Build Your Brand

Why your brand is so important to the success of your practice

Even today, when the importance of sustained marketing is almost universally accepted by dentists, many owners are half-hearted marketers at best. Understandably, for a profession built around clinical excellence, time and money spent on social media, content creation and other marketing matters can seem unwarranted.

Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Establishing a strong brand and keeping this in front of your patients, as well as prospective new clients, is key to ensuring the long term health of your practice.

The elements that actually make up your brand

There is frequently misunderstanding amongst practice owners over what ‘brand’ actually is. Brand, especially in a clinical profession, is far from being simply a matter of name, logo, colours and consistent visual design. While these are all elements of the visual presentation of a practice’s brand, ‘brand’ itself is made up of a deeper and more intrinsic set of elements.

Brand is best thought of as the personality your practice conveys. Does it present itself as traditional? As technologically driven? As a guardian of family health? As a practice for busy working people? Is it an extension of one dentist’s long standing reputation, or is it a fast, bright, modern ‘clinic’ operation, where the identity of the individual dentists is deliberately played down?

The touch points that define a dental brand

Once a practice is clear on the core values and meanings of its brand, then everything it does contributes to communicating (or potentially to damaging) these.

How your signage and premises look and feel. How information and marketing literature looks and talks. How your practice managers speak on the phone. How you come across in your own social media content, and how you’re talked about elsewhere online and in real life by clients and patients. The text messages you send out. The experience you deliver in the chair. How treatment consumables look and feel when received by a patient. The quality of your care and communication after treatment. It’s dozens of touch points like these that, collectively, define the brand of your practice.

How your brand helps build trust, standing and respect

‘Reputation’ was understood to be both socially and commercially important for dentists long before the profession embraced brand and marketing in the way we are now familiar with.

Today, however, patients are sophisticated consumers, and dentists and dental practices are judged in much the same way as other services in the health and wellbeing sector. As a result, the traditional importance of reputation is now better thought of as the critical importance of brand.

Do I like this practice? Is it the kind of place I like to receive treatment? Does it look and feel hygienic and clinical? Does it feel as though it embraces up to date technology and tools? Do I feel the care I receive is of a high standard? Do I like the way the people talk and listen to me? Do I hear and read good reports about it?

How your brand helps drive business

It’s the attributes of the practice just mentioned that combine to build the trust on which a strong patient pipeline, and a healthy flow of high value casework, depend.

Cosmetic work of any kind is a costly choice for a patient, and so purchase decisions (where to have treatment, as well as whether to have it at all), are influenced by a host of consumer criteria. Every investment made in building and asserting your brand contributes to the confidence with which a patient trusts your practice to deliver the successful outcome of cosmetic (or complex remedial) treatment.

Why brand is vital in building long term value

Of course, building a strong brand is important not only for its impact on your business today.

If you have a practice that you plan to scale to a chain, the brand values you have established will be essential to achieving success. Similarly, if you are working with an eye on an eventual sale of your, the strength of the brand you have established will play a significant role in both the kind of buyers you attract, and the valuation you secure.

The role of digital dentistry in contemporary dental brands

The transformation that digital workflows have delivered to practice efficiencies and profitability is recognised by almost all dentists. The significance of the contribution made by digital dentistry to perception of your brand is easier to miss.

Today, however, being seen by patients to have adopted and be making effective use of up to date digital dentistry defines a practice as dynamic, offering the best possible treatment environment, and delivering prosthetics and cosmetic treatment aids manufactured using today’s digital capabilities, rather than legacy mechanical techniques. In short, digital dentistry adds reassurance that you are keeping up to date with the profession’s evolution, as well as tech credibility, to your brand.

How good digital dentistry partners add value to your brand

Just as all dentists are not the same, so labs and digital workflow partners differ in their service delivery and the contributions they are able to make to reinforcing the presence of your brand.

In general, patients will have few or no points of interaction at all with your lab or digital manufacturing facility. In the surgery, with you present and handling all prosthetics or treatment aids from their packaging, items branded to your practice would add no value to the patient’s perception of their care.

In the case of aligners, however, an item packed and delivered to the patient and remaining present and in daily use in their home throughout their treatment program, the presence of practice branding can help to assert the stature and professionalism of the practice, and reinforce a patient’s confidence as well as their self-justification of the money they are investing in treatment.

How ALIGNER ZONE does its bit to reinforce your brand

At ALIGNER ZONE, we specialise in providing dental practices with a direct, digital workflow for the design, manufacture and remote monitoring of aligners.

As well as ensuring an optimal workflow to help you reduce chair time and increase turnover, and an outstanding quality of product, we go to great lengths to reinforce our dental practice customers’ brands to their patients through the packaged presentation of their aligners.

To do this, we have put in place the capability to customise our white boxed Premium Packaging with the logo and accurately reproduced brand colours of any practice.

The result is that the boxed aligners a patient receives extend the presence of your practice into their bedroom or bathroom, reinforcing your care and ownership of their treatment throughout its course, and building further trust and loyalty to your brand.

Can a logo on a box make a significant difference to your success as a business? It can. Everything you do to strengthen your brand amongst your patients and the surrounding community makes your practice stronger and, in the end, increases its value.

