Dental Lab Marketing Guide: Top Tips to Attract Customers

It might be hard to know where to start marketing your dental lab, yet new clients are crucial to its success. Here are three of the best ways to reach physicians and other clientele.

1. Your beliefs.

Set a goal. What are your company’s values? Do you value quality and speed? Is your objective to meet every deadline and get a free case if you miss one? Your lab’s mission informs clients of its goals. It should benefit clients.

“We guarantee every case on time, or it’s on us!” is your mission statement. This shows existing and future clients that your lab will never miss a deadline. They don’t want a patient in the chair ready to seat their new crown that they spent thousands of dollars on just to contact the lab and find out they won’t have it that day. It’s unprofessional and makes the doctor seem disorganized to the patient, costing you.

Consistency also helps. You can’t establish a good business by missing your mission statement. Hand checking every case before it leaves the lab helps maintain consistency. This prevents work from being sent out with visible defects like open contacts, tight nightguards, or off shades.

2. Specials

Specials and promotions attract new customers. New physicians should pick a lab promotion for a sluggish area. For example, Stomadent Labs does a great job of this with their new client special. Send potential clients a letter, email, or brochure with a nightguard or sportsguard discount.

If you want more pressable work, try half-off an Emax crown coupon. If you want more milled zirconia, consider a complimentary single-unit full-contour crown.

Freebies remove risk and are terrible incentives. Sending you a case to test doesn’t cost the doctor anything. If they like your work, you get an account. If not, no damage done.

Send tailored marketing to doctors not using your lab for current accounts. To attract a doctor who exclusively does crown and bridge with you, give a discount on a denture or orthodontic appliance. If your lab lacks denture or ortho departments, offer something different. To entice a customer to give you an implant case, offer a complimentary crown over an implant. You’ll get additional implant work if they like it. It’s smart to prioritize getting implant cases from physicians over your competitors since they’re lucrative.

Time sensitive marketing. Give the promotion a deadline so the doctor doesn’t ignore it because it’s not urgent. Make it “one time use per doctor” to prevent physicians from scanning and printing the coupon and attaching it to many cases. You may also track what worked and what didn’t. After a month, you know how many fliers were returned for usage and how many weren’t. Plan specials with this data.

3. Social media

Today, labs must be online. Create Linked In, Instagram, and Facebook pages for your lab and update them often. Post something on each of them everyday, or at least weekly.

You don’t need to write distinct posts for each platform if you post the same content.

These posts might be as basic as a wax-up, a zirconia crown in the CAD system before milling and sintering, or a technician working. Try photographing every prosthesis before it leaves the lab and publishing one a day.

You may also produce an instructional article where the technician leads you through their process to educate clients on prosthesis design. Take a before and after photo of your diagnostic wax for social media and SEO.