Patient Acquisition 2.0: A future with more happy patients
Dear dentists,What would you say if there was a way to quickly and easily find exactly those patients that you would like to target and bring them into your practice?
- By Specialty: You would like to focus on one or more specialties (e.g., orthodontics, braces)?
- By Treatment: You are a dentist of choice and would like to focus only on the most profitable treatments?
- By Schedule: You would like to perform particular treatments only on particular days and/or at particular times on those days?
- By Affordability: You want 100% certainty even prior to an appointment that new patients can afford their out of pocket costs or straight-up fees for your treatments?
Through our modern platform and its new functions, dentists can now effectively address particular patient groups and bring them into their practices. Also, they can use the built-in messaging functionality to clarify several key parameters with new patients even prior to their appointments.
You can give DentalAce a try at any time.
Before we delve into more details, let's start with a brief story to illustrate which problems we are solving for dentists with the DentalAce platform.
Patient acquisition today is cumbersome, expensive, and often not fruitful
Our story starts with 3 dentists. All 3 of them want to help their patients as much as possible and have chosen different approaches to find and specialize in their niches in an effort to establish themselves as go-to experts.- Dentist 1: Established himself in the course of 20 years as the go-to expert in the field of implantology and built a successful dental practice, which he now operates with 2 young dentists. Despite a solid patient pool and referrals from dentist 1 to his young partner dentists, the complete lack of an online presence is standing in the way of the acquisition of new, younger patients for the younger partner dentists. Also, since implants are expensive and are only partially reimbursed by insurers, some of the practice's new and existing patients end up having to pay for their treatments in installments or even opt out of them due to affordability issues.
- Dentist 2: Has been successful for 10 years with his own insurance-focused practice (Kassenordination in German) and has built up a solid patient pool. Since insurers recently cut reimbursement amounts, finding and treating self-pay patients is becoming increasingly important for the continued financial well-being of the practice.
- Dentist 3: Just opened up his own practice for general dentistry and plans to specialize in the field of orthodontics in the course of the next several years. First, however, he needs to build up a core patient pool in order to establish a strong financial basis for his young practice.
- Dentist 1: To find and engage with more young patients right where they are, dentist 1 and his partners hire a prominent ad agency (cost: EUR 1.000 – 10.000+ per month), which places costly ads into social media and other online ad channels. After the first year, slowly, slowly new patients start to trickle in. Since the exact success rate and return on investment (ROI) of these ad methods is very difficult to determine, it remains unclear to dentist 1 and his team whether these measures have truly driven more patient traffic to the practice or whether it would have materialized organically anyway, as his 2 young dentist partners become more popular among younger patients. Since the Austrian Dental Association prohibits the open advertising of treatment and procedure prices by dentists, the price transparency problem remains unaddressed and a significant chunk of the practice's patients still resort to installment-based payments or "walk out".
- Dentist 2: Places his own ads into Google and other online search engines (cost: up to EUR 50 per day) to find more self-pay patients. In the course of 12-18 months, these ads seem to finally take effect in terms of driving more patient traffic, yet reliable measures of the exact ROI remain elusive.
- Dentist 3: Since the budget is tight for the young dentist, he decides to rely on a profile in the largest and most well-known healthcare portal in Austria (cost: EUR 100-150 per month) and on word-of-mouth referrals. Even in these cases, the growth of dentist 3's patient pool progresses slowly and it takes several years until it is size-able enough to allow dentist 3 to become more selective in terms of patient choice in an effort to specialize solely on orthodontic treatments and procedures.
Unfortunately, once we take a closer look at these scenarios, it becomes very clear that all 3 dentists basically spend money (some more than others) without being able to exactly measure the ROI behind their expenses. Also, their desired results often materialized after a lot of time (1+ years) has passed, which casts further doubt on the above-mentioned advertising strategies. For dentist 1 and his successful practice, this is not all too problematic and dentist 3 can also afford these additional costs. Dentist 3, however, has the most to lose from an ineffective patient acquisition strategy because his budget is by far the most modest and because every cent counts during the establishment of a dental practice's core patient pool.
“Well, things are as they are and there is nothing one can do about it.” is what many dentists likely think. That may have been true until today, but with DentalAce, you now have a trump card to play to boost the effectiveness of your advertising measures.
Patient acquisition of tomorrow already today and much more with DentalAce
“Enter, DentalAce”.To support our dentist members with the acquisition of exactly those patients who optimally fit with their service offering, skill set, and procedure pricing, DentalAce has developed several measures:
- Both broad and targeted advertising: We deploy extensive advertising via various channels for our platform on an ongoing basis in order to always appear at the top of Google search results and other online search engines. We also prepare individual ads for our members on a weekly basis and deploy them through the most popular social media channels to reach as many dentist-seeking patients as possible. And on top of all of this, we can target our advertising efforts on specific patient groups based on the particular requirements of our members with clearly measurable success:
- Trusted online presence: Our secure dentist rating system is clearly differentiated from those on other portals or on Google because it only publishes ratings written by real patients:
- Transparent profit margins: Our personal request and Price Check functions allow our patients to send completely confidential questions regarding procedure pricing to our member dentists. Afterwards, dentists may respond with conformations and invite patients directly into their practice with the additional security of knowing that it will not come to a "sticker shock" moment. An additional bonus is the fact that dentists can fairly accurately estimate how profitable a given appointment will be to their practice ahead of time, which helps them with optimizing the remainder of their appointments from a financial viability perspective.
