Dental Practice Objectives For 2022: Best Opportunities for Growth

The dental practice is a rapidly expanding, highly segmented industry. Due to this fact, even though there’s so much potential for growth, the competition is both vigorous and relentless.

Now, in order to grow your business, it’s essential that you identify your unique selling proposition (USP). This comes in various shapes and sizes, but the first step to discovering it lies in asking one question:

• What is it that my clients want that my closest competitors currently do not have on offer?

This is a serious question that requires a bit of industry research but also needs you to discover the unique bottlenecks of your industry. For instance:

• What are the biggest obstacles that potential clients face just before giving up on going to a dentist?

With all of this in mind and without further ado, here are some of these bottlenecks, as well as some of the most relevant dental practice objectives. Hopefully, these will help you grow significantly in 2022.

Keep up with the Latest Trends

One of the first methods you could try in order to get ahead of your competitors is to try including some of the fastest-growing industry trends in your offer. In the dental industry, these trends are:

• Cosmetic surgery: This one ranges from bonding or repairing chipped teeth, closing gaps, and changing the shape of the teeth, all the way to a silver amalgam filling. Overall, it’s one service that a lot of people are looking for in 2022.
• 3D printing: The technology of 3D printing enables the production of the most accurate physical models of prosthodontics and orthodontics. While not a standard issue for a dental practice, owning the necessary hardware may make a massive change.
• Laser dentistry: For a lot of people, pain is the biggest concern when it comes to paying a visit to a dentist. Well, laser dental treatment is a pain-free method, which might serve as a persuasive USP for many potential patients.
• Dental implants: While this trend is as old as the dentistry itself, it’s more and more common to see general dentists (as opposed to specialists) providing this service.

Now, there are some customers who are there just for a standard procedure, but even they might look into these innovative dental trends in order to assess the competitiveness of your business. In other words, it’s always in your best interest to stay ahead.

Invest In Your Staff

One of the first things you need to understand when organizing a dental practice is that having a full staff and having the right staff structure is just as important. You see, having dentists and dental assistants, as well as receptionists, cleaners, etc., is not more important than having competent dental management on your side. Administrative workers have an important role in every successful dental practice.

In order to attract and keep your talent, you need to provide people with the right compensation. You see, dental experts are always in demand, which means that if you want to keep people, it’s essential that you pay them right. Do your research and, more importantly, tightly collaborate with your accounting department.

One more thing you need to think about is the improvement of your hiring progress. To do so, you need to educate your interviewers, make a list of requirements, and also work on your own appeal as an employer.

Finally, your staff deserves some non-material commitment on your part. No, the customer is not always right, and in order to earn the respect of your staff, you’ll sometimes have to take their side even if it hurts you financially. Also, showing people that you appreciate them takes more than bonuses on their paycheck.

Develop In-house Payment Plans

The cost of dental services is often a major deterrent for those who would otherwise come to your practice. Now, lowering the cost of your services is not always the right answer to this. First of all, it minimizes your profit, seeing as how your operational expenses remain the same. Second, it hurts your reputation (seeing as how a lot of people prefer not to go to the cheapest dentist).

Instead of relying on their insurance plan (which your practice may not accept, to begin with), you might want to offer them an in-house payment plan.

Now, what this does is help you progress your brand on several different levels.

• First, it allows you to access those patients who would otherwise be unable to afford your services. Moreover, it allows you to do so without lowering your prices, thus debasing the value of your brand as a whole.
• Second, it creates more loyal patients. You see, dental health and dental hygiene are fields in which everything revolves around return visits. They need to come for a checkup at least twice per year. The same goes for routine procedures like removing tartar/plaque and teeth polishing. By pulling this, you’re guaranteeing that they’ll come back.

By developing this system, you’ll also make your cash flow a bit more stable. Therefore, it will help your business grow financially, as well as make it more resilient.

Prolong Your Working Hours

For a lot of people, the major problem with going to the dentist is the fact that people simply don’t have time for it.

• How is this possible?
• Isn’t this just some sort of an excuse?
• If not, what can you do about it?

To answer the first two questions, a lot of dentists work hours that overlap with working outs of their potential patients. This means that even if they went straight from work, chances are that they won’t make it. Over the weekends, the majority of dentistry offices are closed. Seeing as how people are working more and more this particular issue is going to grow in significance.

There are two ways to solve this problem.

1. You can expand your work hours.
2. You can move your office to the region where the majority of your target audience lives.

Both of these methods give them a timeframe when they can get to you without much issue.

Invest in Patient Education

Lastly, there are a lot of people who just live in a misconception that they don’t need a dentist or that their oral health is not at risk because they’re not suffering from any inconveniences at the moment. This narrative is quite harmful but gives you a unique angle to approach potential patients through education.

Starting a dental blog, printing leaflets, and, overall, investing in the education of the people gives you a unique way to approach them and establish yourself as an authority. The best part is that these are the topics that the people are generally interested in. This means that gaining quite a bit of traffic won’t be that difficult.

In Conclusion

Overall, there’s no recipe for success. However, it’s quite intuitive to look at the reasons why some of your patients are hesitant to visit (in other industries, this would be called shopping cart abandonment) and work on solving these problems. Recognizing these bottlenecks is quite easy by reaching out to your audience and monitoring your closest competitors. Still, it will take some time and patience. Once you get the information you need, you can produce to craft your own strategy.

META:

The dental practice is a rapidly expanding, highly segmented industry. Read this and learn more about dental practice management.