By the end of this article, you’ll have a secret edge over your competitors.
We’ll give you some dental marketing tricks that have proven psychological triggers that get new customers to convert at higher rates and spend more money. And you’ll also discover some real-life examples of how you can implement these tricks in your own business and grow business.
We’ve used them in our dental marketing company for over 4 years to attract clients and to attract new patients for our clients.
These techniques work so well because they tap into our psychology. It’s like pushing some emotional “buy buttons” in our brains.
Table of Contents
Let’s Discuss Dental Marketing Tricks:
1) Lure people in by giving them something for free
Supermarkets make millions by employing this trick. E-commerce stores copied this strategy too and they rake in a lot of cash using this simple, but very overlooked trick.
But this technique isn’t new at all. It’s been used for ages. For example, door-to-door coffee salespeople used to knock at people’s doors without selling anything at first sight.
All they did was tell people “Hey, I’ve been sent to offer you this FREE bag of coffee. I’ll be back in one week just to ask you if you like it”.
How can you say no to someone who offers you something for free, without asking for anything in return?
You can use this no matter what industry you’re in.
You can offer:
- Free ebooks
- Free books
- Free CDs, DVDs, webinars
- Complete free training or course
- Free samples of your product
- Free Consultation
Just make sure you offer tons of value and you don’t turn into a pushy salesperson. Don’t push people. Offer value and they’ll come to you begging for more.
For instance, our main income stream at Strodin Dental Marketing comes from selling online dental marketing services to dentists.
So what we do is offer a 1-hour free consultation session where we share some of our best dental marketing ideas that dental practices can use in order to attract new patients into their clinic.
Why does it work?
Well, when we give customers something for free, we trigger the social norm of RECIPROCITY.
When someone does something nice to us, we feel a STRONG OBLIGATION of returning the favor. It’s proven by scientists that this is built-in in our behavior and we cannot resist it.
Have you ever moved to a new house and a neighbor welcomed you with some baked cookies?
Didn’t you feel such a strong obligation to somehow return the favor and offer as well something in return?
2) Use social proof to simultaneously build trust and desire for your products or services
You may have noticed or you may have been endlessly annoyed by laugh tracks running in the back of sitcoms, but have you ever wondered the precise reason why those are there?
Put simply, there is a general tendency that when people find themselves in a situation of uncertainty when they are not sure how to act, they look at the environment around them to find cues and guidance. Like laughter from a ghost audience.
And they are especially influenced by people of their own age and status. This type of reasoning is what’s driving the success of websites and online applications like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and “like-a-local” guides.
People like to rely on the experience and opinions of like-minded people to guide their own decisions and actions. There is an excellent experiment that demonstrates the utility of this principle in action.
The main goal of the study was to try to get people who are staying at a hotel in Arizona to reuse their towels.
Four reasons were given to four different groups of guests, each appealing to a different thing:
- The environment
- Prospective donation of end-of-year laundry savings
- An already completed donation
- Or the fact that the majority of the hotel guests reused their towels at least once per stay.
And, yes – the last method proved most effective, with a 10% increase in towel reuse from when people were only considering the environment.
Or to put it otherwise, as effective as thinking about the environment turned out to be, with 35% of the people reusing their towels, taking a cue from the other people who visited the same hotel was more: 45% of the hotel guests decided to reuse their towels.
And if those people were told that the majority of people staying in this hotel, and in this exact room reused their towels, compliance numbers reached 50%.
Amazing, right?
One driving force behind social proof is the need to belong to a social group.
Humans base about two-thirds of their self-image on the social groups they are part of.
It stands to reason that when a situation occurs that makes us feel uncertain, we re-evaluate ourselves and start thinking on behalf of the group it makes sense to be a part of this decision.
So, here are some ways you can use this to promote your business:
- Reviews
- In-depth video testimonials
- Case studies
- Show happy customers
- Collaborate with influencers (this is a form of social proof too)
- aim to generate comments which are often the go-to testimonial in online marketing
- Introduce counters on your web platform, for example, of how many people have bought or supported the product.
3) Use the commitment
Have you noticed how backing out of promises or deals always brings about a sense of unpleasantness and dread?
This is because people are habitual beings and like to be consistent. Simply put, consistency refers to the fact that people like to act in line with the things they have already said or done. If they do not, that creates a sensation in the mind psychologists refer to as Cognitive Dissonance.
This is an unpleasant state of being, and people try hard to avoid entering, by adjusting their behaviors and matching them to attitudes and actions as they go along.
Additional pressure to be consistent comes also from the fact that society largely views inconsistency as an undesirable trait, and often associates it with indecisiveness and even intellectual weakness.
One way to tap into this persuasion resource is to attempt to identify and then ask for insignificant commitments the other person can make. There is tons of research in social psychology that clearly identifies the success of this strategy.
For example, having a group of students write speeches describing the dangers of AIDS and the importance of condom use, and then recite them in front of their peers, increased the likelihood of these students using condoms in the future.
So, the students had already made a commitment, both personally when writing the speeches, and publicly, when presenting them, and they needed to adjust their behavior accordingly.
This worked even better if they were also asked to list any occasions when they had failed to use protection – that elevated their need to rectify the inconsistent behavior.
How to apply this in your business:
- Get door-to-door salespersons to ask the customers to write down the sales agreement rather than doing it themselves. It minimizes order cancellations
- If you have a medical center and you’re trying to reduce the number of missed appointments ask people to commit to canceling the appointment beforehand and they will achieve
- Offer a free trial
- Offer a free consultation
- Offer a sample of your services for free
4) Start with your website
Without a website, no digital marketing plan or campaign would be complete. Having an internet presence is fundamental to your marketing efforts as a dentist, regardless of the industry. Your website serves as your online business card, introduction, and storefront all bundled into one.
Your website can be a powerful resource you can use to:
- Create a brand and web presence
- Promote your services and differentiators like those that services are unique or complementary services.
- Build credibility and trust
- Express your knowledge
- Promote your website, convert leads, and attract new patients.
- Create a list and utilize email marketing.
5) Leverage SEO for results
The majority of potential patients start their Google searches during the discovery stage. By reading about relative topics on the website’s blog, they may conduct research on subjects pertaining to their condition and then searches for the best offices nearby.
Your website should aim to appear toward the top of all relevant searches in either situation. Although it is difficult, achieving this is doable with a well-thought-out SEO strategy that incorporates:
- Finding the best keywords to target, especially those that are popular and relevant to your audience, is called keyword research.
- Material marketing is the process of creating high-quality content, particularly for your blog pages in order to address pertinent questions, draw links, and encourage social sharing.
- On-page optimization is the process of making a website’s structure and content more search-engine friendly. Additionally, add:
Headers, Images, HTML tags, External and internal linking for images, and Image Alt text.
Conclusion
Do you see how all these tactics are tied together? By luring people in and offering something for free (which was our first principle) you actually get people to COMMIT to something.
The more they do the thing you want them to do, the more the CONSISTENCY principle kicks in. People tend to continue doing what they were already doing.
And the more people you get to commit to something, the more social proof you generate. This in turn starts a snowball effect: more people will come to you because they see other people trusting you.
Use these 3 Dental marketing tricks and marketing psychology principles and you’ll see sales skyrocketing!