Dental Marketing Strategies

Methods on how your dental office can get new clients during the pandemic

Traditional dental offices are now a thing of the past. With advancing dental technology and many offices acting as cosmetic spas, the modern dental practice offers not only dental appointments, but an experience. For a new dental practice to grow, it needs to see a minimum of 20 new patients per month. What marketing plan will you utilize to attract up to 50 new patients? How will you attract a new patient, and most importantly keep that patient and have them refer you to others? From the very first click on your website and until a patient completes a visit, it is important to have a well designed marketing strategy to serve your patients’ needs and grow your practice.

Digital Marketing is now one of the most utilized tools in dental practice growth. Practices and patients prefer email and online marketing to direct mail because of it is quick and cost-effective.  It is how offices can easily communicate with their patients, even during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dental practices were quickly able to update their patients, convey changes, and offer tele-dentistry. With traditional marketing in a local magazine or paper is hard to track success, digital marketing easily allows practices to view and utilize statistics on how many people searched for them and what device they used. It is not the norm for a dentist to be working on digital marketing as they are consumed with patient care, so what ways can a dentist increase their revenue?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Dentists

When it comes to SEO, they are all not the same (read about the SEO benefits for Dentists). Since your practice may be focused on gaining patients more locally, you want to ensure your potential patients can easily search for you and help drive more potential patients to your website. Without an effective long term SEO in place, patients won’t be able to find you and this will decrease business credibility. This means your SEO efforts have to be locally targeted or you could be losing patients. While a larger company like Disney can have more global SEO, your practice requires local SEO to boast your presence in an online search. You must have relevant and top-searchable keywords and an SEO-friendly website. For example, when a new periodontal practice first opens, there is little to no business credibility or online information. Why? Because if local SEO is not successfully utilized, patients searching for a periodontal practice in you region won’t be able to find you. This means for new practices and even existing practices, people may be searching for dentists in your location right now and competitors with powerful SEO will have an advantage.

How do you become an online presence that people pay attention to?

It is like a dental cleaning. Your patients can brush their teeth at home, but you know your hygienist thoroughly and effectively cleans with better skills and tools. Creating SEO is similar. You must have a good marketing team to ensure your business information is updated, accurate and well-optimized.

Social Media for Dentists

It is impossible to avoid social media in your dental practice and succeed. Social media is an incredible marketing tool to show your practice’s brand and personality. Facebook and Instagram are key to helping you grow your practice while engaging with patients on a personal level. You may only have 1-2 visits with a patient per year, but by creating an online presence, they feel more connected to your practice all year long.

Facebook ad campaigns are incredible in that you can quickly reach thousands of people and target the demographic of your practice. If you are promoting Invisalign or whitening, a Facebook ad could target an age group and demographic looking specifically for Invisalign or teeth whitening. Instagram has over 500 million daily active users and can instantly allow you to reach out to followers and create and custom posts and videos help share tips, resources, and case studies all through your practice’s vision.  It builds a trust among patients because followers have a more intimate relationship now with your office that they see daily updates and changes to your practice. There are other platforms to market yourself – Twitter, Youtube and Tiktok (if you are able to capture videos in your office of procedures or special events), and even Linkedin. A well collaborated video of a dentist speaking about Covid-19 conditions or teeth extractions can be effective for those searching these topics on social media. When it comes to social media, you cannot do too much to attract new patients.

Updated Dental Website

The first thing a person will see when they look you up online is to find your website. What will they see? An outdated website shows you may not put much effort in to your online presence, therefore you may not go the extra mile in your office design or treatment plan. A well designed website will give your potential new patient their first experience with your office. You want a website layout that is easily accessible with professional photos of the doctors and team, a video tour of the office, blog updates, and case studies to show your treatment. It is a wonderful idea to have a live chat as a part of your website to get that first interaction and hopefully a new appointment created. A webpage should impress your patients into scheduling a visit with you by creating brand awareness.

Patient Reviews

More than 70% of new patients will come from internal referrals. All practices still rely somehow on word of mouth and encouraging patients to digitalize this idea is still the same. One of the first things people do when searching for a new dentist is looking at patient reviews. By having patients leave positive reviews and testimonials on Facebook, Google Review and Yelp, this will help you build an online presence and positive reputation. You can offer an incentive for creating  a review – a raffle, a small gift card – it shows you value their opinion and time.

 

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When you look at your practice and can assert you are taking every opportunity to grow your brand, you can look back and see impressive marketing metrics and increased production. Each office will require a different marketing strategy based on the needs of the practice, but one thing that remains the same is creating a more successful patient base and brand while excelling in patient care.