Blog Category : Dental Marketing

5 Things you must do on Facebook for your Dental Practice

For decades, dentists built their practice by relying exclusively on reputation and word of mouth marketing. But today, most of their audience is on social media platforms. Facebook alone hosts billions of users. PEW research suggests that 70 percent of the Facebook users visit the site on a daily basis, which is why it has become an important platform for many marketers. Source: Pewinternet The dental industry is predicted to be worth around $36.8 billion by 2021. If your practice wants a share in the profit, it must include Facebook in its marketing plan. There are various ways to attract, retain and ultimately market to your patients on Facebook. This article will help dentists who need a little push in their Facebook marketing efforts. Let’s get started! Why Does Facebook Marketing matter for Dentists? Facebook is the most popular social channel for marketers. It alone drives nearly 25 percent of social media referral traffic. Here is why you should focus on Facebook for your dental practice. Facebook helps in earning patients’ trust: Since the boom of social networking sites, many dental practices are rightly seeing the power of being active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Dentists are in a different position than many other industries when it comes to marketing on Facebook. Dentists have to build trust and earn a patient’s confidence to convince them for an appointment. Facebook offers the ultimate way to build relationships with your potential customers. Helps you remove stigmas associated with dental visits: There is a certain fear and anxiety associated with dental visits, and Facebook can be used to convince your patients that you deliver a pain-free experience. You can remove the stigma around visiting a dentist through light-hearted Facebook content. Facebook gives you the platform you need to connect with prospects and remind them that you are all about people, not just teeth. It helps people find you online: Imagine a potential new patient looking for a new dentist in your area. He checks your Facebook page with convincing photos and testimonials that compels them to head to your website. Facebook makes it a lot easier for people to find you online. The quality content instills confidence in new patients and helps old ones to stay in touch with your practice. 5 things to do on Facebook for successful dental practice: Getting the most out of Facebook for your practice can be challenging. But don’t worry. Here we present the 5 things that you must do to get yourself on the right track with Facebook. Create a Facebook page: Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world with billions of active users. For dentists, it is easily one of the most important social media platforms to grow their practice. Every dentist needs a Facebook page to connect with their patients, prospects, and fans. Here is everything you need to know to make and optimize your Facebook page for your practice. Building a Facebook page: Setting up a Facebook page for your practice is a free and simple process. If you have just started, all you need to do is follow these four steps to create your Facebook dental page. Go to the Facebook page creation page. Choose the right option for your dental practice on that page. Enter your business category and contact information. Upload an appropriate profile picture and cover photo for your Facebook page. Add a short description of your practice Optimize your page: After setting up your practice Facebook page, you need to include all the elements and additional tips on the page to get the most out of it. Verify your Facebook page: Verification adds a small gray checkmark to your Facebook name. It tells people that you are an authentic business. It also improves your page ranking in Facebook search results. Here’s how to verify your page: Go to Settings at the top of your page Click Page Verification from General Click ‘Verify this Page,’ and then click Get Started Click ‘Verify this Page with documents.’ You can also verify your page by entering your business phone number, your country, and language. Get a verification code by clicking Call Me Now Enter the verification code and click Continue Fill out your About section: Enter information about your practice in the About section of your Facebook page. Include your business contact number, address, website URL and business hours. Try to provide your location on Google Map if possible. This makes it easier for new patients to locate you. Add a call to action: The call to action button appears next to your page’s Like button. Facebook allows businesses to choose from a variety of call to action buttons, including options such as ‘Call now’ and ‘Book now.’ This makes it easier for prospects to call you directly from their mobile devices or schedule an appointment with a few clicks. Post good content: Posting quality content regularly is a challenging task and requires a lot of dedication. Facebook is a community-oriented platform where users will engage with valuable information if it is presented in an easy-to-digest manner. Keep patients educated about dental health: People appreciate posts that provide valuable information and tips on maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Engage your patients and prospects through education posts about dental health. Stir their interest through content that not only promotes your expertise but shows that you care about the overall well-being of your patients. Post about your office team members: Since Facebook is a social networking site, people love to connect with others and learn their personal bits of information. Try to share details about your practice, your dental office, and team members. Sharing posts about your team members remove patient’s anxiety and bring them closer