can show how well your tooth-whitening service works by putting a picture of a patient's yellowed teeth before treatment next to a picture of their white, sparkling smile after treatment.

Braces are the same way. When you look at photos of someone's teeth before and after they got braces, it's easy to see how they changed.

People who are missing teeth often feel bad about how they look when they smile. They might not know how much new dental implants can boost their confidence.

People in your target audience can learn everything they need to know about how dental implants can change their lives by looking at a "before and after" ad with pictures of someone missing teeth and now having a full smile thanks to dental implants.

Of course, if you use a patient's picture in your dental implant marketing, you should get their written permission first.

Other Ways To Improve Your Implant Advertising Strategy

This is how Desmond handled his clients.

During the COVID-19 shutdown, our clients couldn’t do dental implant procedures. Still, they were able to provide emergency care for infections and symptomatic teeth.

So, we jumped into the emergency dentistry space and pivoted their marketing strategies to pivot their business.

The new emergency patients they brought in are grateful for their care and are a target market for restoring and replacing diseased and missing teeth.

If handled wisely, some are low-hanging fruits for implant treatment because trust in emergent care already exists. The goal is to find the ones who came through the practice who can pay cash or can finance treatment.

To accomplish this goal, we established our Virtual Patient Advocate Marketing Program to educate and motivate potential patients via virtual consultations with our Virtual Patient Advocates (VPAs).

What we do through this program is:

• Generate leads for our customers
• Presell financially qualified patients on the doctor’s expertise and the value of implant treatment
• Help leads become comfortable with implant treatment and how much they may need to finance
• Help motivated leads secure health care loans and refer them for credit repair if needed for financing
• Deliver prepared and prequalified patients to schedule an initial appointment

Our dental practices are back up to speed with implant treatment and have a lowered patient acquisition cost.

We’ve made it easy for them to pivot how they engage their patients for implant treatment. Their marketing has painlessly changed.

More leads are turning into scheduled patients and accepting treatment. We’ve freed up time for the dentist and the care team. Frustration is down. Profit is up.

The Importance Of Virtual Patient Advocates

Virtual Patient Advocates (VPAs) are experienced treatment coordinators. They conduct virtual, online consultations with your potential patients and guide them so patients can navigate their dental journey at their own pace.

They do not hurry patients. They educate them, encourage them, help them envision a preferred dental future, and assist them in finding a way to pay for the desired treatment.

This is all accomplished before the doctor diagnoses and recommends specific treatment for the patient’s oral health circumstances.

VPAs are skilled at helping potential patients repair their financial credit before seeking treatment.

When patients go through this process and arrive at the point where they can get thousands of dollars of financing, they book an initial appointment knowing they want the treatment. They know what to expect and are ready for it.

Patients are delighted with the virtual advocacy. Through VPA, they become incredibly comfortable accepting treatment.

Because patients are coming to you pre-educated, motivated, and financially qualified, they are ready to move forward with treatment. Now, you can focus on what you do best, clinical care.

Top 3 Mistakes Dentists Make When Marketing Dental Implants

Not Enough Interesting Assets

By far, one of the biggest mistakes we see is advertising before making assets. I mean that when a doctor or business owner wants to sell more dental implants, the first thing they usually think of is... I need to get the word out. I've got to make the phone ring.

All these things are true, and we must get our name and brand out there. The problem is that their whole way of thinking changes into a tactical way of thinking.

They are thinking about what to do:

• Pay-per-click: Should we do it?
• Do we need to use social media?
• Should we turn on the TV?
• Should we send mail to people?
• Should we put on seminars for patients

There are a lot of different ways to get the word out.

What do you think I should do, and how much will that cost? That's usually the first place most people look, but that's kind of putting the cart before the horse because all of those different strategies can work well to bring traffic. Still, they depend a lot on the market and the budget.

So, the strategy you choose and the market you go after are fundamental, but they can all work to bring people to your site. Meaning, get eyeballs.

The problem is that nobody knows what the eyes are really seeing. What do you show people when you do advertising?

Dentists can spend between $10,000 and $15,000 a month on advertising for dental implants, but if the landing page people are sent to is garbage… What’s the point?

It's a landing page made from a template with nothing interesting on it. Then they'll say that the marketing doesn't work, I didn't get enough leads, or the leads I did get weren't good enough.

The truth is that most of the time, marketing works just fine. It's just that the things you were trying to get to work didn't.

