Webinar Recap: Improve Your Dental Practice Performance with Membership Plans and Social Media
On January 14, 2020, Kleer CEO Dave Monahan hosted a webinar with Adrian Lefler, partner at My Social Practice. In “Using Membership Plans and Social Media to Improve Practice Performance,” they discuss how membership plans and social media marketing help practices strengthen patient loyalty, increase case acceptance, differentiate themselves and bring in new patients.
The following is a summary of the content covered in the webinar. A playback of the full webinar is available here.
How to Improve Patient Loyalty and Case Acceptance with a Membership Plan
Dave Monahan kick-starts the presentation discussing patient loyalty—a concept that is top of mind for every dental practice. It’s a challenge to generate loyal patients. On average, seven out of ten new patients leave a practice within the first year. Additionally, the uninsured patients visit a practice once every two years.
Dave then dives deeper into the behaviors of uninsured patients and their case acceptance. Uninsured patients accept less than half the treatment as insured patients. They feel exposed when it comes to getting dental treatment. They don’t know how much the dental care will cost, they don’t understand the pricing and they feel uncomfortable with negotiating prices.
A solution lies within subscription-based membership plans. Like other subscription services including Netflix and Amazon Prime, membership plans create a “Membership Club Effect” that increases customer loyalty and usage.
A dental membership plan takes the fear out of unknown costs and enables patients to feel financially savvy. They also feel closer to the practice and good about themselves for taking a positive step toward better oral health. As a result, they will commit to a practice, visit more often and accept more treatment. In fact, based on data from Kleer customers, membership plan patients visit three times more and accept twice as much treatment than uninsured patients.
How Social Media Helps Differentiate a Practice and Attract New Patients
Adrian Lefler takes the floor midway through the webinar and begins talking about how social media can help boost a practice’s performance in terms of practice differentiation and attracting new patients. He emphasizes how patients will best connect with real images of practice teams and patients, and he recommends avoiding posts that look like paid advertisements.
As part of the presentation, Adrian provides two specific tactics for attracting new patients.
- Social Media Contest. One way to increase engagement is running a social media contest. To get started, first offer a reward to followers of your practice. To be eligible for the reward, people must like and share the post referencing the contest. Further increase exposure to the giveaway by having people tag a friend or colleague in the post. These steps encourage new people to discover the dental practice. Determine how long to run the contest and at the end announce the winner through another social media post.
- Instagram Influence. Influencer marketing is a popular trend today in social media, specifically with Instagram. Influencers gain trust with followers and shape their decision-making. Bring an influencer to your practice and have them post about their experience on Instagram to help promote and legitimize the practice.
Promoting Membership Plans on Social Media
At the end of the presentation, Dave and Adrian talk about how Kleer and My Social Practice have partnered to help dental practices promote their membership plans on social media.
The companies have jointly created a social media marketing kit that is totally free for practices. The kit includes downloadable materials and a 30-day plan for kick-starting a social media campaign. It’s accessible by following this link.