to your practice. Engage with fun facts: Take the time to look for fun dental facts that will engage your followers. Content that put a smile on your patient’s face is also helpful in building loyalty. Sharing a fun dental fact, a quirky tip or anything that your patients find interesting compels them to share it with their own community and provides you the opportunity to reach to a wide range of audience and gain new patients. This can be an effective way to widen your customer base. Set a posting schedule you can follow: Following a posting schedule is easily said than done. Posting content regularly is important when it comes to engaging prospects on Facebook. As a dentist, your time is valuable. You will be busy helping your patients and running your practice. Make sure you plan a reasonable Facebook posting schedule and commit to it. Showcase your services: Don’t just ask people to buy your product or services on Facebook. Instead, show them the value your services have provided to patients. Promote and showcase your services by highlighting the people using it to show real-life results. Share about recently completed successful cases and post ‘before and after’ pictures, so that prospects can see your work. It is the best way to promote yourself on Facebook without pushing people away. Promote your involvement in community events: If you are doing some good work for your community, share it with your followers on Facebook. Let them know about your involvement in community events. It provides your patients and prospects an opportunity to connect with you through a common cause. You also build a good reputation when people see the work you do beyond your practice. Run Facebook ads: Facebook allows dentists to post highly targeted ads about their practice. Ads published on Facebook has the potential to reach thousands of active users. There are over 4 million advertisers currently cashing in on Facebook’s ad network to reach their target audience. Facebook has access to personal information about users and knows more about them than any other social media network. They know their age, location, income, interests, family status, etc. which make Facebook ads highly successful. To create successful ads on Facebook, make sure you follow these important steps. Improve your message: Before starting a Facebook ad campaign, be sure your content has an objective. Tailor your Facebook ads according to the interests of your target audience. Know who to target and what you have to say. A Facebook ad campaign for a dental practice should focus on: Spreading awareness about your dental practice Showing potential patients what makes your practice unique from others Introducing a new dentist or another team member Talking about the value that your service provides to patients Highlighting the patient’s testimonials Promoting a specific dental procedure Sharing a business milestone If you know the purpose of your ad, you will be in a better position to decide your target audience and what to say to convince people to take a specific action. Improve your ad targeting: After you know the purpose of your ad, it is time to decide your target audience. Target your ad to people who will likely resonate with the message and take action. The following tips will help you in targeting the right people to achieve your goals. Target lookalike audience: If building awareness about your dental practice is your goal, you might want to target an audience whose interests are similar to your current patient population. Target current patients: If your aim is to fill spots left open by last-minute cancellation, target your current patient population. Because they are more likely to respond to the ad, as they already know your practice’s culture. A better practice to lure patients into an appointment is by offering a discount or a free upgraded service to the first person who responds. Target retired people: If you are advertising dental savings plans, targeting retired people will be your first bet. These people no longer have any dental insurance and will likely take action Retargeting: If you want to get maximum people into your sales funnel, the best people to target are the ones who have been to your website. Target them with an ad that gives them a call to action to download free content or a free consult based on their interests they’ve shown on your website. Improve your visuals: Photos and videos engage and drive more traffic to your website and result in more actions. Once you know the purpose of your Facebook ad and your target audience, you can try different versions your copy and check which version looks best. This can be done by creating a split test in Facebook’s ad manager. Split-testing ads is a powerful way to improve your results and lower your advertising costs. The split-testing ad makes it possible to know what words or visuals will resonate at a given time. To split-test an ad, you need to create an ad and duplicate it. Then you need to replace the text, image, or video, and submit it. Create Facebook groups Facebook groups are a great way for engaging your prospects and past patients. It also allows you to connect with peers, potential partners, and customers. Create a private Facebook group for regular patients: Create a private Facebook group and offer access to your patients as part of a program. Regular patients would like to work more closely with you and connect with the like-minded people in a similar position. People must buy and request to join. Create a public Facebook group for subscribers: Allow people to access this group by signing up to your newsletter or email list. Promote this group as much as possible to attract new people. It is important to engage the members regularly if you want to turn them into customers. Convince the members by showing you’re your work first hand. The people on your email list are