Marketing for dentists is crucial for finding new customers and retaining your existing ones. Without marketing, your prospective customers will not be able to find you or learn more about what you do. Nowadays, the internet plays a huge role in every patient’s search for a new dentist. There are several online marketing methods that you can use as a dental practice to take advantage of people who are searching for dental services on the internet. These methods enable you to not only reach out to new customers but to take charge of how your business appears online. This, in turn, will make it easier for patients to choose you over other practices. Read on to find out more about online marketing for dentists and solutions for growing your dental practice.
Develop Your Brand
Each and every dental practice has some things that set it apart from the rest. For instance, you might be a holistic dentist. This sets you apart from orthodontists, meaning you must take the time to think about how you want to develop your holistic dental office brand. You should also think about how your customers are going to define you. For instance, you might want to be a practice that’s viewed by people as the leader in family orthodontics. Or you might want people to think of you as a team that stays connected with patients all the time, hosting fun events and different promotions. Similarly, you might also be thinking about specializing in pediatric dentistry and this comes with its own considerations.
Brand development also helps you define what kind of audience you are targeting. This, in turn, will guide you when it comes to content creation and how to set yourself apart from your competitors. As you are developing your brand, you might also want to talk to your financial advisor about marketing. Your financial advisor will let you know how much you can safely invest into marketing your practice.
Identify Your Target Market
It’s highly likely that you already have a very good idea about who your audience is. Usually, these are the patients who come into your practice on a daily basis. For instance, if you specialize in family orthodontics and you are getting patients who want braces, then you are already on the right path. However, it’s also possible that you might be attracting adult patients when you are a pediatric dentist. In this instance, you will need to come up with ways of attracting the right audience.
Once you have defined who you want to appeal to, you must start thinking about their questions, what they are interested in, and their dental care needs. This will enable you to refine your marketing strategy and see how best you can reach out to them online. For instance, you might want to research the social media channels that are used by people looking for orthodontic clinics and what type of content they will likely engage with.
After researching your audience, you must now do further research to find out if there are any additional audience groups that you haven’t considered. There are several tools that you can use to define your audience. However, when you are starting out, you should try and make sure that you don’t spend too much money. As such, it is advisable to go for free or relatively cheap products. There are several forums and social media groups for dentists that you can use to find out what other dentists are using and what types of questions customers are asking.
Study Your Competitors
When it comes to digital marketing, imitation goes a long way. You will want to find out who your competitors are and what they are doing to push their businesses forward. You should also look at the kind of content they are creating, how they use social media and what platforms they use to interact with patients. However, if you are an orthodontist, the idea is not to copy what other orthodontic clinics are doing but to use that information to come up with your own strategy. To avoid ending up with lawsuits regarding plagiarism and copyrights, talk to your business lawyer and find out what’s legal and what’s not.
Develop a Marketing Strategy
After defining your brand, identifying your audience, and researching your competition, you can now proceed to look into effective marketing strategies for orthodontics. As you are developing your strategy, you should also think about setting realistic goals for your marketing efforts.
To develop an effective marketing strategy, analyze your practice and think about the goals that are most important to you. For instance, are you looking to acquire a lot of new clients, or are you aiming to retain as many of your existing clients as possible? Sometimes you might even want to come up with a strategy that helps you do both. Apart from focusing on patient acquisition, it’s also important to think about growing your online presence and pushing for more recognition in the industry.
Clearly defining your goals before you implement your plans will help you focus on the tasks with the highest return on investment. This will ensure that you don’t waste resources on strategies that don’t push your most important goals forward.
Develop a Website for Your Practice
It’s crucial for a dental practice to have a professionally designed website. It doesn’t matter how big or small your practice is; you just can’t do without a website. This is one of the most important tools when it comes to marketing for dental practices. There are many ways you will benefit from having a dental practice website.
Patients all over the world are increasingly relying on the internet when it comes to searching for dental practices. This means if you want to take advantage of this search traffic, you need to be present online, and there is no better way to do that than with a dental practice website. This will ensure that you show up in results when people search for the services that you provide.
In the past, it might have been sufficient to just have a directory listing for your dental practice. However, nowadays, that won’t cut it. People want to find out as much about a business before they consider purchasing its services. This is where a dental website comes it. A website allows you to add detailed information about each of the services that you offer, your qualifications, reviews, and even contact details. Apart from that, you will be able to add a lot of content like pictures and videos of your practice. This enables your prospective patients to make quicker decisions before they even visit your practice.
