Should You Use Humor When Marketing Your Practice?

As an orthodontic practice, you know that taking care of your patients’ teeth is serious business. However, when it comes to marketing your practice, there will always be some room to use humor. Finding ways to make potential patients laugh can be a powerful way to build brand awareness and connect with people on a relatable level. 

Why Humor Works in Marketing

For most companies, both large and small, using humor in their marketing strategies will lead to better brand recognition and increase the chances of conversion. The reason is pretty simple: humor is a universally positive experience that creates strong associations. When something makes somebody laugh, they are very likely to remember it. Serious or strictly informative ads can catch people’s attention and can be very effective, but you won’t often find someone saying they necessarily enjoyed it. Humorous marketing is especially effective because if it got someone to smile, they genuinely enjoyed the experience and are more likely to really want to remember the source. 

Using Humor Effectively

Despite how effective it can be, humor is also one of the riskiest forms of marketing. It’s all about achieving a good balance. The main thing to avoid when using humor in marketing is being offensive. For instance, other medical practices, such as hospice care, would probably cause offense if they tried to use humor for marketing purposes. Luckily, orthodontic practices don’t have to be quite as concerned about offending their audience. 

Humor is inherently subjective, so it is always somewhat of a gamble. But if you test out your ideas with several people, it will help you determine if people in general will find them funny. 

For orthodontic practices in particular, your tone across all forms of marketing should generally stay professional, but can still be lighthearted and family-friendly. This makes it easy to integrate humor into your marketing strategy without it seeming out of left field. Just remember to keep any bits of humor appropriate for your audience and the topic of orthodontics. Think goofy, fun humor parents and kids will appreciate. Anything edgy you might laugh at if you’re seeing a comedy show of course won’t fly when it comes to marketing your orthodontic practice. 

Where to Use Humor

You might find small opportunities on your main website to use humor, but in general it shouldn’t be the first thing a potential patient sees. Your professionalism and credibility should be front and center. However, integrating humor into your blog content every now and then can be a great way to increase your relatability to potential patients and reduce some anxiety about the treatment process. One way to do this is with blog posts introducing some of your staff. You can send questions to your employees that are likely to get funny responses and include them in your blog. This sort of stuff gets potential patients thinking, “Hey, they’re professionals who know what they’re doing, but they’re people too, and they aren’t so scary after all.” 

Social media is probably the best place to use humor on a regular basis. Social media is where you can really engage with potential patients on a more human level, and humor is a great way to gain attention and have fun responding to comments. 

By finding ways to get people to smile, you can get more patients to trust you with their smiles.