Dental News - Encouraging patients to become social media evangelists for your practice

Steven G. Goldberg, USA

Sun. 6 July 2014

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Let’s face it. Almost every dentist is looking to grow his or her practice, and we’re all looking to bring in as many new patients as we can. With the many platforms in dental marketing at our disposal, word-of-mouth and direct referrals still remain the most powerful motivators driving new patients to our practice.

A positive dental experience for one patient can lead new patients to our doors, and quite often, the way to provide that positive experience is to provide a pain-free dental experience.

The patient’s perspective

Patients sit in our chairs because they fully trust our knowledge, experience and clinical capabilities to care for their oral health. However, what they think most is, “Please don’t hurt me!”

Consider this: You spend a half hour with a patient, treating tooth #14 with an MOD composite bonded filling. You carefully excavate the decay, skillfully prepare the tooth with perfect cavosurface margins, etch, prime, place adhesive and composite, and cure. You create a beautifully artistic representation of occlusal anatomy and even place secondary grooves in the marginal ridges. You’re proud of your artistic creation, and you’ve provided a tremendous service for your patient.

Is this patient going to tell their friends and family how wonderful your secondary grooves are? Of course not. But patients will remember whether you solved their problem and if you did it without causing them pain.

Today’s world revolves around social media, and your patients have the wherewithal to spread the good word about their positive dental experience to a much wider audience than ever before.

Providing a positive and pain-free dental experience

I invented the DentalVibe to block the pain of intra-oral injections. It is a cordless, handheld device that delivers soothing, pulsed, percussive vibration to “shake up” the site where an injection is being administered, sending a message to the brain and effectively closing the neural “pain gate” and allowing for the comfortable administration of intra-oral injections.

This is a highly shareable story. Those secondary grooves might impress your colleagues, but patients talk about the extra touches that make their visit comfortable.

Marketing through social media

For clinicians using the DentalVibe, we have created an online patient sweepstakes that encourages positive patient testimonials. Participating practices give their patient an entry slip at the end of an appointment when the DentalVibe was used, providing them with a promo code to use when posting a brief testimonial about their experience, which is posted to the patient’s Facebook page or shared via email.

The process is easy, and patients are automatically entered into a sweepstakes to win a monthly give-away of an Apple iPad mini and a 2014 year-end grand prize of $50,000.

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