Depending on your size and location, you need 20-50 new patients a month to grow your dental practice. The question: How do you drive more patients to your dental practice to achieve this growth? The answer: Create a roadmap!
Create a roadmap using dental marketing strategies that show patients what sets your dental practice apart. Use it to help patients not only find you but also book an appointment. Then, after the appointment is booked, use it to retain patients and build patient loyalty, which in turn generates more new patients.
After creating a simple roadmap, you can delve deeper into how to increase patient volume in a dental office by hiring a dental marketing consultant.
So, what does this roadmap look like?
Choosing And Maintaining Your Digital Dental Marketing Strategies
Choosing a dental practice is a choice for patients. You want to show future patients why your practice is the right choice for their dental health, but first you need to clarify the story of who you are and what makes your dental practice unique.
Using a consistent, intentional, and emotional story across all dental office marketing strategies, no matter what they may be, is the key to driving more patients to your dental office.
It is important to choose marketing ideas for a dental office that serve to attract the interest of new patients and then leverage that interest once it’s there.
Things to think about:
- How do potential new patients conduct their search?
- Are you easy to find on the Internet?
- How do you turn the interest of a potential patient into an actual patient?
- How can you generate engagement with your patients?
- How do you turn engagement into patient referrals?
Focusing on digital marketing for dentists grows your practice by showing patients how to find you, keeping them as patients once they do, and assisting them in referring new patients.
Five Digital Dental Marketing Strategies You Could Do Now
Here are five stops on your dental marketing roadmap to attract new patients.
These dental marketing ideas work with each other to maximize your presence online and drive more patients to your dental office. They are not linear stops to check off a list but points in a positive feedback loop that create an ever-widening circle. This widening circle creates the space for your dental practice to thrive.
Always remember that the center of this circle is the consistent story of your dental practice. No matter the stop on the roadmap, it all connects back to the same story.
Stop One: Website Optimization
Your website is the main digital marketing strategy for dentists. 83% of your future patients will find you through your website. Design it to work for you by optimizing a few key elements.
A few basic needs:
- Information on your services and how to access them. (Quick and easy is best.)
- An FAQ section (Optimizes internet searches and cuts down on staff working on repeat with common questions.)
- Vital contact information clearly visible on the top of every page.
- Patient testimonials (Raises the trust and confidence level for new patients.)
- Landing pages that include an action. (Like booking an appointment.)
- Use High-quality photos. (They make you more popular.)
None of that matters, however, if you don’t employ:
- SEO marketing practices
- A user-friendly design
- Engaging content that includes video
Code for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
When you use dental SEO marketing, your website rises to the top of the competition where potential patients are looking for you—on the Internet. SEO employs valuable keywords so that your website and blog posts rank higher in search engines.
Keep in mind:
- Craft your SEO search terms to fit the specifics of your practice
- Consider sophisticated search criteria for keywords
- Update to maintain relevance
- Website performance and security affect optimization. Make sure your site is secure
and loads quickly.
Use a Responsive Design
Your future patients are on the go. You need to reach them where they are. Responsive design means that your website adjusts according to the screen size of the device viewing it. It ensures your website is user-friendly on any device and reaches your future patients where they are.
Video—It rules the web!
No way around it—we cannot get enough video. Websites that utilize video are 50 times more likely to rank higher in searches.
If something can be watched instead of read, make a video. It engages your patients and raises the visibility of your site, which raises the visibility of your dental practice.
A few ideas to add a video to your website:
- A welcome message – Show upfront who you are and why your dental office is unique.
- Dentist and staff profiles – Show the people that make up your practice.
- Dental health education – Show your expertise.
- Patient reviews – Show the patients that make up your practice.
- How procedures work – Show off your specialty.
- What’s a visit look like? – If your practice specializes in providing services to children, show what a trip to the dentist looks like.
Stop Two: Grab The Google
In digital marketing strategies for dentists, it is crucial to consider search engine platforms. 77% of people looking for a dentist will start by typing in a search engine. 90% of searches worldwide happen through the Google search engine. The math is not difficult to parse out. If you are not optimizing your use of Google, you are driving uphill in second gear. So how do you optimize your presence across the platform?
Get on Google My Business and maintain your presence there
This free Google tool is critical in local online searches and is important to optimize for dentists’ digital marketing strategy.
No doubt you have used Google to search for a local restaurant, and when the Local Search Results window pops up, you most likely choose to eat at one of the first few listings. Potential patients search for your dental practice in the same way. It’s essential to get your office to be one of the first few listings.
Boost Your Google Business Listing
Complete all the fields on the listing, including:
- Business Category
- Main Phone Number
- Business Description – Remember your SEO keywords
- Hours of operation
- Reviews
Don’t check it off the list and forget about it. It takes monitoring and updating to keep your dental practice at the forefront of online searches. A vital way to do this is by generating reviews.
This is how dental marketing strategies create a positive feedback loop and widen the circle. If you can capture consistent reviews from current patients, you can increase your online presence, which drives more new patients to your dental practice to generate more reviews.
Marketing ideas for referring dentists:
- Ask to record a short video after a visit
- Send a link
- Ask via email or text
- Instant messaging through social media
Stop Three: Go Local To Target Your Dental Marketing Strategies
Location, Location, Location! It’s not just for real estate. A large percentage of patients consider the location to be a factor in choosing their dentist. Your future patients are not far away. They are in your neighborhood, around the corner, and driving by your dental office daily. But do they know you are there?
Effective dental practice marketing utilizes the local features of digital marketing such as Google Geo-target, Facebook Local, and Nextdoor. Digital marketing for dentists uses these tools to target your marketing to a specific area and demographic. It helps put your marketing dollars in the most useful areas.
Stop Four: Build Relationships
This is like a buy-one-get-one offer. It serves to build relationships with your patients, future and existing, in a genuine way, which can then generate favorable reviews and referrals. That, in turn, increases traffic to your site, which then moves your dental practice up the search engine results ladder.
Two Important Ways To Build Relationships Digitally
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Create a Dental Marketing Blog
The positive feedback loop at its finest. Creating a content blog with optimized SEO terms shows off your expertise and what makes your dental practice unique and increases your presence on Google. Be creative. Be informative. Match it with keywords and have Google work for you. As an expert, answering patient questions is an excellent place to start. You can then build your blog out from there.
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Dental social media marketing ideas
Connect and create community through social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Build relationships through these networks by posting staff celebrations, new patient referral programs, or launching other marketing ideas for referring dentists.
Stop Five: Remarketing
Capturing the attention of a potential new patient is important, but the potential is not how growth happens. New patients are created when they book an appointment.
Remarketing strategically places ads in front of a visitor to your website who did not book an appointment. It reminds them who you are and can turn a web visit into an office visit. You can use targeted remarketing ads through your Facebook network.
In Conclusion
Your practice is unique and its story needs to be told consistently and compellingly. Now that you understand the basics of digital dental marketing strategies, you can create a roadmap to drive more patients to your dental office.
Dental marketing services can help you move further down this road by helping you implement consistent messaging across all your marketing channels.
A dental marketing expert can assist you in creating a more intricate roadmap and allow you to continue to attract new patients and grow your dental practice.
