Attract New Patients Through Real-Life Results
Shifting the focus to the patient’s perspective and using social media authentically can build trust, attract new patients, and transform your practice’s marketing approach.
We’ve all had that “aha moment” or what I call the awakening. My eyes were opened to the reality that there’s a more efficient way to attract new patients if we just focus on the patient’s perspective — not ours.
In 2016, I was having an amazing day at the office. Patients were excited about the results they were getting. I shared with my wife how fantastic it would be to have every day be like that particular day. Then she said something that stuck: “Everyone knows you’re a dentist, but nobody knows what you do, which is positively impact patients’ lives.” From that awakening, I began looking at marketing — and specifically social media — in a different way.
I realized people don’t want to see teeth. They want to see patients who are now more confident in so many aspects of their lives because they have a healthy and beautiful smile. They want to see what they could have — emotionally.
I tested the idea by only posting real-life patients smiling and radiating confidence, not clinical pictures or pictures of my team. Within weeks, people were reaching out to me and I realized social media is the perfect tool to create immediate communication and connections and it can build a massive amount of trust.
One patient, I’ll call her Kendall, shared via Instagram messenger how self-conscious she was about her smile and that she’d been to multiple consults but hadn’t moved forward. She sent me a picture of her smile. Instead of just typing out my response which has little personality and zero engagement, I sent her a short video. This was my first video consult and in it I shared what I could do for her as a cosmetic dentist, approximate costs, payment options like the CareCredit credit card, and what I believed her outcomes could reasonably be based on her smile.
It is not a diagnosis; it was sharing with her the possibilities and information she needed to take the next step. I ended it with an “I’m here when you’re ready” statement and she booked a consult a few weeks later. Kendall went from zero confidence to self-confidence in about a month. Since that aha moment, Instagram is my number one new patient outreach and I have 340,000 followers.
Based on what I learned, here are three principles I follow:
- Social media should show what you DO, not how you do it. So share patients’ positive outcomes and the emotional impact these results have had in their lives. Patients are your most powerful marketing asset and when they are happy with the results, they are happy to help.
- Respond immediately and personally. When you can’t be face-to-face, shoot a quick video so they can get to know you as a human, not a typed response or email.
- In the video, make the next step easy by looking at it from patients’ perspectives and what they want to know, not what you want to tell them. They want to know the options — how much is it going to cost, if you have financing available through a company like CareCredit, what they can expect in terms of the process and outcomes, and if they can trust you as a provider.
Patients want the process to be easy and they want to feel comfortable and cared for. When we do all those things, we make it easy for them to choose us and move forward with treatment.
From Decisions in Dentistry. March/April 2025;11(2):22.
