If you’re launching a new service at your dental office, marketing can make it more successful and help you avoid wasting time and money. Confirm demand, get the word out about the launch as it approaches, equip your patients to spread the word, and keep a steady flow of patients coming in. Marketing can help with all of this. Here’s how.

Failure to Prepare is Preparing to Fail

Business consulting is beyond our scope of services at Pro Impressions Marketing, but we can tell you that dental offices that offer all the things without a focus can tend to struggle. It’s foolish to invest in training, technology, and marketing of a service if the rest of the systems needed to sell the new service aren’t there. At best, in those doomed scenarios, you’ll blow up your front office team with leads that will never come to fruition

First, ensure the new service aligns with your brand to avoid that. Don’t force if it’s a square peg and your practice is a round hole. It won’t go well. For example, practices with a cosmetic focus that suddenly launch a sleep marketing campaign don’t do as well at adding dental sleep as holistic or TMJ practices because it’s harder for the patient to connect the dots. Sleep looks like an oddball on the website, and because it’s less in alignment with the interests that brought people into the cosmetic office, it can be a tough sell for the team. 

Speaking of which, preparing the team for the launch is critical. They have to be experts in the service, even if they aren’t the ones offering it because the entire team should be ready to ask patients about the service if they encounter an opportunity. For example, if the hygienist greets a patient, and the patient says, “Ugh, I’m okay, I guess. I’m just tired.” If the hygienist were prepared for the sleep apnea treatment service launch, their ears would perk up. They would know how to talk to the patient about daytime sleepiness being abnormal. They would automatically ask why the patient was tired and continue the conversation with something like, “Well, did you know that we are now able to help patients sleep better with a simple oral appliance?” 

The team’s preparation will look different depending on the practice and service, but it could look like team training sessions outside the office, shutting down the office for an hour or two a day to do team training in-office, watching videos together, and conducting brainstorming and role-playing sessions. Cap it all off with some goal-setting tied to team reward, and you’ll be much more likely to reel in new patients when you get a bite rather than having the opportunities slip off the hook.

After you’ve considered whether or not the service fits your practice’s goals and your passion for treatment, and you’ve prepared the team to help with the internal sales effort, you still have some due diligence to do before you buy that shiny new piece of equipment or invest in continuing dental education.

Confirm That People Want The Service

Your new dental service should solve a problem. Do people in your area have that problem? Do they know that they have the problem and are they looking for a solution? Or, if you think you may be kind of late to the party, is it worth still jumping in, or has demand never really taken off?

Above: monthly search volume trends for “sleep apnea” according to Google Trends.

Sometimes, common sense answers those questions, but sometimes, you must investigate. Conduct a brainstorming session with your marketing team. We’ve talked with dentists who are considering a new piece of equipment or procedure and have been able to ask them questions that lead them to a better understanding of how the new service would fit into the mix of their other services. We’ve also been able to brainstorm the types of questions prospective patients might have and how they might use Google, YouTube, and social media sites to find the answers. We then can leverage the tools we have to explore what types of marketing could get our clients in front of these prospective patients. This can be something simple like Google Trends or more in-depth like some keyword research using SEMRush and other tools.

Once you’ve made sure that all signs point to a winner of a service that is a great match for your current and future patients, you’re ready to launch your new dental service.

Launch Your Service Successfully

You need to launch your new dental service in stages, preparing for the launch of your new service as you might have prepared to open your dental office. It’s an event that warrants some buzz! Your new service needs marketing months before you plan on offering it if it’s going to have some momentum. If possible, start marketing the new service on your website before you invest money in the tech or added personnel you might need to offer it. This will give Google time to discover it.

Your new dental service launch list should include…

Pre-Launch

1. A landing page for the new service, typically a page of your website, and optimized for Google search.
2. A promotional element on your home page linking to the new page (not necessarily a special offer, but just helping people find the new service)
3. Inclusion of cross-promotion between this service’s page and any complementary services that might help add more traffic to the new page (ex., Linking to a new myofunctional therapy page from TMD and sleep pages).
4. An update to your online business listings to include the new treatment as part of your services list.
5. In-office promotion of the service, such as signage and ‘ads’ on treatment monitors.
6. Video announcements on social media feature the doctor talking about why they are excited to offer the new service.
7. An email sent to your existing patients announcing the addition of the service, including graphics and links to the landing page. Consider a promotion for existing patients who come in for the new service in exchange for a video testimonial.

Active on Launch Day

1. A press release, preferably sent to local media outlets as well as syndicated digitally online.
2. Outreach to potential referral partners such as MDs.
3. Addition of ads as part of your digital ad strategy, and the potential addition of funds to expand your paid search budget, especially if the competition for patients of this service is high in your area.
4. Video testimonials from patients you’ve already treated with the new service (include on the landing page and as additional social media posts)

On-Going Promotion

1. Focus on review generation from patients who opt for the new service, encouraging them to mention it by name in their review.
2. Inclusion of the new service in the rotation of post topics as part of your ongoing social media strategy.

This is obviously a lot, and again, you don’t want to start this process the first day you’re able to treat patients at your office with the new service. You want to start it as far in advance as you are able. This will help to build momentum toward the launch and make the launch of your new dental service more likely to succeed.

Track Progress as a Team

Any successful dental digital media strategy will include tracking. As part of your regular team meetings, review your progress on inquiries received and patients spoken to about the new service. Go over the number of reviews and testimonials that the team generated. Of course, identify the number of patients treated with the new service and celebrate the wins together when you meet your goals.

The above dental service launch list includes some one-time items like a press release, but much of the “launch” needs to become an ongoing part of your marketing to keep a steady flow of new patients for that service category. If you just push out a flurry of posts and only run ads for a month or two, your launch will likely only yield a blip of new patient activity.

If you need help marketing the launch of a new service at your dental office, call the team at Pro Impressions Marketing at 970-672-1212 today or schedule an appointment with one of our consultants online.