If your dental practice offers Invisalign treatments to patients, you have a potentially crucial marketing advantage. Align Technology, the company behind the Invisalign brand, spends more than $250 million every year on marketing its product in North America.
As a result, most of your patients have probably heard of Invisalign, even if they might not know exactly what it is yet. Knowing how to sell Invisalign to patients allows you to build on the already strong brand awareness to bring in more patients.
That’s especially true if you have a good understanding of your local market demand for Invisalign, which can help you achieve a great dental marketing ROI. Keep reading to better understand how you can build an effective Invisalign marketing strategy.
How to Sell Invisalign to Existing Patients
When talking to current patients, the focus is on clinical education. This audience already trusts your dental expertise. Now, it’s time to tell them more about the clear aligner treatment designed to improve their teeth. You can then offer your services to help them create a treatment plan.
Web Design for Invisalign Providers
Web design matters for any medical practice, helping you build a more convincing and credible online presence. In this case, the key is making sure that you are an Invisalign practice, co-branding your website to make it clear that you offer this product. You can take advantage of Invisalign’s existing brand awareness by placing its name and logo prominently on your key pages.
Beyond that, it’s about education. Talk through the benefits of using a clear aligner, and Invisalign specifically. Design your website to not just be visually stunning, but also functional enough to help visitors sign up for a free consultation to talk about their treatment options.
E-Mail Marketing
Chances are you already have an email list that includes your existing dental patients. You can now use it to promote the fact that you offer the product, positioning yourself as a credible Invisalign provider within your patients’ local reach.
Every email you send should have at least one “call to action” that the user can take to benefit you. The call to action is typically a visual button, and everything in your message should drive to and revolve around it. Use it to link to your sign-up page for a free consultation.
The Patient Experience
Your dental office is the perfect place to advertise your Invisalign offerings and products. Here, you have a number of options:
- Posters in your waiting area and patient rooms
- Videos on screens visible to patients while waiting
- Discussions with visiting patients who are considering braces
Of course, the patient experience extends beyond the physical visit, as well. Add the Invisalign logo to scheduling reminders and appointment follow-ups for even more visibility.
Social Media Marketing
If you already have a large following of existing patients, social media can become a core channel to promote yourself as an Invisalign provider. Share information about the treatment, its benefits, and how you help patients.
If you don’t yet have a large following or want to reach new prospects, consider boosting your social media posts. For a small budget, you can effectively reach patients that fit specific demographics aligned with your audience.
How to Sell Invisalign to New Patients
Of course, your dental marketing strategy doesn’t have to be limited to current patients. The fact that you provide this type of orthodontic treatment can be a core messaging pillar for attracting new patients.
Social Media Ads
Paid social media ads can be a hugely successful strategy for dentists. With paid ads, you can effectively reach any member of your target audience that fits specific demographic and geographic parameters, allowing you to reach patients in the right age bracket and income range to consider Invisalign treatments.
Facebook can be an especially effective tool for dental practices looking to promote Invisalign to new patients. They allow you to share short videos or static images highlighting the treatment’s benefits, then target users according to hundreds of options. Social media ads are pay-per-click (PPC), meaning you only pay if a potential patient is interested enough to click on the ad.
Paid Search Ads
Similar to social media, paid search PPC ads can be an effective tool to highlight your orthodontic treatment options to potential patients. Ads are targeted based on keywords, meaning you can specifically reach patients looking for braces or even specifically for Invisalign treatments in your area. Your ads will appear at the top of relevant search results, providing a natural next step for interested users.
Paid search is closely related to Google display ads, which work based on similar targeting and budget parameters. The difference, of course, is simple: text-based paid search ads appear on search results, while the visual banner display ads appear on the 200+ million sites that are part of the Google Display Network.
Content Marketing
As audiences increasingly look for value over promotion in their digital consumption, medical content marketing has taken on an outsized importance in the larger marketing strategy. Rather than focusing on straightforward promotion of your services, content marketing is about drawing in an interested audience by addressing common questions and pain points.
Done right, content marketing can go a long way towards building trust and credibility in your dental practice.
Search Engine Optimization
Content marketing is closely related to SEO, which is the process of optimizing your dental website to be highly ranked for relevant searches on Google, Bing, and other search engines. It requires both technical optimization and content optimization, ensuring that your website offers a positive, relevant experience for potential patients.
SEO is a complex topic, but its core is simple: find the keywords your audience searches for when looking for dental and Invisalign providers, then optimize your website to be the most relevant, valuable, and helpful resource for those keywords. Over time, you’ll get your content and landing pages in front of your audience without spending money on ads.
How Much Should Dentists Spend on Invisalign Ads?
Ultimately, the question of how much dentists should spend on marketing as a whole is impossible to answer with a set figure. While the average dental practice spends just over 11% of their revenue on promotional efforts, too many variables play into this to make it a hard goal for every dentist looking to promote Invisalign.
Instead, you first need to understand the local market demand for Invisalign treatments. if you underestimate that demand, your marketing ROI will be lower than it might otherwise be. But if you overestimate it, you’ll be wasting money chasing non-existent leads.
Determining local demand yourself means needing to find the demographics of potential patients in your zip code as well as the surrounding zip codes within your draw area. For this, you can use Census.gov. With that data in hand, you can extrapolate local demand by comparing it to total search volumes in Google for terms like “Invisalign.”