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Cultivating a dental practice requires investment in marketing. Word of mouth can only go so far.
Fortunately, many dental office marketing ideas exist to achieve that objective. Among the numerous options at your disposal, certain tactics are particularly important to attract patients and grow your practice. They increase your dentistry’s visibility to prospective patients and affect your business reputation.
This practical guide outlines these key strategies to successfully execute marketing for dentists.
Marketing is an ongoing process of reaching out to clients and building patient relationships. As a result, set a monthly budget for marketing expenses based on the goals you want to achieve, and assign someone to oversee this on a regular basis.
Let’s examine some other considerations before diving into dental marketing strategies.
As part of setting your dental practice marketing goals, define the types of patients you want to reach. The marketing approach differs based on your patient profile.
Does your practice cater to children? Are you focused on specific areas of dentistry, such as orthodontics? Reflect on the types of patients you’re targeting before building a marketing plan.
How can prospective clients discern the advantages of one dental practice over another? To consumers, the differences between dentists can be unclear. That’s where brand positioning comes into play.
Positioning is a strategy used to define how your business presents itself to customers and differentiates itself from the competition. By executing a positioning strategy, you help consumers understand what sets your dental practice apart and establishes a brand for your dentistry.
For example, Walmart positions its brand as a low-cost leader, so when customers think of a place to shop for inexpensive items, Walmart comes to mind.
In the same way, you want customers to associate your business with an idea that sets you apart from competitors, such as promoting your deep knowledge and cutting edge dental technology.
To figure out the right marketing strategies for your practice, determine your goals, for example, customer acquisition or generating repeat business. Then determine your marketing budget and measure the return on investment (ROI) of executing different marketing strategies. The ROI tells you which strategies are best for achieving your goals.
Because there’s a limit to how far patients travel for dental services, focus marketing around your immediate geographic area. Many digital advertising tools include methods to specify a geography within a certain radius, in miles, from your office, called geo-targeting. Use this geo-targeting filter to reduce marketing costs and improve your ROI.
With a plethora of marketing channels to choose from, every dental practice can find a number of strategies that work best for their business. Here, we highlight five effective marketing strategies for dentists.
Dentistry still requires patients to walk into an office, but that doesn’t stop prospective clients from beginning their research online. That’s why a business website acts as a key component in your marketing strategies.
A website serves many purposes for dental practitioners. First, it acts as your business brochure, educating potential patients about your services, and why they should come to your practice.
Next, the website represents your brand. For instance, a fun, colorful site might work well for a children's dentistry. In addition, it’s the destination consumers arrive at from online marketing strategies such as an email marketing campaign.
Lastly, your site supports content geared toward your marketing goals. Perhaps you want to showcase your expertise through educational articles and videos about your dental techniques. Or maybe you want patients to schedule appointments through your site.
Here are tips to use a website in your online dental marketing efforts.
Creating a beautiful website is worthless if no one sees it. That’s where Google comes in. Its Google My Business service puts your dental practice in front of Google’s large audience.
Here’s how it works. Organizations supply Google with business information which Google then uses across its products, including its search engine and Google Maps.
In addition, with a Google My Business account, you can see and respond to customer reviews, as well as view statistics like how many customers called your business, allowing you to gauge the effectiveness of appearing on Google. Best of all, Google My Business is free.
When investigating Google My Business, keep these tips in mind.
Social media for dental practices consists of two components: marketing on social networks such as Facebook and reputation management.
A social network owns deep data insights about its users to the point where you can easily find your ideal patient profile and target advertising to this audience.
Social media is also critical to reputation management, which is the concept of overseeing a company’s reputation among its customers. Reputation management is particularly important for a dental practice because consumers are wary of any healthcare provider with poor reviews.
Since anyone can post negative comments and reviews online, overseeing social media is a must.
Apply these suggestions to bring social media’s benefits into your dental marketing strategy.
A popular small business marketing technique is direct marketing, where a business markets directly to a specific group of customers, such as residents living near your dental office.
Direct mail, a tactic within direct marketing, involves your business sending a postcard or other form of printed marketing collateral to potential patients in your geography. It’s long been an effective marketing approach, and easily implemented through the U.S. post office.
The digital equivalent, email marketing, provides an important benefit: the ability to personalize email communication to different customer segments. Doing so captures the attention of busy consumers more effectively than a one-size-fits-all blanket email and increases the likelihood of their engagement with your services.
For example, a new patient might receive a welcome email to strengthen that relationship while a repeat client might get a follow-up email thanking them for their business with a discount for teeth whitening.
You can collect email addresses to implement email marketing through the purchase of an email list, or by taking the time to collect the info yourself from clients.
Along with email marketing, email newsletters offer another means of engaging patients. Your newsletter should include topics and advice related to dentistry and oral health. It serves to keep customers engaged with your company, so that they return for additional services. The steps involved in how to make an email newsletter are straightforward, so it’s a worthwhile approach.
Direct marketing is often a cornerstone of the marketing strategy for small businesses, so here are tips to help you.
Google isn’t the only place your business info shows up. Your company can appear on search engines like Bing and Yahoo!, and on a slew of websites aggregating lists of local businesses, called directories, in an online version of a phone book. These directories include YP.com, the old Yellow Pages phone book in digital format, CitySearch, and Yelp.
Your business info on these sites is referred to as a local listing. Local listings appear on websites without your knowledge, and the benefit is free exposure. The downside is that local marketing listings can contain inaccurate details about your business, like an old address or phone number. So you’ll want to check the sites that matter most to your business to ensure your business information is accurate.
Follow these suggestions to implement local listings as part of your online dental marketing strategy.
We’ve covered some key marketing tactics for a dental business, but many other digital marketing tips can work equally well.
For instance, inbound marketing is another impactful marketing choice for a dental practice. Here, you showcase your knowledge of dentistry through articles, videos, and other content designed to bring patients to you.
So experiment with different marketing tactics, measure results, and continue to refine until you establish a set of strategies that are optimized to your practice and patient composition.
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