All your marketing dollars do is get people to visit your site and look at it. So, before you do that, you need to put time, energy, and money into making assets that people want.

What are some compelling assets that you can use over and over in different types of media? We can use patient stories and testimonials to spread the word about our business. Your "before" and "after" pictures are also a great way to market yourself.

Everything you want to do to market dental implants shouldn't have anything to do with dental implants themselves.

Instead, it should be about the clinical results that dental implants give patients and how those results can improve their quality of life in the long run. This must be the focus of everything. That's how you avoid being a commodity.

If you don't make people feel anything, what else is there? The dental implant, the procedure, the products, and the services. These things can be turned into commodities, which is why you run into people who constantly compare prices.

Your competitors are charging less, so you lose leads to them. All because you didn't take the time and effort to take good photos, make interesting content, and make good videos BEFORE you spent money on advertising.

The Budget Doesn't Reflect the Goals

Whatever you spend each month MUST align with your or the practice's goals. When that isn't clear from the start, the campaign is doomed from the start.

Making a budget should involve a lot of math. How much will this cost? This is a question that many doctors ask.

How many people you want to see your advertising depends on how much traffic you want. We can't expect to close 10 arches a month but only spend $3,000 a month trying to get those cases. It is very unusual to actually close 10 arches a month for $3,000 a month. It doesn't happen very often.

When advertising dental implants, you need to know who you're trying to reach. These are people who don't have any teeth. People who haven't been to the dentist in a decade or more and whose teeth are about to fall out.

Most of the time, these are people who are worried about money and whose teeth haven't been worth very much. The problem is that many people who respond to the marketing aren't qualified to buy or can't afford it.

This should come before questions about how much it costs to advertise on social media, PPC, TV, or direct mail. It doesn't matter. It depends on your budget and your market. Then, it's up to the marketing company to help you devise a plan for how to spend your money.

All of it depends on what your goals are and how much money you have. Think about how those things work in your market, and come up with something that makes sense since not every marketing strategy works in every market.

Inefficient Sales Pipeline

You have to realize that if you're going to seriously build your practice with implants, you want to do real volume, and you want to do big, multi-implant cases consistently. You HAVE to have a sales process that is set up for triage.

If you generate a hundred leads, only 50 of them will be qualified. You could turn half or a little more than half of that into appointments. You need a plan for how to handle leads. When the forms come in, you must figure out who is in charge of the leads.

• Who is in charge of making the phone calls?
• How much time will you put on the schedule for the doctor,
• How much time will you put aside for the treatment coordinator to handle these new consultations?

How will you pre-qualify them so that we don't spend an hour and a half with a patient and then find out they are on Medicaid?

Or maybe they are on Medicare and can't even afford $500? We need to send those patients somewhere else, but you need to find out that faster.

Often, marketing for dental implants will bring in a lot of patients who aren't good candidates. This can waste a lot of time if you're not careful and don't have an excellent way to close.

Dental implants are most likely one of the most standardized parts of dentistry. You need a sales process that can handle these objections before they come up and a treatment coordinator who knows how to bundle services and show people they're getting a lot for their money.

You must convince them this is a good deal without lowering your fees. You can charge more and sell more than your competitors, but you still have to show them they are getting a good deal.

You're out of luck if they look at your price and don't know what it means or don't think it's a good deal. They will just go somewhere else. If they want to look around, nine times out of ten, they'll find someone cheaper.

That doesn't mean they offer the same thing or that their treatment plan is just as good or of the same quality. We all know that it's not usually the case. Still, from the patient's point of view, a dental implant is usually just a dental implant.

You must immediately set up a sales process and training for big cases. It pays off. They are big cases that can hugely affect how much money your law practice makes.

Your hourly output can go through the roof when working on bigger cases. This makes room for other work to be done by associates and gives my clients the chance to work less and make more.

Work less, make more money, take on bigger jobs, and make a lot more money. It's worth your time, energy, and money to do it the right way, but most people who jump in with both feet don't have any assets and go straight into marketing.

Final Thoughts

You might be surprised by how many people could use dental implants but have no idea they exist.

That means that if you run a good marketing campaign for dental implants, you can reach many people who don't have dentists.

There is a growing market for dental implants. You can get your share of patients by using innovative marketing to teach your target audience how great implants are.

And if you want to validate your marketing efforts with true attribution data, we have a call tracking solution that leverages AI to make you book more patients.