How You Can Use Geofencing to Grow Your Dental Practice

In our February article, Making Geofencing for Dentists Work, we learned about display ads and the ways you can initiate ads, including geofencing. Now, we’ll take a look at how you can take the principles behind geofencing and use it to build up your practice. You’re always looking for new and innovative marketing tactics to yield growth; geofencing is one of the ways you can achieve this.

A Refresher: What is Geofencing?

Geofencing technology allows you to “draw” a perimeter around a specified location. Where you draw the line is up to you. Once a patient that you’re targeting enters that space, the advertisement you’ve created will pop up on their smartphone. According to Duct Tape Marketing, geofencing increases app usage by over 200%, leading to high customer engagement and an increased probability of converting a customer into a patient.

Geofencing’s click-through rate is 15 times higher than that of normal push notifications. Geofencing usage is growing year after year; according to MarketsandMarkets research, the geofencing industry is expected to grow by 27% by 2022. And, as the number of consumers looking for information via their mobile device or on the go increases, it’s important to capitalize on ways to attract their attention but in a way that doesn’t ultimately deter them from your practice.

So, How Can You Target Dental Patients Via Geofencing?

Geofencing allows you to successfully target your patients on a hyper-localized level, but you have to establish how you can actually connect with these patients through this avenue.

Target Dental Competitors

Also known as geo-conquesting, this is a way to make your mark when you have a patient who enters into the territory of one of your competitors. By drawing a geofence around your competitor’s location, you are able to remind your patients of your presence anytime they cross that boundary around the competition. This tactic works best in heavily saturated areas where a few competitors dominate the landscape. According to Spatially.com, Dunkin’ effectively did this to Starbucks customers and converted them with a mobile coupon campaign. If two coffee giants can do this, then there is no reason why you can’t make this happen in your practice!

Target Activities/Complementary Businesses

As Forrest Gump once said, he and Jenny went together like peas and carrots. In the world of geofencing, you want to find that same kind of kindred partnership with an organization that will complement your business practices. That way, you all are working together to build your clientele; it’s capitalizing on relationships that go hand-in-hand.

For instance, if a patient is going to a plastic surgeon, the chances they might be interested in cosmetic dentistry are higher than say just patients who take part in routine preventive care. It might behoove you to geofence an area around plastic surgeons, so that way, when a patient crosses into that territory, you can hit them with information on cosmetic dentistry, which might be of interest to them.

Think about other businesses that offer services that can work alongside your dental practice. Just think, if you put a border around a sleep center, you might be able to attract patients with ads about sleep apnea. Or, if you know a patient who’s visited an oral surgeon, it might be good to target those patients with an ad about missing tooth replacement.

Target Specific People/Dental Patients

Geofencing also allows you to target specific people/patients via first-party data. You can get very granular in your focus, targeting certain neighborhoods. You can work with your dental marketing firm to use your dental database to drill down patients to the household. So, say you have a patient who hasn’t been in for their treatment in several months. You can run a targeted ad campaign to the smartphones, computers, and smart TVs in these patients’ households specifically! Hitting patients at this level allows you to run ads as serving a reminder to patients about you, your practice and your services.

You can also work with other companies to employ means to target patients. For instance, if you currently receive a new movers list for direct mail campaigns, you can utilize that same list in your geofencing campaign to reach those individuals digitally with information about your practice.