"Word of mouth" patients are a valuable asset in dentistry. Every wise leader understands that one satisfied patient will recommend the clinic to ten more. And these ten will bring another hundred. So many clinics live without advertising and any promotion!However, there is a negative aspect in this case. "Word of mouth" patients come to the clinic and recommend it spontaneously. Today, they will suggest it to someone. Maybe not tomorrow. Later sometime, they will suggest it again. As a result, this leads to the fact that if the clinic reached revenues of a half a million INR a month without advertising and promotion, only at the expense of "word of mouth" patients, then at this figure it freezes for many years,if not forever.
Why incentivize patients to recommend
The other day I was consulting for the owner of a dental clinic from Bangalore. Her question was about today's topic.It sounded like this:
“Our clinic has been operating for 10 years. During this time, we did not place any advertisements. We worked only at the expense of "word of mouth" patients. But now there are much fewer patients, and we are forced to spend money on advertising, which we still do not quite understand how to do. In this regard, I have a question: please tell me how we existed all these 10 years, absolutely not thinking about where to get patients? Why didn't we close earlier? "So that you do not find yourself in a similar situation, I published the answer in this article.
I have a friend outside of dentistry. He and his team are involved in vein treatments. There, just like in dentistry, some patients come by word of mouth. But the percentage of such people relative to the total number of patients during the month is much less than in dentistry. And the point is not that the clinic provides services poorly, but that if a woman has solved her vein problem , the maximum whom she can recommend the clinic to is one or two friends.In addition, an additional disadvantage is that, having solved the problem once, this patient will no longer come to the clinic. In other words, the “patient life cycle” in phlebology is significantly shorter than in dentistry. Hence, these clinics quickly decline if they either do not learn the skill of active referral, or do not place a lot of advertising.
What goes around comes around?
- crown
- implant
- veneers and
- orthodontics.
- friends,
- acquaintances,
- relatives.
This is the answer to the questions:
... How did we survive all these 10 years without thinking about patients? Why didn't we close?You survived as there was a stream of "word of mouth" patients, but because the clinic did not feed him with additional technologies, he gradually faded away. And now the institution has to spend money on advertising, which the management is not very good at. So let's talk about how to artificially make the recommendation stream stronger.
How to make sure that your clinic is not forgotten?
- Firstly, after treating his teeth, it is unlikely that your patient will show them to everyone around him and say who did this for him. The exception is family and closest friends. By the way, over time, a person gets used to his transformation and stops telling everyone about your merits altogether.
- Secondly, recommendations work great when one person asks another about whether he has a good clinic or doctor in mind, and he is happy to talk about his experience of interacting with your clinic. This is an excellent recommendation option, but, unfortunately, in India not everyone understands the importance of regular check-ups.Therefore, they will not ask for recommendations and won't come to the clinic until their teeth hurt.
- Thirdly, people may ask many friends for such recommendations, and the clinic they decide to visit may not be the one recommended by your patient, i.e not your clinic!
Story of a School Bus!
There is one not quite ordinary school in the USA. The students are taught to live in extreme conditions: to climb mountains, build houses in the forest and escape from the rain in them, make a fire without matches and get food in the forest. Students are trained in it as follows: teenagers come to school during the summer holidays and live there for one month, learning all the wisdom in order to survive in the forest for a long time. The children really liked studying, or rather the rest in such a place in the summer, and upon arriving home, the students emotionally told their peers about their adventures. But the school's organizers faced the same problem as dentists and clinic leaders. After a certain amount of time, the stories of people about their experience of interacting with the school subsided. The more time passed from the moment of interaction, the less people talked about the organization.When marketing kicks in!
To kickstart word of mouth, the school management began to think about how to activate conversations with satisfied customers so that they can communicate their experiences and bring new students. Many ways have been tried to "wake up" children who were in school. In the end, in-house marketers offered one interesting version of an unusual school bus that runs on special oil instead of gasoline, and on the right side of its body there are special climbing steps, which are usually seen in extreme amusement parks. https://dentalreach.today/100-dental-social-media-post-ideas-for-dentists-and-clinics/ The bus travelled to schools and youth organizations and reminded former students of their experiences of surviving in the forest. It really worked! Noticing an unusual bus from afar, everyone who was on the street at that moment paid attention to it. Children who went to that school recalled what they experienced and what skills they mastered, staying for a month on training. Of course, they immediately told their friends what kind of bus it was, what organization it came from and what they teach in this institution. All these stories were intertwined with emotions and impressions. As you can imagine, it served as a better advertisement for the school than just advertisements in youth magazines and school newspapers.How does the smart dentist remind people of himself?
How to apply the bus strategy in a dental practice?Free for members
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