All dental practices understand the importance of dental patient marketing. It brings in new patients, and it can even help to strengthen ties with existing patients. Marketing is essential if you want your practice to thrive.
It’s easy to know that you should market your dental practice. It’s much more difficult, however, to know exactly how to do that.
There’s no one right answer to this, and there’s a large number of different strategies you can use. For most practices, using a combination of several different dental marketing methods will yield the best results.
Not sure where to start? Let’s take a look at 7 of the most effective dental patient marketing strategies you can use to market your dental practice.
1. Get Involved with the Community
It goes without saying that if your practice is in Ohio, you won’t really be treating patients in Kentucky. Dental practices, by their nature, are local businesses, and they rely heavily on the local community to provide patients.
Get involved with your community. This can include anything from attending festivals or sponsoring a little league team, both of which allow you the opportunity to build relationships in person.
You can even teach a class on dental hygiene at an elementary school or share your knowledge at the local University. This lays an excellent foundation for how the community will view you, and it gives you a chance to engage in some word-of-mouth and direct marketing.
2. Build a Community on Social Media
Social media gives your practice another excellent way to reach out to potential patients and build or strengthen relationships. This goes for existing patients, too.
Now, when someone follows you on social media, they won’t only be hearing from you once every six months? they’ll have a constant source of communication with you year-round.
Facebook is an excellent platform that dental practices can use to build online communities of their patients.
In addition to staying in touch and generating conversation, you can also provide updates and information (including contact information) and you can collect reviews from existing patients. This can provide new patients with more potential touchpoints, and a better immediate first impression whenever they find you.
3. Focus on Local SEO
Search engine optimization for all essential dental terms can help your business, but local keywords will be what really brings you new clients. Who cares, after all, if a patient in New York City finds your site if you?re based on Sioux Falls?
No one. That?s who.
Dynamic SEO is the way to go for dental patient marketing. This means that you’ll want to rank for terms like Chicago dentist instead of just dentist, or best Chicago orthodontist.
Not only will this help you find your target audience who is Googling for exactly these terms, it will also give you an edge in voice search, where users ask Siri or Alexa to help them find a local dentist near me.
4. Create a Strong, Well-Designed Site
There’s about a 70% chance that a potential patient’s first interaction with you will be on your site, so it must make a good first impression. Your site needs to look professional, be well-organized for easy navigation, and be thorough in the information it offers visitors.
Not sure exactly what that looks like or how you can stand apart? See more information on our Website offerings.
5. Use Content Marketing to Offer Value
Content marketing is the practice of using content like blog posts or ebooks to bring visitors to your site, build relationships with them, and eventually convert them into patients.
On-site content marketing in the form of a blog or FAQ gives you an opportunity to regularly add new content (and keywords) to your site, increasing your overall ranking and sending more traffic to your site.
6. Run AdWords Campaigns
Google AdWords is a strong pay-per-click platform that allows you to have your ad displayed to users who are searching for certain keywords.
When using AdWords campaigns, you’ll definitely want to be targeting location-based keywords in order to increase the relevance of your ad placements. Use your descriptions and headlines to highlight unique offers, or other features of your practice that set you apart.
7. Retargeting Campaigns
Primary purpose of Retargeting is to reach the current online shopping audience on competing company websites and OEM websites (in cases where this applies).
*This strategy allows our client to actually leverage their competitors marketing dollars against them by being able to an audience acquired from ?their? websites. Precision Competitive is the most precise in market shopping digital targeting in the industry today.
Start using a combination of different strategies that works best for your practice and the patients you want to attract, you’ll start seeing an increase in appointments before you know it.
Need a little help creating a comprehensive marketing plan or campaign for your dental patient marketing? We have several strategies to help you. Contact Us to learn more.