considered a higher quality leads and are likely the prospects to take action. Analyze the insights: An important and powerful tool that allows you to measure the performance of your business page is Facebook Insights. Facebook analytics enable you to understand who your most engaged audience is and what type of content is driving the most traffic to your page. Unfortunately, most dentists overlook it because they don’t know which metrics they need to pay attention to. To better understand Facebook insights, go to your dental page and click insights. You will end up on your dashboard with many sections. These sections include: Overview: It gives you a view of everything that has happened on your page in the last. The three important measures you should focus here are page likes, post reach, and engagement. Source: Hootsuite Visits: This section allows you to see how many people are visiting your page and where they are coming from. The important metrics in this section are the Page and Tab visits and External Referrers. Posts: This section provides you data about your page followers and when they are online. It also helps you to analyze how your posts are performing based on average reach and engagement. Another important metric to focus on in this section is the Top posts from the pages you like. It is a great way to keep track of your competitors and how they are reaching the audience. Source: Hootsuite People: This tab on your dashboard lets you get to know your audience better by looking at three important metrics. They include Your Fans (who is liking your page, their age, location, gender, language, etc.), People Reached, and People Engaged. Facebook analytics tips: Once you have a good understanding of Facebook page insights, these tips will help you get the most out of it. Check back often Download the Facebook Pages Manager app Request an easy-to-find page URL Update relevant info Download your data These tips will allow you to track the success of your dental practice marketing on Facebook easily and efficiently.

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How To Powerfully Use Instagram To Market Your Dental Practice

The marketing prowess Instagram brings to the table for brands and businesses (of all kinds) can no longer be ignored! With more than a billion active monthly users who use the platform at least once or twice a day, it has quickly become the most preferred marketing channel for a lot of brands. 70% to be exact in the US alone. Add small to medium businesses to the mix and the number of advertisers present on the platform increases to more than 2 million worldwide. There’s a reason brands are choosing Instagram as their go-to marketing tool over other social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. Do you know what that reason is? It’s the highly engaged audience the platform boasts of. More than 80% of the personal accounts present on the platform follow at least 1 brand they like, and that is the bare minimum. There are people on Instagram who follow, interact with and actively purchase from thousands of brands out there. So, can dental practices around the globe make good use of this amazing social media platform to stand out from the noise and make a name for themselves? Absolutely! Being a renowned digital marketing agency with a strong background in providing exceptional dental marketing services ourselves, we get this query from a lot of dentists and we say YES! to every single one of them. It was about time we settled this question once and for all! Before I begin preaching you about how you can make use of your hidden marketing talent on the platform to bring in more foot-traffic for your dental practice, you need to understand the nature of this unique platform and what makes its user tick. Instagram is a highly visual platform and is the happiest social media platform out there which is mostly used by millennials. And Millennials love brands that are real. You don’t have to be the best out there, just be real and you’ll have their trust. For this, you would need to be fully transparent about who you are and what you do regularly. That can include showcasing your personal life, the people that help you run your practice, all the inside stories and what not. Showing the human side and being totally real about yourself really works at Instagram, whereas self-promotional content has no place on the platform (unless you are a well-established brand with millions of followers), you’ll only get frowns and ignorance that way! You’ll have to engage your audience with your posts and make them trust your practice first. Hard selling on the platform with your first post right away will put your practice in a bad light, so I would advise you to stay away from that entirely on the platform. Keeping that in mind, here are a few ways you can start marketing your dental practice on the platform and build a ton of following - Create a business profile and give all the information you can in the bio While there is no problem in marketing your dental practice from your personal account, business profiles on Instagram come studded with deep analytics for every post and audience intelligence features that will help you understand your audience better. Moreover, by having a business profile, you’d enable prospective patients to give you a call or contact you right from the Instagram app, which is a great way of fostering conversions. Source Use this opportunity and mention every detail about your dental practice as you can in the 200 words bio section on Instagram. That includes your contact information, the area your practice serves, the top services you provide, your business website, the time your business is available and every other information that can help prospective patients in choosing your dental service over others. Make sure you don't forget to add URL of your website as that's