Before we take a look at these functions in more detail, let us first find out how the respective situations of our 3 dentists change once DentalAce enters the playing field:
- Dentist 1: Creates a profile on DentalAce for himself and his 2 partner dentists and receives a 3-month free trial. Already in the first month, a handful of patients book appointments via DentalAce and two more patients inquire about treatment pricing prior to their appointments. This give dentist 1 the opportunity to politely decline one of those patients' request because the practice would lose money at the price point suggested by the patient (that patient then finds another dentist via DentalAce, who can perform the treatment at his desired budget). After the remaining 2 free test months, the monthly performance statistics that DentalAce member-dentists receive on a monthly basis show a clearly growing number of new patients and a total patient gain of 10 patients per dentist. Given these clearly positive results, dentist 1 purchases annual subscriptions for himself and his 2 partner dentists and, as a result, sees over 100, mostly younger new patients in year 1 for a cost of merely EUR 999 (incl. VAT) per dentist. As an added benefit, dentist 1 also received valuable information about the level of treatment prices that would likely be affordable for most self-pay patients and optimized his prices accordingly to make sure that he was able to help the maximum number of patients while ensuring the financial viability of his practice.
- Dentist 2: Gives DentalAce a try for free for 3 months and gains 15 new patients with minimal effort. On top of that, all of these 15 new patients are self-pay patients which is what he was hoping for all along and, thanks to the Price Check function, never appeared uninformed about pricing to their appointments. Thanks to this clearly measurable success, dentist 2 decides to subscribe to DentalAce for the longer term and thereby optimizes his patient acquisition strategy over time in a way that allows him to gain an increasing number of self-pay patients who are looking for his preferred treatments and generate a reasonable profit margin to ensure financially viable practice operations.
- Dentist 3: Sees a similarly measurable success rate in his first 3 test months and gains 12 new patients for free. As an added bonus, 8 of them are looking for orthodontic treatments, as originally desired. After his first full year on DentalAce, dentist 3 has won over 100 new patients and is happy that over half of them decided to see him for orthodontic treatments. Thus, for merely EUR 99 (incl. VAT) per month, dentist 3 enjoys the month-to-month flexibility of a DentalAce membership while not only gaining more patients but also those patients that he would like to target over time.
All 3 dentists see a clearly measurable ROI after joining DentalAce even during their free testing period and can , in the course of their first year on the platform, advance their goals much more quickly and with the ability to constantly track progress.
Nowadays, you often hear the phrase “You get what you pay for!” which seems to indicate that premium service must come at a premium price. We at DentalAce think differently about this and offer the best "deal" in the market at the very best price and with the most functions without any contractual obligations.
Why?
Because, to us, you are worth it!
And because we strive to significantly improve the quality of dental care in Austria!
So, don't fret during the patient acquisition process and, instead, use DentalAce for a proven and targeted approach.
Click here to give DentalAce a try.
Patient acquisition 2.0: And this is how
Personal Request: For patients who would like to collect offers/invitations based on appointment options and a maximum budget that they already have in mind.Step 1: Log into your profile and take a look into the patient portal
Step 2: Review active requests and respond to the ones you select
Step 3: Log into your profile and open the request candidature tab
Step 4: Review the status of your requests and modify it, as you choose
Price Check: For patients who have already picked out specific dentists and who would like to agree on a maximum budget for their desired procedure prior to booking an appointment. Dentists can confirm or reject the patient's proposed price and thereby ensure 100% financial transparency.
Step 1: Log into your profile and open the Price Check tab
Step 2: Open the Price Check request of your choice
Step 3: Accept or reject the Price Check request of your choice
But does it really work? – How do patients benefit?
With so many advantages for dentists, there must absolutely be a catch for patients, right? Not in this case because the DentalAce system also has several very clear advantages for patients:- Find the right specialist: DentalAce allows patients to look for the exactly right specialist for them via the use of strategically placed ads and integrated filters. Patients can search for specific specialties (e.g., orthodontics) or treatments (e.g., professional dental cleaning) prior to booking an appointment online.
- Build more trust: Thanks to the secure rating system that is built into the DentalAce platform, patients can be 100% certain that all dentist ratings are 100% authentic
- Receive transparent pricing: Via the personal request and Price Check functions on the DentalAce platform, patients can quickly and easily arrive at certainty regarding procedure prices.
Hopefully you found this article interesting and we look forward to welcoming you on our platform soon!
To quickly and easily register a profile with DentalAce, please visit our dentist landing page for more information.
All the Best & see you soon, Ace!
