Top 7 Dental Practice Marketing Statistics

The correct dental marketing statistics can be a game-changer for your dental practice. They will give you the insight on the dental industry needed for your dental office and brand to outshine the competition. More importantly, these statistics can help you develop strategies to help draw new patients while strengthening ties with existing patients.

Dental practices need to apply the right marketing strategy and have an optimum online presence. We will cover:

• Improving customer satisfaction increases referral traffic
• Organic search might be more significant for website traffic and conversions.
• Offering online booking makes your practice standout
• Paid search drives conversions
• Providing patients with digital content on social media and websites
• Automated reminders and insurance paperwork grow your patient volume
• Patient retention is key

Every dental office needs to establish a marketing presence. It is essential to capturing an audience, building goodwill, and attracting clients. Dental demographics reports have enabled dentists to have a greater reach. Therefore, understanding the digital marketplace will help you reach more patients.

7 dental digital marketing & advertising statistics

Let’s look at the most crucial digital marketing statistics for dental practices, which will be beneficial for making a digital marketing strategy to generate more revenue for your practice. Remember that digital marketing has excellent reach, which will help you find your future clients.

Improving customer satisfaction increases referral traffic

In the State of Dental Report, over 1500 survey respondents were asked what was most essential for their dental practice. The overwhelming top priority was improving customer satisfaction. It has become imperative for dentists to view their patients as customers who primarily decide on their care based on the quality of service and convenience.

The factors patients consider essential when choosing a dentist include the dentist clinic’s competence and reputation and recommendations from someone they know. According to Marketo, referrals have the highest conversion rates of all customer acquisition channels at 3.74%. These days, patients focus on online reviews to inform their viewpoints. If your dental practice provides excellent customer service, your reputation will grow, attracting more patients while keeping loyal ones.

Organic search might be more significant for website traffic and conversions.

Website traffic gives information on how many users visit your website. Organic web traffic often uses search engine optimization (SEO), so your website is found by search engines and people using them.  About 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, which is why it’s important to have organic search traffic. With the right search engine optimization strategy, your organic traffic grows exponentially over time without additional investment.

Optimizing your practice’s search engine optimization will also impact your conversion rates, directly impacting revenue. SEO can improve the flow of traffic to your local listings, website, and social media to drive conversions.

To convert traffic once they are looking at your practice, you should make it very easy for patients to reach your practice by freely offering your contact phone number, email address, feedback forms, and even online chat boxes if patients want to find your practice.  The returns are also exponential.

Offering online booking makes your practice stand out

According to the State of Dental report, only 26% of practices offer online booking. However, online scheduling is viewed favorably as a tool for new practice growth by most employees. Also, patients prefer to book healthcare appointments online, according to a dental demographics report by Healthgrades. In essence, 77% of patients choose a provider that offers online scheduling.

Therefore, online booking can make your practice stand out from others. It will show patients your practice is up-to-date. 

In addition, if your online scheduling is synced with your practice management system, your practice workflow will be more efficient. Appointments will show up as soon as patients schedule them, reducing the workload on your staff and allowing them to be accessible for other tasks.

Paid search drives conversions

According to a report by MarketLive, paid search had a 35% higher conversion rate for websites than organic search visits. Although paid search visits made up about one-third of total search engine visits, it still affected revenue by increasing revenue to almost 44%. 

Therefore, it might be helpful to for your dental practice to start paid ads in your region to attract more clients.

Providing patients with digital content on social media and websites

According to research by Google, 84% of patients use online and offline sources for hospital research, and 44% of patients who researched health care providers on a mobile device scheduled an appointment. Social media can also be used in such a way to make your patients feel connected to your practice. As time passes, social media like Instagram becomes a better marketing channel because of the business-friendly features and ability to reach a vast audience.

In the internet age, a key to that approach is to provide patients with educational content, which can easily be found when a patient does an internet search or on your dental practice's social media. Internet users typically use search engines, insurance provider websites, health information websites, and consumer-generated reviews as resources when searching for care.

Learn more about optimizing your practice’s social media presence here.

Automated reminders and insurance paperwork grow your patient volume

Dental demographic reports show that marketing automation can be the driving force that propels your practice into the modern era. According to the State of Dental report, automating tasks such as insurance paperwork and verification had a high weighted average of 3.68. Also, intelligent patient reminders can eliminate no-shows and cancellations, which will generate revenue in the long term.

About 49% of dental practices use automated reminders, while 46% rely on the office team to email or call patients. Having a system in place to reduce missed appointments should be a priority. Automation achieves this and saves time for your staff, preventing them from performing time-consuming tasks.

Patient retention is key

No dental practice can overlook improving patient retention. It is easy to think more of acquiring patients; however, when you offer regular patients more services, it helps keep them loyal. 66% of dental practices that offer alternatives such as dental discount plans, easy online payments, and patient membership plans are more inclined to visit that dental office.

With other options, such as the ones listed above, patients visit the dentist 2 to 3 times more frequently and spend twice the amount on treatment compared to other patients.

NexHealth can help improve your dental digital marketing

Digital marketing can be the difference between making revenue or losing it. Remember that data and statistics will provide you with the right analytics to make decisions. With NexHealth, however, you will have the correct analysis reports and will be able to schedule patients easily, converting your efforts and making your dental appointments grow exponentially.

Dental marketing statistics can go beyond giving insight into the dental industry; dental offices can use them to create or improve their marketing strategy. If you want to see more details about dental marketing, visit the State of Dental report.