the only place where you can add a link for users to go to your landing page. Optimizing your profile bio is vital and should be your top-most priority before you begin with any of your dental marketing efforts on the platform. Making use of influencers is a no-brainer Influencer marketing has consistently been one of the top marketing trend for the past few years and Instagram has been the go-to platform for a lot of influencers to advertise their collaborations with a brand in the most personal and non-branded way possible. According to a study by Zine and eMarketer, nearly 80% of influencers prefer Instagram as their platform of choice for brand collaborations. And more than 68% of marketers are using Influencers within various industries to give a boost to their brands. Dental practices should not be any different. If you are looking to quickly get in front of a broader audience and gain exponential exposure, influencer marketing is the way to go. You could reach out to influential people in the health and fitness industry or anyone with a big audience on Instagram and offer your dental services to them for free (in some cases), in return you or they can post an insta pic and/or a story at your dental service The influencer gets free dental services and you get to leverage their huge audience in the most genuine way possible, a win-win situation. As an example, Dr. Kevin Sands from Beverly Hills, USA, does this a lot with Instagram’s biggest influencers such as Kylie Jenner, Drake, Kim Kardashian and a lot more (not that they need dental services for free). While you can also make use of influencers in a lot of other creative ways, I think this example gets the point across. Imagine the people following these influencers getting connected with you and looking for your services. Once they follow you, make sure you keep them engaged as they would not remember your services when they are scrolling their feed regularly. Don’t shy away from showcasing your unique personality With so many businesses on the platform, showcasing your unique personality in every post can really set you apart. So make sure you engage with your existing audience and attract more users and make them stick. It doesn’t always have to be about before-and-after images of your dental patients. While posting these kinds of posts may be great for marketing on other social media platforms, do it too much on Instagram and users will simply start getting bored of your stuff! To engage your audience, keeping a healthy mix of creative posts that bring out your personality in the best light possible is vital. As they would recognize and would look forward to your unique self. The above video is the courtesy of Dr. Daniel Rubinshtein, who is a renowned dentist in New York City with a 198k following. He constantly posts funny stuff related to his dental practice along with the proven before-and-after treatment posts that have amassed such a massive following for his practice. You can have a look at his profile page to see for yourself how his creative and funny posts will make you like him in an instant. Actively engage with your followers and share the love Your followers are there with you for a reason. They actively comment, like and share your posts for a reason. While getting all this love from people may feel nice, you should work upon making your audience feel nice once in a while as well. Reply to their comments, showcase and reshare their posts about you with your entire audience, actively engage in giveaways or run some contests, giving your audience back some love always puts your brand in good light and attracts more fans. While it might mean a little to you, it can mean a world for your entire audience. If you do this for your practice, you’ll look like a practice that doesn’t only care about making money but cares about their audience as well. Best example of a dental practice doing this on Instagram is Apa Aesthetic. Founded by the award-winning dentist, Dr. Michael Apa, he actively engages with his audience on Instagram in every way possible and shares the usual before-and-after treatment posts mixed with posts about his personal life. The result - 229k huge following on Instagram. You can check his Instagram account to witness all of the giving-back for yourself. Don’t forget to use #Hashtags Talking about Instagram, how could we forget #hashtags? Using hashtags is a great way to get your posts seen on Instagram. As every hashtag becomes a categorized link where all the posts with the same hashtag are displayed, use a hashtag that gets searched by a lot of people and you get instant exposure for your posts on the platform. But there’s a trick to it. On Instagram, you can use general hashtags like #dentistry, or you can use specific hashtags like #KidsDentistry. You can even use local hashtags like #NewYorkDentistry. Or you can create your own hashtag like #(your dental practice name)dentistry to add branding to it. The world of hashtags is so vast on Instagram that choosing the exact hashtag that would bring you the best kind of exposure can be a bit of a daunting task, to be honest. While Instagram provides you an option to place up to #30 hashtags in your post, overdoing them can look like spam. So, you’ll have to carefully select each of them and use them sparingly. This is where ideally you could use 3 where one is specific to your brand and word (unique) and the other could be general which would show up on specific hashtag searches for images on Instagram. Keeping a mix of them all works best as they’ll bring targeted people to your posts and also build your brand at the same time. So, work on creating a unique hashtag of your own. Dr. Sam Saleh, based in Beverly Hills and currently with 251k followers, uses #branded hashtags perfectly on most of his posts. His own hashtag, like he has used in the image above, is #drsalehsmile and if