Patients Are Key to Increasing The Value of Your Dental Practice

The keys to building a successful, profitable dental practice are attracting new patients and retaining current patients. Your internal and external marketing strategies should all support this premise. If you’re not adding new patients to your practice, and you’re not keeping your current patients happy, you’re fighting a losing battle. Patients are the single source of revenue for your dental practice.

How patients feel about your dental practice, including your billing procedures, the friendliness and competence of your staff, and their trust in you,  are all extremely important to keeping patients from leaving your dental practice. Satisfied, happy patients and their families will return to your practice again and again for years, sometimes for their entire lives.

There are two key benefits that current patients offer in increasing the value of your practice.

1. They already trust you, they feel that they receive good service from your practice and are happy with you and your services. These patients represent ongoing income for many years as they will continue to view you as their trusted dentist. They are most likely to listen to your recommendations for treatment.
2. Satisfied patients will also spread the word about your practice at no cost to you. Happy patients are the best form of advertising because they will send friends and family members to your office, and they will have put in a “good word” about you.

Another key success factor in operating a dental practice is the ability to retain patients once they come into your office for their first appointment. Your practice’s ability to retain patients is critical to your practice’s ability to operate profitably.

Practice Growth

The traffic to your web site is strongly correlated to the number of patients you see in your practice.  If you attract more visitors to your web site, it should result in more patients in your practice – provided of course, your web site has a compelling reason for patients to contact you.

Don’t expect your web site to instantly start getting you new patients.  Many practices expect new patients to automatically find them online, just because they have a web site. That’s not the way it works, a new web site is like an unlisted phone number … nobody finds it, nobody calls you, unless you promote it.

In today’s competitive and challenging economic environment, the success of your practice depends on your ability to be discovered by new patients, in addition to staying connected and engaged with existing patients. To be successful requires effective strategies that will help you retain current patients and acquire new patients who will complete treatment and refer other patients to you.  Foundational strategies include an optimized website, social media, and a patient newsletter. These tools will allow you to connect and engage with existing patients and potential patients.