Building your brand
Using the ALIGNER ZONE box solution

The Benefits of Dental Monitoring

Across the dental profession, optimizing chair time has long been recognized as vital in maximizing profitability. The challenge, as always, is to do this not only without compromising the patient experience, but while actually enhancing it.

Technology, of course, provides the solution. Digital dentistry has made it possible for the accepted definition of a high quality patient experience to evolve, so that today it is based on up to date technology used with evident expertise, clear communications and explanations, and efficient, hassle-free case management.

Dental monitoring can make a valuable and impressive contribution to achieving this impact. It affords patients being treated with aligners increased confidence that their treatment is being watched over by their dentist and progressing as planned, along with increased engagement and greater convenience.

For the dentist, dental monitoring makes it quick and easy to keep each aligner case continuously under review without the need for additional or unnecessary appointments, and engages the patient more fully in ensuring the success of their treatment.

What is dental monitoring?

Dental monitoring (remote monitoring as it’s sometimes known) uses an AI-powered platform backed by a database of clinical images, to detect and monitor oral observations, remotely.

For dentists carrying out aligner treatment, this means you can check that your patient is complying with your instructions and using their aligners correctly, and determine precisely when they need to be seen in person. Otherwise, they can safely be left to get on with their life, while you can get on with seeing other patients.

How dental monitoring actually works

At ALIGNER ZONE, we offer dental monitoring with all of our premium aligner packages.

Once you’ve seen your patient and formulated their treatment plan, you monitor treatment and manage liaison with them through our online dental monitoring platform. This has been set up by us for the oral observations usually needed for aligner cases. However, we can customize these further for you if necessary to accommodate exceptional cases.

Your patient simply downloads our app to their smartphone, and uses in combination with the custom device which we provide to them to take intraoral images whenever they are due to scan their teeth. They can do this from wherever they happen to be at the time.

Once intraoral images have been scanned using the device, they automatically upload to your dental monitoring dashboard, where you can view them and monitor the process.

The uploaded images are analysed by AI, which can detect over 130 oral observations. If it detects an observation specified by the protocol – for example if an alignment is not progressing correctly – it sends out appropriate instructions, pre-configured by us – to you and your patient.

You can use the app to communicate with your patient in both directions, schedule appointments to see them in person, or send them further instructions, complete with annotated pictures, at any time.

How dental monitoring benefits you and your patient.

By using dental monitoring on your aligner cases, you’ll optimise chair time, replacing additional appointments with AI monitoring, pre-set instructions to patients triggered automatically when something’s wrong, and the ability to communicate directly or call the patient in via the app whenever you wish.

Because the patient is able to see the progress of their alignment via the app for themselves, compliance is improved dramatically. If poor fit develops, you can see this long before the next scheduled appointment and decide on how best to make refinements, and you can save more valuable time by automating non-clinical steps.

From your patient’s point of view, if you’re using dental monitoring there’s less need to miss work or make child-cover plans to be able to come in to the practice for repeated appointments. The monitoring provides reassurance that treatment is on track, and boosts motivation to comply with wearing the aligners as you have prescribed. Because you are able to act immediately if refinements are needed, treatment is generally completed in the shortest possible time.

In all, dental monitoring not only hands you back valuable chairtime and improves the efficiency of your aligner case management. It also delivers your aligner patients a seamless and impressive customer experience.

Register to the ALIGNER ZONE Portal
to start using dental monitoring on your aligner cases

Marketing Aligners – Example wording used for marketing

With an average treatment of 6 months to a new confident smile, it’s no wonder why more and more people are turning to Aligners as their clear choice for clear braces.

ALIGNER ZONE aligners work on basic orthodontic principles. They are used for the correction of crooked teeth, gaps or rotation, while achieving the desired results in an organized and planned fashion. These customized trays are “invisible” and move the tooth in the desired direction. This is achieved through wearing a series of clear Aligners, each for 22 hours a day, 1 to 2 weeks at a time (one stage), which move the teeth per stage until their optimal alignment has been reached.

Not sure what ALIGNER ZONE is?

Prescribed by your dental professional, ALIGNER ZONE are clear aligners that have been developed specifically for aligning your teeth in a predictable, smooth, clear and comfortable manner. Instead of metal brackets, wires or screws, you’ll be wearing a thermoplastic material to achieve your desired results – while going unnoticed by the people around you.

Historically, pricing for aligner therapy meant most people couldn’t afford it. Thankfully to advancements in technology and business, efficiencies it allows us to be affordable without compromising on quality.

Treatments require professional supervision as orthodontic or dental procedures may be required, which only your dental professional is able to perform.

Interproximal Reduction (IPR), a regular orthodontic procedure where small amounts of tooth surface between teeth is removed to create space to fix crowding or odd shaped teeth. Mainly used to stop patients from having an edge to edge bite.

Buttons – Attachments, small amounts of composite bonded to teeth to give the clear aligners force or traction to push or pull on which assists in the rotation and movement of teeth.

The ALIGNER ZONE team pay meticulous attention to detail, combining the latest technology with expert treatment planning and are constantly produce world class clear Aligners at an affordable price with no compromises in quality.