a user clicks on this hashtag, it displays each of his post where he has used the exact same hashtag categorized by top-posts, most recent and other hashtags he has used in the same individual posts. A prospective patient, if he clicks on it, will then be able to see all his work at a glance to make the final decision which can work wonders in making conversions because it’s all his own glorious work on a single page for everyone to see (obviously, why would any other dental practitioner use #drsalehsmile). On top of that, patients who have taken his treatment and are boasting his work on the platform using the same hashtag would also be visible on the same page. It really can make a difference if you think about it. Some other Instagram features While hashtags can be a great way to gain some extra exposure on the platform, Instagram is studded with some other features as well which you can make use of to stand out and get creative with your posts. Instagram Stories Instagram Stories was first introduced in August 2016 and lets users post disappearing photos and videos to their profiles. The feature is great as stories don't add to the clutter of news feeds but are displayed at the top of it in the form of colorful circles. This Instagram feature can be used as a great way to get in front of your audience. Instagram Boomerang Boomerang is Instagram's own app which lets users create a mini-video by capturing a burst of photos, stitches them all together and plays it forward and backwards creating a never-ending loop. It lets you break away from posting your usual photos and videos on the platform and can add a little spice to your profile. Instagram Live Video To get in front of your audience, along with uploading stories on your profile, you can also start a live video on the platform and gain a lot of engagement from your audience. All your followers automatically get notified when you start a live video, so Instagram does most of the legwork for you in this case. You can start a live video of you operating on one of your patients to give all your followers a sneak peek into your dental practice and how you operate. The best part? Your followers can interact with you in real-time and ask whatever their heart desires, which is great for building a relationship with your audience. So, there you go! Marketing your dental practice on Instagram is not as hard as it seems. While it can be difficult for every business to get influencers regularly, it's always good to start at someplace and lookout for opportunities. Being powerful on Instagram requires your unique self and most importantly consistency throughout. For especially dental practices, it's important for people to visually see what you do and who you are on the platform to build a loyal following from the ground up. There's no doubt that Instagram has immense potential to grow your dental practice exponentially. Contact Us Today and let us help your practice get more customers.

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Why Localization Should Be a Must For Your Dental Practice

In our last blog we talked about the importance of online reviews for your dental practice and how you’d have to list your practice to Yelp, Google My Business, and Facebook and ask people to explicitly review on them to start a self-feeding review cycle. <!-- --> Other than gaining a lot of reviews, listing your dental practice on these website opens some other doors that can prove to be detrimental to the success of your dental practice. Which doors exactly? It brings you in front of your local audience who are searching for dental practices online night and day. Say, you run a dental practice in New Jersey. If a person searches on Google for dental practices in New Jersey and your practice website is nowhere to be seen, he will choose one of your competitors and get on with it. That must not happen. This is where Localization of your dental practice is so important. You’ll have to be on top to let your local searchers find your practice instead of your competitor’s. How? By claiming your listings in local directories. Here are 3 reasons why you absolutely need to create or claim the listing of your dental practice in local directories - Increased exposure to hyper-targeted dental patients: When it comes to local searchers, the buyer intent is super high and they are almost at the end of the buyer funnel looking for just the right type of services that will fulfill their needs. According to a study, as much as 50% of all local searches convert to foot traffic the same or next day. So, capturing those laser targeted searchers gets easier when you are present on all the top ranking directories which cater to the dental space. Each valid listing will increase your authority: We’ve stated before that local listings impact both search engines and people... searching on search engines. With each valid local listing of your dental practice, Google will see you as an authority in the dental space around your locality and will start ranking your website higher in search engine results. Searchers, seeing that your website ranks high on Google, will take you as an authority in your industry as well and prefer your practice over your competitors. Also, being a part of the community is always great for building relationships with prospective patients and convincing them to try out your practice. Increase in rankings (including Google local business rankings) Everything SEO related is done to increase the ranking of a website. And listing your dental practice on local directories is a sure-fire way to do that. Not only listing your dental practice in high authority directories increase your authority in the dental space, it will also increase your rankings in Google Local Businesses tab that often comes first in local search results showing the nearest places around you and mind you, that tab