Making a dental business successful can be a troublesome experience, as it’s such a competitive market to get established in. Building up a loyal patient base can be tricky due to most people already having reliance on an existing dental practice that they get their treatments from. This means that it could take years before you get a noticeable profit. Not to mention, buying all of the equipment will already set you back a significant amount.

To get a dental business to succeed, you will need to have good market research, strong financial planning, attentive patient care, effective branding strategies and instil a good culture. However, these are baseline methods that many businesses do to achieve higher levels of success. Trying out more outside the box strategies will be what helps your dental business the most.

If your dental business is currently plateauing and you want to make some positive changes in order to allow it to thrive, you’re in the right place. We’re here with three simple things you can do to help push your practice above the others and to remain competitive at such a difficult time. So, let’s get into it and prepare to see your business prosper!

Invest In Your Team

The first thing you need to do to succeed is to invest in your team. There is famously a shortage of people available in patient care, so it is important that you put yourself out there as a business and prepare to do whatever you can to build a strong and reliable team. Start by offering competitive salaries, a fantastic working culture and unique benefits, to show your staff that you appreciate them and they are valued. If your team is short of particular roles, invest in good job advertisements to draw people in (this is where the salary and benefits will come in handy).

Whilst fancy tech and clinics are important to initially draw patients in, what really makes a difference to patients is a team who will go above and beyond to provide an exceptional level of patient care that they simply can’t find anywhere else. Currently this is what is lacking in the industry, so this is a strong point of difference you can create to not only keep fantastic staff but to set your business apart from the rest.

Dental SEO

Another thing that you should be investing in from a marketing perspective is SEO in Manchester. SEO often provides the best return on investment from any marketing channel, as once you invest and maintain the efforts with a good company, you will continue to see long term benefits. Rather than reaching out to people who might be interested in your business, by working with an SEO agency to increase your rankings, you are investing in becoming visible to people who are looking for the exact service that you offer.

Another great thing about dental SEO when you choose the right agency is that there should be a strong focus on the local element, to help you appear in local results that will bring highly qualified users to your website. This will involve optimising your Google My Business account, which is one of the most vital components that is considered important for client trust. It will help you to get more information on Google search pages, such as star rating, reviews and opening/ closing hours.

Enhance Your Social Media

While this could be considered another aspect of SEO, social media marketing is its whole separate animal that can be used to generate traffic, build client trust and boost brand awareness. For a dental business, attempting to grow your social media from zero followers can be daunting, as it will need a lot of patience and consistency to grow your channels to a respectable level. It’s firstly important to set your social media goals and targets so that you know what you are trying to achieve before you even begin.

Choosing the right social media for your dental business will be vital, as each platform has different benefits and gives you the chance to reach out to unique audiences. Since dental businesses will most likely want to target an older demographic, they will be best suited to grow their audience on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn as opposed to TikTok and Instagram. Make sure you’re showing what makes your business unique, from fantastic architecture and technology through to a caring team, specialists within the industry and different deals you have on. Having a schedule, keeping it fresh and interacting with your audience are some of the keys to healthy social media growth.

Offer Subscription Plans

Last but not least, you should offer your patients subscription plans. More and more dentists are doing this so it will help you to remain competitive, and it makes dental care more accessible and simple for your patients. For example, your patients may pay £20 a month and get two dental checkups, two hygienist appointments and 10% off any cosmetic or general dentistry treatments that are required.

You could consider charging slightly more and offering complimentary treatments, like free teeth whitening or teeth stain removal. No matter what you choose, offering subscription plans not only helps you to keep loyal customers, but offers a great solution to new potential customers who want to keep things simple. With this, you also avoid the chances of missed payments from customers as they don’t need to remember to pay for your services.

Improve Collection Rate

Making your clinic more attractive to investors can help to boost cash flow and to do this, you should look to improve your collection rate. The ideal collection rate for businesses in the medical sector is 96%, so getting it as close to this as you can will help you with gaining more investors. There are a few aspects you can look at to help with collection rate, such as whether your patient’s payment methods can sometimes create delays in your cash flow if you receive the money in a slow manner. If patients are paying by mail, you should look to quicken this process by offering online payments only.

Going paperless in general and only relying on digital devices will streamline all of your processes, which can improve how well your business functions. This can transform your dental business while improving the chances of your cash flow getting boosted.