Cosmetic Dentistry Marketing Strategies: 13 Reasons to Smile

The dentistry industry continues marching slowly yet steadily forward, with an estimated 37,600+ dentists in the United States in 2023 and around 6,200 businesses. These companies altogether bring in roughly $5.6 billion in revenue.

While the number of businesses and revenue levels may be lower than in years past, those drops are by fewer than 1.5% in both instances. Besides, the number of employees has jumped by 0.3%, proving cosmetic dentistry is a solid career market.

Smaller dental practices may only have a small budget for a marketing campaign. That’s why I’ve boiled it down to only the most essential cosmetic dentistry marketing strategies for your business.

Table of Contents

Can’t-Miss Marketing Strategies for Cosmetic Dentistry

Here are 13 of the best cosmetic dentistry marketing strategies to take your business to the next level and put a smile on your customers.

Teeth Dentist GIF by Prof. Jonke — *Image courtesy of Giphy*

1. Build a dental brand

Before you can get very far with your campaign, you must have a solid, definable brand. Your brand is a touchpoint, your true north, and the guidance you should use to communicate with potential patients and leads.

Your brand can’t be that you’re a team of professional specialists. People know that already, and it’s not unique. You and every one of your competitors are dental specialists. What else about you should make a customer choose you over another dental practice in town?

The answer is your brand. Here are some pointers for digging down deep and uncovering the hidden gems that will comprise your cosmetic dentistry brand:

Reflect on your business story. Why did you begin a cosmetic dentistry practice? Why did you choose this dental niche specifically? As you mull over your answers, you’ll pull out threads you can weave together to create your unique story.
Embrace calming, healing, trusting colors, such as blue and green, in your brand design.
Choose your tone carefully. It should connect with your audience and be easily replicated across various media, from email to social media posts.
Keep your logo design simple but effective. Don’t be afraid to use white space for all your design elements.
Consistency is critical. Your practice should know how to express your dental brand to create a unified platform experience.

2. Determine your market

Now that you understand yourself and what your cosmetic dentistry firm is made of, it’s time to get to know your patients.

Highly segmented campaigns targeted at specific markets always outperform generalized advertising. You can utilize more segmented marketing strategies that resonate more deeply with your audience groups.

Don’t stop after you’ve divided your patients by demographics and geographics. Go deeper, splitting them by psychographics to better understand their motivations, beliefs, and opinions.

This deep digging will help you serve your patients excellently in the future and could encourage more conversions.

3. Optimize your dental website

One of the outcomes of your cosmetic dentistry marketing strategies is more website traffic. If your site is difficult to navigate, not optimized for mobile, and lacks opt-in forms, all that traffic will have been for naught.

An optimized website that ranks high for dental SEO includes these elements:

Helpful internal links across the site that take users to pages they want to learn more about.
Trustworthy external links to other reputable sources, as required.
Regularly updated blog content that’s engaging, targeted, and covers topics your audience cares about.
Keywords splashed about the website (including the blog) based on research, including a mix of short- and long-tail keywords.
Title text, descriptions, and alt text naturally use keywords and benefit the reader.
Optimized, compressed images that don’t increase website loading speed.
An appealing, clean graphical design with easy navigation to elevate the user experience.
A clear site map submitted to Google for crawling and indexing.
A site loading speed of two to eight seconds.
Shortened (but still descriptive) URLs across the entire website.
Mobile optimization that provides a mirrored experience to using the site on a desktop, with no loss of features or functionality.
Social proof, such as before-and-after images of your cosmetic dentistry services.

4. Use social media to your advantage

Social media is one of the most effective strategies you have as you build your cosmetic dentistry marketing. Create an enduring presence across platforms.

Visual sites like Instagram and Facebook are fantastic places for showcasing your before-and-after photos and videos, but don’t ignore other major platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In addition to other marketing strategies, buying Instagram followers can potentially amplify content reach by encouraging follower engagement and shares.

What kinds of posts should you make? Here are some tips for engaging with your audience through social media content:

Host a contest where the winner receives a gift card or even a free dental service.
Celebrate small holidays (in addition to bigger ones) that most of your competitors don’t have on their radars.
Start your own hashtags and encourage others to post using the tag to drive up engagement.
Post patient stories and case studies exemplifying how your dental services improved their confidence and outlook.
Have live Q&As on Instagram Stories or Facebook Live, answering burning questions about cosmetic dentistry your audience has.

5. Roll out a content marketing strategy

Content will provide value to your audience, allow you to captivate new leads, engage your current patients, strengthen brand awareness, and bring in new patient opportunities for your cosmetic dentistry business.

You can’t post content once or twice and expect it to drive results for your dental marketing campaign. Publishing content across various channels is a consistent process, so consider creating an editorial calendar to manage what will go live and when. CRM software can automate content publishing.

What kind of content should you focus on specifically? Explainer videos should greatly benefit your cosmetic dentistry office. You can go into detail on the services you provide, including treatments, to put a patient’s mind at ease.

Behind-the-scenes videos of your practice, interviews with your staff or important names in the dentistry industry, and before-and-after clips should also be popular.

You should also keep a blog where you touch on dental care tips, the latest dental procedures, advancements in the field, news, and trends.

Consider hosting a webinar, publishing an eBook, creating an infographic, or writing whitepapers on topics within cosmetic dentistry. These materials will allow you to position your firm as a thought leader.

