Category - Resources

What is word-of-mouth marketing and how does it work for dental practices specifically? Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) is a form of marketing that relies on customers talking to each other about their experiences with a product or service. This can happen offline, through face-to-face interactions, or online, through social media and review sites.  For dental practices, […]

Dental marketing budgets are no longer like what they used to be. Today, it’s not enough to design posters, send direct mails, or rent billboards to showcase your services. You have to leverage technology and digital marketing channels to reach and acquire more prospective patients. 

As more patients make their decisions this way, more dentists position their dental practice to have the reviews needed to capture prospective patients’ attention. With that in mind, we will highlight ten more reasons you need to prioritize getting more Google reviews as part of your dental marketing strategy.

HIPAA is an acronym that stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This United States federal statute was signed into law in August 1996 and stipulates how protected healthcare information is managed and shared by healthcare industries, amongst other things.

In Canada, there are a number of privacy laws and legislation that help entities protect their individuals’ privacy and data: PIPEDA, PHIPA, PHIA, HIA, etc. This article will also discuss the laws that dentists should pay close attention to, the key highlights of PIPEDA, and suggest ways Canadian dentists can comply with it.

Choosing a dentist isn’t easy and it could be down to several factors. From relocation to insurance coverages, patients can decide to stop booking appointments with a dentist for many reasons. But it’s important to know why and how they choose to work with certain dentists more than others.

Dental Patient Lifetime Value is a measure of the total worth of a patient to your dental practice. It is a dollar amount that suggests how much a patient will contribute over their entire lifetime as your patient, and it is one of the most important metrics you need to know as a dentist.

Careers have a funny way of shaping themselves out. One minute, you’re setting foot in a dental practice you’ve recently purchased, and the next, you’re trying to figure out how to move from it. If you’re currently in that position—planning to sell to your dental practice soon—you’re reading the right article.

Dental PPC marketing campaigns go hand in hand with Local SEO techniques. Read this article to learn how one informs the other.

Dental PPC campaigns are great for attracting and converting patient leads. Learn how you can improve them and increase your marketing ROI as a result.

Fewer things improve dental patient relationships like open, transparent, and direct communication. Learn how text messaging can do that for you.

Local SEO gets your website in front of patients in your community who are likely to use your services. Learn how to improve your dental website’s Local SEO.

Learn the importance of dental patient reviews for your practice and how you can ask patients to leave or share their reviews with you or online.

A dental patient referral program is a great way to improve your patient retention rate. Learn tips on how to create a referral program that works.

Learn how dental office automation tools can enable you and your team to be more productive.

Discover ten steps you can take to boost your dental practice’s patient acquisition strategies and rate.

Learn Google Ads Optimization tips to help your dental practice attract and retain more patients in a competitive dental landscape.

With a Live Chatbot, you improve the quality of dentist-patient relationships. Learn more about how this tool can win your patient’s trust and business.

Learn how to gather more patient referrals and leverage them to attract more local patients to your dental practice

Learn how to improve the quality of your dental office communications and positively impact your patients’ experience and practice’s growth.

Learn the similarities and differences between Live Chat and Chatbots and discover the best tool you need to improve your dental patient communication.

Emails are great for engaging and retaining your dental patients. Learn tips on how to make your email marketing strategy work for you.

Learn all you need to know to improve your dental website accessibility and patient engagement with your web content.

Learn all you need to know to improve your dental practice’s Local SEO and attract more nearby patients.

Local search ads on Google Maps can get you closer to the patients you need to advertise your dental practice to.

Struggling to attract more patient leads to your practice? Try optimizing your dental practice’s Google My Business Profile. Learn tips to do just that.

Your Google My Business profile is essential. It’s the key to showcasing your dental practice online and improving your Local SEO performance.

With location-specific paid ads, you can reach more patients who are likely to visit or contact your dental practice. Learn all you need to know about Local PPC Campaigns.

Your dental website’s appointment page is a crucial stage in your patient journey. Learn six steps you need to take to boost conversion on your appointment page.

Remarketing campaigns are great for your re-engaging past patients. Learn all you need to know about these dental marketing campaigns.

Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you understand your patients better. Learn how to set up Google Analytics for your Dental Practice.

PPC marketing can increase your dental practice’s brand awareness by 80%. Learn 8 tips to help you get the most out of your dental PPC campaign strategy.

Reducing your patient acquisition cost can help you manage your overhead, save time and make the most of your dental marketing budget.

It can be challenging to make the most of your dental marketing budgets and resources if you don’t have set benchmarks and measurable goals. After all, like Tony Robbins once said, “you can’t hit a target if you don’t know what it is.” To grow your dental practice, you need to identify, measure and track […]

Reputation marketing builds your dental practice’s brand perception and enables you to attract more patients leads.

