Marketing ideas to promote a business?

[Slice]

Hello!

I work at a dental office and we're trying to come up with ways to promote our practice. It's a small office with one dentist and one hygienist (that comes in only 2 times a week). We open on Saturdays (which is our most liked day).
We're trying to attract new long-term patients.
How can we do that? What can we do?

It's illegal to provide free stuff (example, free gas card) for new patients here. So we have to be very creative.

Thanks for you help!

[wokthedog]

stand in front of the dental office in a bear suit with a sign, spinning it

[Andrew Strauss]

Try to do leaflet distribution in locally. Advertise your business on local news paper and yellow pages. You can also do online classified submission for online brand awareness.

[Lee]

Create a website for the business that is optimised for search engines, using specific keywords including local terms, then when people search dentists in "your location here", you should be able to rank highly in the engines which will bring you traffic and thus more customers.

It may sound like hard work, but you can do this cost effectively and the returns can be very good. It has also been done by others (Doctors etc) to great effect, so the precedent has been set.

[CoachingForLife]

Hi, you require both online and offline marketing.
Creating a website would be a start.
Once you have a website, getting yourself on social media (i.e twitter, facebook and Linkedin) is the next step.
It is crucial at this stage to have reviews or testimonials from your clients as well.
If you dont know how to do this, then high an expert to build your website and a social media manager to do the articles and blogging stuff. Spend money to make money!!
Your presence on google, yahoo and bing is also important.
If you require some help, contact me directly.
Offline marketing, would be leaflets, have an open day to demonstrate your services to the locals. Half price treatments, hire spare rooms to other therapists .......