SmileMakers Dental Blog

I’m a fanatic about signage, specifically dental practice signs. I actually carry a digital camera when I travel just so I can snap pictures of a great dental practice sign that I may see in my travels. Why is this so important to me? Signage is the least expensive way to acquire a new dental patient!

Recently I got a question from a doctor asking me if it was worth a 100% premium to add an electronic digital reader board to his new sign. The addition of this feature literally doubled the cost of the sign from $7,500 to over $15,000! He wanted to know if it was worth the extra expense.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with digital reader boards, these are essentially programmable digital displays with changeable moving messages and basic images. They are usually attached just above or below your standard practice sign.

The answer depends on three questions.

1. How much drive-by traffic will your sign have?
2. Are you willing to spend the time changing the programmable message on a daily basis?
3. What is the average value of a new patient in your practice?

First, for any dental practice sign to be successful, it must have great drive-by traffic. If you haven’t got significant drive-by or foot traffic visibility, do not invest heavily in signage.

Second, digital reader boards are involvement tools. Yes, you can program them with the time and temperature and let them run on their own. But for maximum return on your investment, you should change the message daily and turn it into a community bulletin board.

This works especially well if your office is near a high school or college and you program your sign to tie into sporting events, honors programs, community events, plays, etc. People will always look at your sign to see what’s new. If your market is more urban, program your sign with short quotes from famous people.

Third, consider the average net contribution of a new patient to your practice (after the cost of providing the dentistry). For example, if each patient nets you $500, then you only need an additional fifteen new dental patients over the entire life of the sign to pay for the additional cost of the programmable reader board. This falls into the “No-Brainer” category of dental practice marketing decisions.

Click here for more information on dental sign design and positioning

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 6:54 am and is filed under Wealthy Dentist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.