Starting a dental practice up can be daunting! What comes first? You want the patients to come flooding in. So marketing is essential if you want your practice to thrive. A lot has changed in 2020 as we know different ways we interact. It has become more important that you get the right advice and support you need to make your practice a success from the word ‘go'.
When you start, it’s easy to know that you should market your dental practice. It’s much more difficult, however, to know exactly how to do that. You have started your dental practice in a great location - how are we going to attract the patients?
There’s no one right answer to this, and there’s a large number of different strategies you can use. For most practices, using a combination of several different dental marketing methods will yield the best results.
Not sure where to start? Let’s take a look at 5 of the most effective dental patient marketing strategies you can use to market your dental practice.
Create a well designed dental website
There’s about a 70% chance that a potential patient’s first interaction with you will be on your site, so it must make a good first impression. Your site needs to look professional, be well-organised for easy navigation, and be thorough in the information it offers visitors.
You will want experts who only build websites for dentists, they know every treatment you are likely to offer and which photographs, videos, and text to put onto your site which will attract the maximum number of patients. Your dental website should be a reflection of your practice image, philosophy, and values.
Time and time again, we have helped build websites for owners looking at starting dental a practice and know how to help. If you'd like to know more, check out our websites section.
Dental Websites
Click to Call
The main goal for dental marketing or advertising is that patients and prospects book an appointment—which is usually done by picking up the phone and calling the office. Click-to-call ads are available through Google and Facebook.
While you want to get the word out about your dental practice, being specific about who you market to is important. Most likely, you don’t want to be showing ads for your practice outside of a 50-mile radius. Facebook and Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) on mobile, desktop, and tablet. This extension can be added to existing ads, or you can create call-only campaigns.
Social Media
You'll want to make sure you're on both Facebook and Instagram. These are incredibly important and powerful when starting a dental practice. Facebook has an insane amount of demographic targeting available to you and you can be using this to your advantage. Other than the obvious, you can also target potential customers by language, relationship status, employment, income, and interests. Research has shown 86% Off Women More Likely To Make A First Purchase After Social Media Engagement. So that tells you something, make sure you’re getting in front of the crowd by targeting ads to women and live in your area.
Instagram has become hugely popular and a place to shop as well—create an Instagram for your practice to show off your unique techniques, and advertise to potential patients through social media. If you regularly update, it is sure to keep your practice top-of-mind for your followers.
SEO
Search engine optimisation for all essential dental terms can help your dental practice enormously, but local keywords will be what really brings you, new clients. Get on page one, better still get to the number one spot on Google.
Not only will this help you find your target audience who is Googling for exactly these terms, it will also give you an edge in voice search, where users ask Siri or Alexa to help them find a local dentist “near me.”
Ads Campaigns
Google Adwords is a strong pay-per-click platform that allows you to have your ad displayed to users who are searching for certain keywords.
If they’re looking for a “London dentist,” your ad for your London practice could pop right up. When using Ad campaigns you’ll want to be targeting location-based keywords in order to increase the relevance of your ad placements. Use your descriptions and headlines to highlight unique offers or other features of your practice that set you apart.
Put your knowledge of your patients first, and use that information to connect with them on the platforms they’re on, target keywords you think they’d be searching for, and attend events you think they’d be.
Need a little help creating a comprehensive marketing plan or PPC campaign for your dental patient marketing? We’ve got the experience a great team and the enthusiasm to help you.
If you'd like more help then check out the rest of our site or give us a call, we're always happy to help!
