5 Successful Holiday Dental Marketing Ideas for 2022

The holidays are just around the corner, which means now’s the best time for dental practices like you to start planning holiday dental marketing campaigns that showcase the personal and festive side of your local business!

Dental marketing strategies can be as simple as adding a holiday twist to some of your tried-and-tested marketing tactics or thinking outside the box and trying out new and unique promotional gimmicks.  

Whatever digital dental marketing tactics you go for this year, remember that it’s crucial to create timely holiday-themed content to attract more patients and keep your clinic top-of-mind as patients plan to book appointments in the new year.  

5 Dental Marketing Ideas to Maximize Acquisition and Decrease Attrition

1. Publish High-Quality, Holiday-Themed Content

During this busy time, you want to keep your dental practice top-of-mind by creating educational and entertaining dental content for the holiday season. This is how you remain relevant, show your expertise, and provide value to your existing and prospective patients during the festive season.  

So, what should you be posting? Start on your website and social media:

Publish a dental holiday gift guide

Help your dental patients decide what to get their loved ones for Christmas or themselves by creating a visual guide. Your gift guide should include dental essentials for the holidays, such as electronic toothbrushes, teeth whitening whiteners (if you're selling them), mints, travel-sized dental kits, sugar-free candies, and many more! If you've got some promos going on, make sure to put that on top of your list!

Keep your patients updated about all the fun things you and your employees do during the holidays‍

Featuring your employees, their holiday-specific traditions, and the stuff you do together to celebrate humanizes your practices. Post about your office Christmas party, your Thanksgiving potluck, how each of your employees spent their holidays, and how you celebrated New Year.

Sharing these things is fun, heart-warming, and adds a human touch to your digital marketing efforts.  

Create a series of holiday dental health tips

‍With all the parties, food, wine, and celebrations during the holidays, people often forget about their dental health. Take this opportunity to remind your patients about the dangers of eating too many candies during Halloween, share tips on how to whiten teeth from all the holiday food and wine, and let them know about the importance of brushing and flossing before bed. Gentle reminders like these show that you care about your patients.

It's also a great way to sneak in a little marketing and convince them to book a dental appointment once they're back from their holidays. You should also optimize for dental SEO to help your content rank at the top of the search results. This way, when they search for “how to whiten stained teeth,” you’re the first clinic to appear!

Provide your audience with a variety of content types

Don’t be afraid to explore new social media features, platforms, and ways to help you reach out and communicate your message to your target patients. Right now, TikTok is incredibly popular. Consider sharing some of your dental hacks and tips there. You should also use Instagram Stories to show behind-the-scenes clips of what goes on in your dental office every day and use Facebook Live to host Q&A sessions.  

2. Invest in a Holiday Dental PPC Campaign

Given how fierce the competition is during the holiday season, it’s not enough to rely on organic marketing to get the leads you need to increase your holiday sales.  

Alongside a long-term dental SEO campaign, you should implement a PPC campaign to generate immediate results.  

Here are some tips to help you ace your holiday PPC campaign:

• Review your previous holiday campaigns. Which promos were popular among your patients? Which creative was most compelling? Which channels drove the most bookings? Use this data to inform your PPC holiday campaign this year.  

• Allocate some of your budgets for testing new platforms, channels, tactics, or tools. TikTok is incredibly popular right now not just for eCommerce but for the dental industry as well. If you're selling dental products and are targeting a younger demographic, you should definitely consider using the TikTok shop to help you generate leads and sales on the platform.  
• Decide on a campaign objective. What is it that you want to achieve by running ads? Is it to boost brand awareness? Increase holiday sales? Attract potential patients?
• Identify who you want to target with your ads. It could be visitors who read your holiday-themed posts, past patients, high-value patients, recent website visitors, those who engaged with your content on social media, and many more.  
• Create landing pages and ads that are optimized for the holiday dental deals you’re trying to promote. This is a great way to capture leads and convert them right away.  
• Reengage users who visited your site, interacted with your social content, engaged with your ads, and have expressed interest in your business but haven't converted yet.

3. Give Back to Your Patients

The spirit of the holidays is all about giving without a thought of getting. But we all know that the reciprocity principle will make your patients want to return the goods they received from you.

Give back to your patients this holiday season and encourage them to keep coming back by giving them a free dental cleaning, a holiday-themed dental kit, or host a fun holiday event for all your patients.  

Here are some ways you can give back to your patients this Christmas:

Send out a Thank You email to your current patients

Let them know about your holiday deals, loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and events that they can join. If you don’t have much to give, a simple thank you and a discount code they can use on their next appointment will mean a lot.  

Do a giveaway on social media‍

Promote your dental practice and your services by giving away free dental services to lucky participants. Doing this can grow your following, spread brand awareness, and generate information about your target audience.

When it comes to choosing a prize, analyze what’s valuable to your target patients. If you specialize in cosmetic dentistry, for instance, giving away free teeth whitening will definitely grab your ideal patients’ attention!

Surprise patients with a mystery Christmas gift

This can be given when they book an appointment with you during the holidays.

Reward your loyal patients with discounts ‍

You could also opt for a gift basket filled with smile-friendly goodies they like!

Doing simple things like these can make patients choose your practice over others.

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4. Partner with Local Businesses

During Christmas and the holiday season, there are parties happening left and right – annual office parties, family get-togethers, and other holiday-specific traditions.  

Because of this, many people spend a chunk of their money to look their best for the holidays. Who doesn’t love a much-deserved day of pampering and a makeover?  

Why don't you make your patients' lives easier by teaming up with local spas, hair salons, nail techs, and estheticians to cross-promote each other’s businesses?  

Provide exclusive discounts on specific services, such as teeth whitening and veneers, to customers they send your way, and likewise, the patients you send their way will also get a discount or a special deal for the holidays.  

Building strategic partnerships by collaborating with other local businesses in your area can be very beneficial for everyone involved.  

5. Remind People of Their Unused Benefits

Remind people that December is their last opportunity to take advantage of any unused dental benefits for the year. With all the sweets that are bound to be on their tables throughout the season, there's no better time for them to come in for a visit!

Because of how busy the holiday season is in general, patients will appreciate a gentle reminder to get their cleanings, x-rays, and other dental treatments they need before the year ends. You want to let them know that you’re on their side and are just making sure that their hard-earned money doesn’t go to waste.  

You can do this by sending them an email – this can be done easily if you're using a practice management software – creating social media posts stating which dental insurance you accept and the different services they can get at your dental clinic, and publishing a blog post on why they should max out their dental benefits before the new year.

Looking for a Dental Marketing Company that Can Boost Your Holiday Sales?

A holiday dental marketing campaign might just be what you need to max out your appointment slots throughout the festive season and boost your practice for the new year!

At Digital Resource, our dental marketing experts will work with you to create a custom holiday dental office marketing plan to drive more sales, retain existing patients, and of course, attract new ones.  From search engine optimization and web design to Google Ads campaign optimization and email marketing, they'll make sure you'll have the best holiday season yet!

Want to start growing your dental practice and open a new branch by next year? We can help! Contact us today to get the leads you need to boost your profitability.  

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