Google My Business is a free tool for boosting your dental practice’s online visibility and edging closer to your dental marketing goals.

Dental marketing helps you acquire, delight, and retain more patients for your dental practice. Learn the essential dental marketing tips you need to know.

Online reviews impact your dental practice’s patient acquisition and patient leads. Learn how patients use them to decide on their choice of a dentist.

PPC campaigns are essential for patient lead generation. Learn the fundamentals of running PPC campaigns as we address all your FAQs about PPC for dentists.

Patient Retention rate is key to the longevity of your dental practice. Learn how to improve your patient retention rate and retain more patients.

You will learn how to define these two strategies, which strategy is better suited for your dental practice, and how you can benefit from implementing them, which is better suited for your dental practice.

2021 is an opportunity for dentists to continue recovering and growing their dental practice. Use these 20 dental marketing tips to position your dental practice for success in 2021.

Review gating is the process of filtering patients’ reviews to funnel only positive reviews for publication on dental review sites. As such, review gating misleads prospective patients by giving them a false impression of the dental practice.

Online reviews help dental practices rank higher on Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs) and generate more leads. You must have a system in place that encourages your current patients to share their reviews on the dental review sites that your prospective patients will likely visit.

In an era of widespread usage of digital services, platforms and devices amongst dental patients, dentists must implement digital marketing strategies to reach their patients exactly where they are. Paid advertisements, or paid ads, are an important aspect of digital marketing that allows dentists to maximize their reach, learn more about their patients, run targeted marketing campaigns and analyze their marketing insights.

Most dentists aren’t privy to effective dental marketing strategies—much less, content marketing strategies. These strategies aren’t taught in dental schools but they are essential to the sustained growth and productivity of dental practices. With a comprehensive content marketing strategy, you can position your dental practice’s website to be an important resource for current and prospective patients.

8 in 10 Canadians have a dentist and 64% of American adults between the ages of 18 and 64 have at least one dental visit in a year. These statistics show that patients need dentists. That said, several dentists are vying for the attention of these patients.

Below are 20 tips to help you and your practice have a successful, profitable 2021. Most of our suggestions don’t require you to spend any money, but rather require you to look back at 2020 and reflect on the good, the bad, and the ugly. Even though 2020 was an exceptionally unusual year, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions…

The nature and quality of your patient experience have an impact on your dental practice’s reputation and productivity. If your current patients aren’t satisfied or happy after an appointment with you, chances are they may be unwilling to return and hesitant to recommend your service to prospective patients.

Many dental practices have websites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices. The dentists, who run these practices, are unknowingly losing leads and patients by the day. Even worse, they are being left behind by the rapid changes in digital marketing and consumer behaviours.

Local SEO has never been more important for dental practices and dental marketers. If you want to give your dental practice the best chance of boosting its brand reputation online and attracting new patients, you have to prioritize your local SEO strategy. In its recently released Local SEO industry report, Moz outlines the top 9 local ranking factors that impact SEO in 2020.

The quantity, frequency and diversity of online reviews shared about your dental practice accounts for 15% of signals that Google’s search engine optimization (SEO) algorithm uses to update its ranking and listings. Your online reviews allow Google to learn more about the service you provide and the value you offer dental patients.

A high-converting and well-curated website should bring you new patients. It should consist of essential design features, effective call-to-actions and industry-specific content that attracts, retains and converts web visitors to active patients. You can get a better ROI for your marketing investment by reviewing, updating and optimizing your dental website from time to time.

Introduced by Robert Cialdini, in his 1984 book, Influence, social proof refers to the phenomenon that people make decisions and take actions based on the decisions and actions of others. For dentists, this happens when your prospective patients choose to book an appointment with your dental practice after seeing or reading your current patients’ reviews or remarks about your dental care service.

Patient feedback plays a crucial role in the long term growth and success of a dental practice. It is as simple as this: you can’t get better if you don’t know what you are doing wrong. In the dental industry, your patients are the best indicators of what you are doing wrong – or right.

Amongst several factors that can negatively affect the growth of a dental practice, patient attrition is one of the least talked-about. While it is great to establish and implement marketing strategies that result in new leads and more patients for your dental practice, it is even more beneficial to have a system in place for retaining your current patients.

Duplicate content refers to substantial blocks of text that appear on different pages of one website or different websites. When the same content is linked to different URL domains, it becomes difficult for Google’s search algorithms to establish the origin of the content and this can have adverse effects on the website that originally published the content.

With developments in social networking and patients communications, dentist-patient relationships have evolved in recent times. Patients – just like everyone else – want to have easier and direct access to their connections and the information they need.

