Dental offices and dentistry practices rely heavily on the web for gaining patients. As a dentist, you want better presence online so that more people come to you for their dental checkups and treatments.
Successful dentists understand the important of online marketing and search engine optimization. They invest in digital marketing and website SEO.
If you are a dentist and need more patients to your dental office, let’s see how you can plan a digital marketing strategy for your dentistry practice.
Demarcate Your Locality
Dentists work from their dental clinics. Like most healthcare businesses, dentistry is a local business that operates within certain areas.
When you work in a certain locality, your catchment area for customers (patients) is restricted to a radius of few miles. If you are in a town, your patients would comprise its residents. In a large city, your dental practice will generally get patients from the neighboring localities. When your dentistry clinic is in a small city, you will also target neighboring towns.
A successful dental marketing plan will target the right area. Depending on your location, you need to demarcate your practice area.
You also need to look at your available resources for creating the target zone for your marketing plan.
If you are short on money, you will have better success restricting your activities to a smaller area instead of trying to cover a large city.
Identify the Opportunities
Once you have clearly defined your marketing coverage area, the next step in the digital marketing strategy for dental offices is to sport the opportunities.
- Business website
- Keywords for SEO
- Online advertising
- Get patient citations
- Social media promotions
Depending on your location, you need to identify the opportunities.
SEO is a great way for long-term benefits. You need to select the right keywords for your search engine optimization campaigns.
Keyword research is important for an effective SEO strategy. Instead of picking the most searched keywords, you need to select the target keywords that are easy to rank. Don’t try SEO for difficult keywords when you cannot match with the resources of your competitors. Instead, you need to find keywords where you can achieve first page rankings with your resources.
Online advertising or PPC ads require significant expense, but it gives you an immediate flow of leads. When just starting out, it’s a good idea to allocate part of your marketing budget to ads.
Invest in your website. As people will look at your website even before they call your dental office, you want send out a professional vibe when prospective patients visit your website. A good dentistry website will assure people and say: we are great dentists who care for their patients. You can hire a good web designer who can create a business website for your dental practice.
Build backlinks to your website. Search rankings are determined by multiple factors, with backlinks to your website being one of the important ones. Also, make sure that your website in optimized for SEO. Learn about SEO or hire a good SEO expert for your business.
Recommendation: Hire an SEO expert for your dentistry practice. Keep yourself free for attending your patients instead of spending time on scouring the Internet for links.
Based on your real-world situation, you should create a comprehensive marketing plan with SEO and other digital marketing strategies. Your online marketing plan should have clearly defined actions and goals.
Get Citations & Reputation
Nothing makes people more confident about your dentistry practice than recommendations and citations.
People like to learn about the dentist or their doctor before actually visiting the clinic. Lots of great reviews online does help build trust and confidence among your patients.
Reminding your patients about review and recommendations is a great way to build online reputation and earn testimonials. When requesting for reviews, it is important to follow the accepted practice. Any reward for encouraging positive reviews doesn’t conform with fair practice.
Online reviews and testimonials are great way to earn trust of customers. It’s also a potential pitfall. A disgruntled person may choose to leave negative reviews for your dentistry practice. One needs a smart plan to handle potential bad reviews and manage online reputation.
Execute Your Strategy
Got your digital marketing plan ready? Sadly most business owners take little or no action when it comes to digital marketing. Don’t fall in that category.
Start with your website. Hire a good web designer to create a great website that reflects your competence and reassures your patients.
With open source content management systems such as WordPress and plenty of designs (free and paid), it’s easy to create a decent looking website. You can add basic functionalities – location map, contact form and phone numbers – and you are good to go.