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.
This article will discuss five dental marketing channels dentists need to consider when creating their marketing budgets. The goal here isn’t to overwhelm you with options but to help you make an informed decision on how to take your marketing and business strategy to the next level.
Dental Marketing Channels to Consider
1. Online Reviews
At the top of our list are online reviews—and rightly so. Online reviews impact dental marketing and patient acquisition efforts in many ways. You could be spending so much money on one marketing channel while your poor performance with online reviews hinders your practice from maximizing that channel. That’s how critical online reviews are.
For example, patients may see an advertisement about your dental practice online or at a physical location. After seeing this ad repeatedly for a while, the patient might decide to look up your practice on Google. When they do, if they don’t find enough good reviews about your practice, they may decide that you’re not a good fit. So, although your advertisement got the patient’s attention, your lack of online reviews turned them away.
91 percent of people regularly read online reviews, and 68 percent of them will form an opinion right after reading about one to six reviews. In other words, patients likely trust reviews more than an advertisement they see on a billboard. With this in mind, you should consider investing in gathering more online reviews.
With Connect the Doc’s review tool, you can automatically position your practice to gather more authentic patient reviews and share them on top dental review sites.
2. SEO and Content Marketing
Chances are you have a beautifully designed dental website but as great as your website is, it is only as useful as the traffic that it attracts. SEO and content marketing helps you attract more prospective patients to your website and engage them well enough so they can be encouraged to book an appointment.
SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization. It involves improving your dental website’s chances of being found online by your target patients. This level of visibility occurs by getting ranked higher on Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs). Online visibility is key to attracting more traffic to your dental website.
As more prospective patients visit your website, you need a strategy in place that helps convince them that you’re their best choice. In addition to publishing engaging website copy on your Homepage, About page, Service page, and Appointment page, you should consider publishing insightful articles on your blog page—just like the one you’re reading right now.
Blog posts can go a long to build your credibility as a dentist and practice while contributing to your SEO performance. This may take time, but it works. Investing in better SEO performance and a solid content marketing strategy is like playing the long game. But within as little as six months, you can start seeing remarkable results in your Google ranking and website traffic.
For more information on how you can improve your SEO performance, speak to a Connect the Doc SEO specialist today.
3. Dental PPC Ads
PPC Ads, or pay-per-click advertisements, are paid advertisements published online across platforms your patients use regularly. From Google’s SERPs to social media platforms, paid ads can showcase your dental practice’s services to prospective patients wherever they may be browsing from.
PPC ads are great for running highly targeted marketing campaigns. You can set parameters that ensure your ads are seen by patients who will benefit the most from your services. This saves you money and time while providing you with more good-quality leads.
Running PPC ads campaigns for your dental practice can be challenging. If you don’t set it up appropriately or mismanage the campaign, you can lose so much money. It’s essential to work with a Paid Ads specialist who can ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
4. Referrals
Much like online reviews, referrals are proving to be an excellent way of getting people’s attention and attracting them to businesses. The more your patients refer others to your practice, the more patients you can attract and book.
To do this, you need to have a dental patient referral system and strategy in place. This involves figuring out the details of how patients will send referrals and how you will track referrals coming from patients.
The good news is you don’t have to look too far for a referral solution. Connect the Doc has created an excellent referral tool that can turn your patients into your practice’s ambassadors in no time. This tool can get patients to make referrals automatically to their network right after an appointment. It can also help you track which patients’ referral links are attracting more leads. This way, you can reward patients who are winning you more leads.
5. Live Chat
Remember how we talked about having a dental website and content marketing strategy that’s engaging so that visitors will be encouraged to stick around and eventually book an appointment with you? Well, there’s a lesser-known way to keep your dental website’s visitors engaged: Live Chat.
Live Chat is a tool that allows patients to interact with you or your team directly from your dental website. They don’t have to send an email or make a phone call to reach you. They can ask questions and make inquiries right there. An investment in this marketing channel can a long way to improving your patients’ satisfaction.
Connect the Doc took this channel a little further by creating a smart Live Chat tool that interacts with patients and addresses their queries without you or your team’s involvement. This means you can have a 24/7 digital receptionist on your dental websites that field common patient inquiries while capturing new patient leads. Request a demo to learn more about this smart tool.
There are many dental marketing channels, tools, and strategies that you can choose to work with. Take your time to decide the channels best suited to your practice’s needs and target market. You can also speak with one of Connect the Doc’s dental marketing specialists to help you make the right, informed decision.
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