Branding In Dentistry: 4 Tips For Your Clinic

The clinic's informational positioning is essential in its promotion and popularization among potential patients and industry experts. The more meaningful your facility's work is, the more distinctive it becomes compared to competitors.

Recently, Dr. Melvin Mendonca – a dental business consultant with more than 15 years of experience – published a comprehensive article regarding purpose-driven branding in dentistry and shared a list of key tips on the topic.

Why is a "personal mission" essential for your practice?

Simply put, a well-branded practice is more likely to be found by new patients and retain the existing ones via a direct strategy: increase patients' trust to enhance their loyalty, simultaneously expanding the influence in the industry to reach the desired outcome – business growth. Let's review each of these key steps.

1. Build trust and credibility.

According to Dr. Mendonca, 86% of patients prefer the brand leading with a specific purpose. This means that you should describe why and how you work for the "mission of high-quality patient care." The clinic's official statements should demonstrate that it serves a particular goal, such as improving local underserved groups' dental health or providing an exclusive dental procedure with novel, cutting-edge digital tools.

A good real-world example is infectology – companies that present new drugs or vaccines often build communication strategies using storytelling in their informational campaigns. For instance, during the final stages of their COVID vaccine development, the Moderna company published several partner articles, telling how many years they spent on respiratory diseases research, etc. This approach lets their clients know that the company specializes in this field and has mastered its development approaches, increasing general credibility.

This method works for every type of healthcare facility. Give your patients the answer to "why" you do what you do, which will be a solid base for building trust.

2. Enhance patient loyalty

Once you precisely define your facility's mission, you must "walk the talk." To prove that you aim to provide unique dental services, you should meet the patient's needs and values. Briefly, every patient requires good treatment outcomes and genuine care – they need to see and clearly understand that you work for a "greater good," not just doing business.

At this point, you definitely need to establish a proper communication strategy that should include direct conversation with the patient and various reminders/recommendations that you can share with them in different ways, including email, calls, and SMS. Using these digital tools, you can ensure the patient won't forget the scheduled appointment or maintain the post-surgical dentist's recommendations. At the same time, patients will feel that the clinic is particularly worried about their health and well-being.

You can also gain patients' loyalty by offering special promotions for new (or regular) customers and implementing referral programs.

3. Increase influence in the industry.

Besides attracting new customers, your brand strategy will also "catch" the eyes of industry professionals and influencers, who may become an additional source of facility advertising.

When you build a straightforward and consistent definition of practice mission, other experts with similar values may notice you and ask for further collaboration. For instance, they may invite you as an lecturer to some dental event or to participate in masterclasses, exhibitions, hands-on courses, etc.

Therefore, brand strategy automatically forms a personal reputation, and once it is strong enough, your clinic will benefit from it. Still, to achieve this level of recognition, you need to constantly share your point using your clinic website and social media to post some articles, posts, visual content, etc.

4. Manage your business growth.

Patient trust, loyalty, and industry influence are valuable resources, but only if you don't waste them and use them correctly. According to Dr. Mendonca, about 42% of customers leave the brand if they see a statement on a social issue they disagree with.

Thus, you must carefully monitor key metrics of your clinic's patient flow and social media statistics to understand better audience reaction to your rhetoric, which may help you identify the Return on Investment indicator.

Still, if you succeed and find the right tone of voice for your purpose-driven brand, that may become an essential factor in scaling and growing your business.

Key risk factors

Dr. Mendoca also highlights the main complications you can face while developing your clinic brand. These factors may disturb your communicative strategy, significantly harming its development and pushing potential clients away:

• Hypocrisy. If there is a gap between your words and actions, people will notice it and probably consider you a liar and a cunning businessman. Do not promise anything you can not fulfill, and do not make a statement regarding the values your team really does not share. Audiences are susceptible to any lie and will notice it sooner or later.
• Oversharing. You should share your thoughts and principles in your posts and publications, but do not bombard your audience with kilotons of text and dozens of photos daily. Choose only the most important thoughts and events you want to share - spam is bad for every industry.
• Guilt tripping. Any of your promotions should focus on positive outcomes. If you want to talk (for instance) about implantation, you should describe how useful it is for dental health and life comfort. You should not scare your audience with information like, "In case you reject implantation, you will have a severe dental infection." Such information may find its reader, but it definitely will not add new patients.  
• Brand dilution. Your first and foremost mission is to provide qualified dental care, and that's what most of your patients expect from you. So, any promotion, special offers, and referral systems will be useless until you master treatment services in your facility.

Pay attention to these points and avoid them in your brand development strategy to ensure its success. If you are interested in more insights regarding dental practice development, check out our Newsfeed:

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