Entering an authoritative position like that gives your firm a boost over other dental practices in your city or town. Your content will also go further across the internet as more websites source it.

6. Use email marketing to foster stronger relationships

You’ve poured a lot of hard work into your website, using lead magnets and opt-in forms. The blog and social media content you’ve created make strong lead magnet material, as evidenced by your high rate of signups.

Continue bulking up your email list with giveaways, contests, exit intent pop-ups, quizzes, and signup forms on your site and in your email signature.

Don’t let your email list go cold now that you’ve worked hard to get signups. CRM and email automation software can help you launch a campaign that connects with your various audience segments, no matter how many.

Alert your patients when you’re running a special on dentistry services so they don’t miss out on your limited-time offer. If you introduce a new service or onboard a different cosmetic dentist, inform your audience via email.

Send newsletters in between these periodic emails. You can issue a monthly or quarterly newsletter to your new and long-term patients, filling them in on everything occurring in cosmetic dentistry.

7. Advertise your dental firm with PPC

You can use many forms of advertising to get your cosmetic dentistry marketing strategies off the ground. For example, you can advertise around town on billboards, newspapers, TV, or radio. You can also use email ads or social media ads.

Consider investing in pay-per-click or PPC ads especially. The pay structure for these online ads is you’re charged each time a user clicks your ad. You pay the fee to the publisher, but it’s only a few dollars a click.

Since publishers charge different fees and you only pay when customers engage with your ad, the monthly rate of PPC ads varies greatly. You may only spend $100 monthly on your ad campaign or $10,000 or more.

However, PPC ads are good at reaching your audience where it counts. You can use the ads on search engines, websites, and social media marketing, so they’re quite versatile.

Reach local audiences with your ads through a combination of geotargeting and local keyword research and implementation.

Struggling to come up with ad copy that converts? Try these tips!

Incorporate local keywords into the ad copy.
Use benefits-focused language positioning your cosmetic dentistry firm as an optimal solution for good oral health.
If your ad uses a headline, put extra focus on it, ensuring it’s airtight, catchy, and memorable.
Incorporate a call to action or CTA in your ad, ideally several if you’re writing a landing page.
Use A/B testing for your ads before they go live.

8. Team up with local community partners

Another way to make your cosmetic dentistry firm a mainstay in your community is to work with other related businesses. For example, as a cosmetic dental practice, you might partner with a health food brand, a mouthwash company, or a farming business.

Seek influencers that have a similar brand message to yours. Working with an influencer isn’t only about driving up the clicks and views. You need that alignment between their values and yours, or any message they amplify will ring hollow.

Keep yourself busy by attending community events and seeking sponsorship arrangements with area businesses. This will make your firm a mainstay and the one that locals think of first when they need cosmetic dentistry.

9. Get more referrals, testimonials, and reviews

Social proof is at the core of your cosmetic dentistry marketing strategies. Without that form of trust working for you, it will be hard to improve the audience reception of your firm.

So, how do you get more reviews? You have several ways to increase the number:

Post signage inside your dental practice asking people to leave a review.
Send an automated follow-up email asking the customer to write a review after an appointment.
Ask your social media followers and email subscribers to leave a review when they’re pleased with their service.

As for testimonials, since those are more in-depth, you might communicate directly with patients, asking your longest-term patients to produce a testimonial attesting to your outstanding service. A video testimonial has more emotional oomph, but a text-based testimonial can also get the job done.

Starting a referral program will increase the number of recommendations your office receives. Give your prospective patients incentives to refer others, such as discounted services, free teeth cleaning, and the like.

10. Introduce a loyalty program

Besides tapping into your most loyal customers for testimonials, you should consider making them the VIPs of your firm via a loyalty program.

The program can be all about rewarding your patients based on the number of times they come in to see you per year or how long they’ve been with you.

11. Use machine learning and AI for more targeted campaigns

AI has made quite a splash in a short amount of time, and it’s only poised to get smarter. Although you might wonder where AI and machine learning fit into your cosmetic dentistry marketing strategies, the answer is in many places.

For example, you can use AI for customer segmentation, lead scoring, writing email and social copy, managing data, publishing content, tracking mentions, producing metrics, and making financial predictions.

Don’t be surprised if you don’t get overnight results. Machine learning means the AI gains intelligence the longer it works with you and learns about your processes.

12. Offer virtual dentistry consultations

Your patients are busy people, but they shouldn’t put off dental care. Why not give them an in-between option, such as virtual consultations?

You can discuss the oral health needs of your patient through video software, then invite them for a follow-up exam, where you can prescribe a treatment.

13. Measure the right marketing metrics

With your first cosmetic dentistry marketing campaign under your belt, it’s time to look at where you excelled and which areas you could afford to improve.

The digital marketing tools you use should produce reports on these analytics:

Website traffic
New referrals
Email open rate
Email click-through rate
Social media engagement rate
Bounce rate
Social media subscriber rate
Email list growth rate
Return on investment
Ad spend per campaign
New patients who booked appointments
Long-term patients who booked appointments
Conversions
Lead quality
Customer lifetime value
Net Promoter Score
Average time to appointment
Cost per acquisition
Cost per opportunity
Net new patients

Bottom Line

Cosmetic dentistry marketing strategies build on your business growth, giving you a springboard to grow and take your goals sky-high.

Through a strong combination of social media platforms, email marketing, referrals, content marketing, and advertising, you will be ready to make your dentistry firm the premier choice in your area.

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