Learn tips on how to run a dental referral program for your dental practice

The power of the internet lies in its ability to mould our social fabric by introducing us to new people and information. For dentists, the internet is a gateway to increasing their pool of patients and sharing vital information about their dental practices.

Learn how to keep responding to changing market demand and patient behaviours by optimizing your dental marketing campaigns

In this article, we will discuss common questions dentists have about dental practice sales during the ongoing economic downturn and Coronavirus pandemic. You will also learn about four tips to keep in mind when preparing to sell your dental practice.

Regardless of the kind of reviews you receive – positive or negative – a good rule of thumb is to always respond to your reviews online. By responding to a review, you let prospective patients know that you are authentic and able to handle criticism when necessary. The challenge, however, is responding to online reviews while maintaining HIPAA-compliance. In this article we go through some useful tips on maintaining HIPAA-compliance when responding to reviews.

In this article, we will discuss four steps that you should implement as you build an online reputation management strategy for your dental practice.

In this article, you will learn the benefits of having live chat on your dental practice website. You will also learn why Connect the Doc’s live chat technology is a great option for your practice.

In this article, you will learn the five steps you need to take to attract high-value patients to your practice. These are action steps that you can start taking, today. When put in motion, these steps can help your practice attract and retain your ideal patients and guide you to become a better dental service provider.

The landscape of the dental industry is evolving. The pandemic and recession have forced dental professionals to rethink the way they provide services and operate their dental practices. Although this evolution is still ongoing and there are a lot of changes that we are yet to see, it is important to suit up and have a plan in place to manage your online presence and engagement.

This is the second article in our dental economics series. Over the course of the series, we will discuss the measures dentists can take to manage their wealth and achieve their financial goals. In the first article of the series, we discussed the ways dentists can navigate ongoing recession. That article recommends studying the times and making key decisions for the future – and this is exactly the kind of mindset that is needed as you plan for your retirement savings. In this article, you will learn some of the steps that you can take to start planning for your retirement now or in the future.

In this article you will learn about active measures you can take as a dentist to ensure your dental practice can survive the impact of the pandemic over the next few months.

As Google continues to improve the features of Google My Business, it is important that you have a process for ensuring your business profile is optimized and updated. Read this article to learn the key items you need to stay on top of when you regularly update your Google My Business profile for your practice.

This article is the first of a series of articles on Connect the Doc’s website that will discuss dental economics. Over the series, we will discuss the measures dentists can take to manage their wealth and achieve their financial goals. In this particular article, you will learn the steps you can take – as a dentist – to navigate the current recession.

As our world slowly recovers from upsets caused by the ongoing pandemic, dentists must consider their role as contributors to the wellbeing of our society. Dentistry is part of our health care system and the smooth running of dental practices can help keep our communities healthy. As such, it is important that dentists adapt quickly to the times. Teledentistry might just become an essential part of dental services even when the pandemic is long gone.

We dive into how WordPress plugins work, why they’re so important for optimizing your content management system (CMS) experience, and which are the must-have WordPress plugins that you should start using for your dental practice today.

Learn how to put the right strategies in place to increase your dental practice’s chances of being seen online through search engine optimization (SEO).

Learn about the value of investing in paid ads following a pandemic as well as become familiar with current Google Trends and dental-specific keywords that could be applicable to your marketing strategies.

In this article, you will learn some of the top criteria or ranking factors Google uses to rank websites. By considering and applying these ranking factors to your online marketing strategies, you will be giving your dental practice’s website the best chance at ranking as #1 on Google.

Discover more about what teledentistry encompasses, as well as how you can handle certain issues related to billing and coding your services when teledentistry is involved.

As the impacts of the COVID-19 panic have begun to manifest themselves on a large scale, uncertainty has become the next big hurdle that local dental practice owners will have to deal with. We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know that we will have to keep going as best we can, and try to make the most out of a bad situation by being prepared to take on the major challenge of our time.

Keeping your patients and prospective patients up to date on how you are handling COVID-19 at your office is extremely important. Some offices are completely closed. Others are open for emergencies only.  Many of our clients who have their websites powered by Connect the Doc have asked us to add a website banner to the […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge changes to your practice. This blog post outlines some things you can do to help your practice survive and thrive during this crazy time.

It’s a little scary to embrace the fact that people can say whatever they want about your practice on a public platform, but that’s exactly what you have to do. Thankfully, there are some simple strategies you can use to help manage the review process and ensure that the reviews you receive are as high-quality as possible.

A paid ads campaign is when you pay to have links to specific landing pages placed at the top of the results when users search for specific terms in a search engine. Of course, there are many distinct elements that go into a successful paid ads campaign, and we’ll delve into each of them as we go along.

