The world of dentistry is incredibly competitive and only continues to grow. Dental practices need to constantly bring in new patients to keep scaling their businesses. To attract potential patients, dentists must create and deploy a digital marketing plan.
Dental marketing includes any marketing efforts aimed at winning over new dental patients to your practice. A dental marketing strategy will also include current patient retention tactics. While dentists consistently need new patients, they also must retain their current patients to keep their business steady.
What marketing tools are used in dentistry?
Marketing tactics may be new to some dentists, and creating a marketing plan can feel daunting, especially on top of all your other duties running your local business. To get you started, below are a few marketing tips and tools to help your dental office grow and thrive.
User-friendly website optimized for mobile users
If new potential patients visit your website on their mobile phones and get frustrated by the lack of intuitive user experience, they’ll most likely leave and find another dental practice to go to. Optimizing your website for mobile users will ensure a positive first impression with potential patients using their mobile devices to search for local businesses.
Google Business Profile
Every local business should have a Google Business Profile (formerly known as a Google My Business profile).
Claiming your Google Business Profile allows you to update essential information, like phone numbers and addresses and respond to online reviews. Keeping your dental office’s information up to date is critical for showing up high on search engine results pages when potential patients use Google search.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategy that many businesses use to connect with potential patients without overtly selling their products or services.
In content marketing, teams create content like blogs, videos and social media posts with relevant information for your current and potential patients. Content marketing doesn’t focus on direct selling but aims to establish trust and be helpful to potential patients.
Social media
Social media is a huge part of discoverability today. It is imperative to have a robust social media presence on the social platforms that make the most sense for your ideal patient.
Social media marketing includes everything from the posts you create to the look of your profile and the tone of your voice used in captions. Social media makes your dental practice seem more approachable and can bring people into your practice. It is also an excellent way to stay connected with current patients.
Video marketing
Consumers are using video more and more to make buying decisions. Through the pandemic, we saw a boom in video content and it has now become the norm for social content and marketing efforts alike. Videos in emails increase click rate by 96%, boost SEO rankings and provide an 87% positive return on investment, according to a video marketing study.
Pay-per-click advertising
Get your business listed above or to the right of the organic search results on the most used search engines with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. In this model, you can pay either a fixed or bid-based price per click, and your ads will appear when people search for dental practices in their local area.
Retargeting
Retargeting can be used to target potential patients who have already engaged with you and your dental practice in some way, usually through your website. It’s a great tactic because this audience is already interested, so you can further influence their buying decisions and advocate for your dental practice to provide the dental services they need.
Automated web chat and appointment setting
Potential patients must be able to easily set up appointments with your dental office. If people are frustrated by the user experience on your website and unable to make appointments online, they may move on to a dental care provider who has a better online experience.
Automated features such as Broadly’s Web Chat can respond to inquiries in real time while potential patients are actively engaged, leading to more conversions.
Email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is one of the few ways to directly contact your potential and current patients. Your newsletters engage your current patient base and entice potential patients. User-friendly email marketing platforms allow dentists to send out emails and track progress. However, many dental practices outsource email marketing to professional email companies.
Local SEO
A great way to get in front of more prospective patients is by improving your search engine optimization (SEO). Local SEO relies on keywords to maximize your organic rankings within search engine results.
There is also a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into optimizing your website and content for SEO. Depending on your time constraints, hiring an SEO marketing expert to implement this strategy may make sense.
Customer reviews
Most potential patients will evaluate your dental practice’s online reviews before booking an appointment. The more positive customer reviews you can get, the more likely someone is to choose your dental practice over another that doesn’t have as many good reviews. Online reviews are a big part of the decision-making process for choosing a dentist.
Improve your dental marketing strategy with Broadly
Grow your dental practice using Broadly’s powerful online reputation management solutions. Broadly helps dentists increase online reviews to boost their reputation and drive low-cost patient leads.
Create custom email marketing campaigns and newsletters with Broadly’s tools, streamlining your email marketing efforts and strengthening your customer relationships. Broadly will also help you design a modern, mobile-friendly website with web chat.
Broadly is here to support your business growth and online reputation management needs. Sign up for a demo today.