For maximum effectiveness, you must always hire a professional web developer to build your dental practice website for you. They will help you select the right web hosting service and come up with a well-structured website that has a great layout. With this type of website, your clients will view you as a professional who is serious about the services they provide. On your own, you might not even know how to select the best web hosting service, and you won’t know what design to go for and what to include on your website.
Search Engine Optimization for Dentists
As you are developing your dental practice website, you must never make SEO an afterthought. This means you must find a developer who fully understands how to develop an SEO-friendly website. After all, there is no use having a website that won’t show up when people are now searching for you.
SEO enables prospective patients to find you online. As a result, you will be able to acquire new patients consistently. When you implement the best SEO practices on your website, your website’s ranking will improve. This essentially improves your chances of getting bookings online as users will be able to click on your website in search results. For instance, patients usually search for things like “pediatric dentistry near me.” If your website is properly optimized for keywords related to pediatric dentistry, it will show up on the first page of Google, which is basically where all the business takes place. If your SEO efforts are consistent and effective, you will eventually get to the top of search results as far as searching related to pediatric dentistry is concerned.
Statistics show that about 77% of health inquiries start on search engines. Apart from just appearing on top of search engine results, SEO also ensures that your customers will enjoy a good user experience. You will find that websites that load fast and have a user-friendly design have a higher chance of ranking on top of their competitors. This means SEO not only makes you visible but it improves your chances of converting your prospective patients into customers.
Paid Online Advertising
There are several methods of implementing paid online advertising into your marketing strategy. One of the most common is the Pay-Per-Click or PPC advertising model. Apart from this model, you can also promote posts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This will enable you to put your business in front of patients faster.
When you are using Google’s PPC network (Google Ads), you will be able to advertise your website so that it not only shows up in search results but also on different websites that are visited by your prospective clients. You can also advertise on sites like YouTube.
More than a third of internet users are not able to distinguish between paid adverts and organic search results. This is one of the advantages of paid online advertising. Unlike SEO, the results are instant. However, this should not make you think that it’s better than SEO. Both methods have their advantages, and they are best used as a combination. One of the other advantages of PPC is that you are only charged when someone clicks on your advert. This means that every cent that you use can be accounted for. Apart from that, you can also set a budget so that you don’t spend more money than you are willing to.
Marketing On Social Media
Social media also presents a lucrative opportunity for growing your dental practice. The different social media platforms that are available will enable you to extend the exceptional service you provide even after the patient has left your practice. For you to stay in touch with your customers and stay in their minds, you need to constantly communicate with them and keep them informed about the activities you will be doing. This is where social media comes in. It is a touchpoint between your business and your customers. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can act as mediums for easily connecting with your patients.
About three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 use social media daily. However, because of how technology has advanced, nowadays, you can just create a page and post once or twice a month expecting to get results. You will need to come up with effective strategies that enable you to stay in constant communication with your patients. That way, you can quickly provide answers to their questions, and you can also provide useful, entertaining, and relevant content to keep them engaged.
When you develop a vibrant community of patients online, you will not only be able to retain your existing patients, but they will also become ambassadors of your brand. This is because happy patients will not hesitate to refer their friends and coworkers to your practice.
Marketing Your Dental Practice With Content
Content marketing involves the creation, publishing, and distribution of branded content all over the internet. You can publish content on your website, on social media platforms, or even use guest blogs on other people’s websites. The main aim of content marketing is to stimulate interest in your practice in a way that’s not pushy. At the end of the day, the patient will feel like it was their decision that made them engage, not your efforts.
There are different forms of content you can use to market your dental practice. For instance, you can use emails, blog posts, infographics, and videos. All these types of content can help you educate and attract new patients. By educating prospective and existing patients, you will come across as an authoritative figure in your industry, which will make patients trust you more.
The practice of attracting patients using high-quality, informative, and compelling content is known as inbound marketing. It will not only benefit your practice but your patients as well. About 83% of healthcare organizations are using this strategy because of how effective it is.
Marketing your dental practice online is not too difficult as long as you know how to do it and who to work with. It’s important to always hire the relevant professionals to carry out certain tasks for you. Wearing many hats might seem like a money-saving tactic, but it can end up backfiring if you do not produce quality results. After all, you only have one chance to make a lasting impression on your prospective patients.