Every effective paid ad leads to a well-designed landing page that reinforces why a prospective client should take action, ultimately leading to a conversion. If you’re getting consistent clicks on your ads but your conversions are lagging behind, here is how you can optimize your landing pages to ensure you are engaging your website visitors every single time.

With the new “Possum” updates to Google’s local search algorithm, the proximity of your patients and the location of your dental practice have never mattered more. Let me preface this post by saying that most of the updates that Google (and every other big technology company) is making is focusing on mobile. Everyone is using…

At the beginning of the month, I read a post on Dentaltown titled “From Sucktember to Bestember.” As you probably have experienced, once the back to school rush is over, many dental practices see a dip in patients until Thanksgiving. To help you out of the fall funk and to prepare you for a HUGE…

When speaking with dentists and doctors that want to improve their reputation online, I kept hearing the same question: “How do I respond to the negative reviews?” Now before sharing some scenarios and possible responses, you should know that it’s pretty much impossible to please everybody. The practice will eventually get a negative review. If you…

Rock Health is quite possibly the most well-known digital health venture fund. They’ve made investments in popular startups like Doctor on Demand, Aptible, and Omada to name a few. Earlier this year, they published a long report that outlines how trends in technology are shaping how consumers interact with healthcare services…

Marketing for healthcare practitioners have become increasingly competitive over the past few years. Gone are the days of paying for targeted keywords such as “Vancouver Dentist” or “Calgary Physiotherapist” at fifty cents a click. Now those same clicks cost in excess of $5. At the same time, prospective patients are more cautious and do their…

SEO is one of those acronyms that instills confusion into the hearts of the uninformed. This fear could lead to a variety of costly circumstances, however, here are some tips to alleviate some potential stresses: 1) Find the Right SEO Firm 2) Take Advantage of Free SEO Tools 3) Content is King Stop running around…

All healthcare clinics are concerned about getting on the first-page of Google. Let’s look at one of the most cost-effective and timely ways to boost your Google rankings online. History of Google Adwords Everybody loves a good origins story. Google blessed us with the convenience and cost-effectiveness of their Adwords development in the beginning…

What is A/B Testing? A/B testing is a marketing technique that is comprised of two versions of a website (A and B) with the primary purpose being to determine which website has a more impactful user experience. This information is important because it tells the tester which changes they should make to maximize the attention…

Your goal, as a healthcare clinic owner, is to find or create opportunities to better your practice. This should begin with the first impression your patients have of you, which 9 out of 10 times will begin with an information search on your website. Here are some need-to-know tips on how to convert transactional users…

1) Consult Review Website The transparency of review sites can have both positive and negative effects on your healthcare clinic. For example, this type of online exposure makes it easier for competitors to post “reviews” about your service. This is quite common in very competitive industries, but if you, as a business owner, can prove…

Hello! Connect the Doc is excited to launch its newest feature, customizable book now button landing pages at the 2014 Pain Management Conference. Feel free to visit our booth, and join us if you are attending the conference. Here is a video of how the customizable landing page works: Landing pages and call to actions…

Season’s Greetings! Happy Holidays from all of us at Connect the Doc! 2013 has been another exciting year. We would like to thank you for being a part of our service; with your support and participation, here’s what we accomplished: Voted #1 healthcare referral service by Georgia Straight Reached 2500 Booked Appointments Serviced more than…

Last time, we talked about how to thrive on Twitter; this time, we will focus on strategies which will help you improve your engagement on your Facebook page. 1. Ask questions in your posts There are many ways to improve your visibility on Facebook, and the best way to do so is to engage your followers…

Twitter has become an indispensable social media marketing tool today; it is, often, the face and voice of your company. Almost every company has a twitter account that they use to reach out to followers, but most of them are tweeting for the sake of tweeting; here are 5 tips which will help your company…

Vancouverites are a health-conscious bunch, and it shows in the amount of healthcare clinics just in and around the city of Vancouver — there are over 2000 Physiotherapists, RMTs and Chiropractors. So what makes customers choose your services instead of the thousands of other choices available? Here are some tips to help you secure your…

“I’m going to the dentist today.” Such a sentence, in today’s society, is invariably met with sounds of sympathy and perhaps even a few groans. This, coupled with the pervading social attitude of “toughing it out” can make it hard to find customers for your healthcare clinic, and even harder to retain them…

Calls to Actions are an important aspect of today’s websites whether they are in the form of a button, a banner or some other type of graphic or text; they are essential if one wants to convert web traffic into customers. However, many websites are not using Calls to Action to their full potential today…