boasts some of the highest click-through rates on Google. But what exactly are those high authority directories? As we stated in the beginning, the biggest players when it comes to local directories are without a doubt Yelp and Google My Business. The best part, they also cater to national and worldwide audiences but primarily focus on helping local searchers as they are the ones who are most likely to convert quickly. And conversions is what you need. So, maintaining a presence on such directories becomes all the more important to increase your local footprint. For conversions, claiming your listings on these platforms is what you need to begin with... Listing your dental practice on Yelp Yelp is a goliath in the US. 90% of the people in the United States use Yelp to find local businesses and healthcare practices and 30% of those searches are for healthcare practitioners (including dentists). Having more than 160 million website visitors a month is no big deal for them but if your dental practice is listed on a platform with such massive exposure, it can be a big deal for your practice. So, here’s how to claim your listing on the platform - Scroll down the bottom of yelp’s homepage and click on the ‘Claim your Business Page’ After clicking on it, you’ll be redirected to the ‘Yelp for Business Owners’ page where you’ll need to enter your practice’s name and street address to claim your listing. Find your practice from all the listed local practices in the specified area and just claim your listing, it’s that easy! After that, it’s just the task of filling relevant information of your practice. On Yelp, try to submit genuine images of your practice and staff members to gain more credibility on the platform. Listing your dental practice on Google My Business Listing your dental practice on Google My Business is a sure-fire way to get more local eyes on your dental practice. By listing your business in the Google local business directory, you’ll gain a lot of exposure amongst people searching on Google Search and Google Maps, which apparently is a lot. To get yourself listed as a local dental practice, you’ll have to submit all your correct business details to Google. Don’t know how? Here’s how you can do it as well - Go to the ‘Google My Business’ homepage and click ‘Start Now’. You’ll be redirected to their listing page where you can begin with listing your dental practice. After that, it’s about filling all your correct practice information (you can have a look at our previous blog to know exactly what information about your practice you need to get listed on Google My Business). Listing your dental practice on Zocdoc Ever heard of Zocdoc before? Even if you haven’t, I am sure potential patients in your locality use this service to find dentists like you every day. It’s that popular. Zocdoc is by far the most popular directory that caters directly to healthcare practitioners. With more than 6 million monthly users and 120 million annual searches, this directory is a goldmine for dentists. Biggest disadvantage? Getting your practice listed on the platform is not free, you’ll have to pay a flat $3000 annual fee to get your practice listed. But if you decide to get listed on this platform, the exposure you’ll gain it is tremendous. Zocdoc even lets potential patients book appointments of their chosen practice directly from their platform, which can really sky-rocket the patient traffic coming to your dental practice. Letting patients book appointments online is why Zocdoc is so popular. We will be covering why this feature is so vital for patients in the next blog. So, stay tuned! To get yourself listed on the platform, you’’ have to click on ‘List your practice on Zocdoc’ tab on the top right of its homepage. After you click on ‘List Your Practice’, the process of getting your practice listed is almost the same as the other platforms mentioned above. These 3 directories are not the only directories out there but are the one ones with the most authority in their space. So, it makes sense to target them first to get the ball rolling. Know some more high authority local directories that proved to be useful in bringing some dental patients through your door? Let us know in the comments.

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How Online Reviews Help Gain Exposure For Your Dental Practice

Imagine a scenario where potential patients are looking for your dental services online and come across this review - "/social-media-marketing-services/" Or this… What do you think will be their reaction? Obviously, they’ll be impressed but will it be enough to get some foot traffic? Absolutely! Online reviews are the 21st century equivalent of word-of-mouth and they can serve as a powerful catalyst in driving patients towards (or away) from your practice. Seems like an exaggeration? Answer me this… when was the last time you went to or ordered from a new restaurant without checking its reviews online? I bet you do that everytime! And everyone else does it too. Don’t think people look for reviews only when it comes to restaurants, they do it for all things imaginable and dental practices are sure one of them, so it becomes all the more important for you to handle online reviews with care. According to a BrightLocal study, as much as 93% of consumers read online reviews to decide if a business is worth their time or not, which is huge!... and should be a clear-cut sign that you need to take your review game up a notch if you want some more exposure for your dental practice. Here are some more reasons why you absolutely must embrace online reviews - 1.Helps propel your marketing efforts Almost every dental practice of today is engaged in some online marketing efforts, be it Social Media Marketing or Content Marketing or any other outreach efforts. And I am sure you do it as well in one form or the other. So, you’d know how difficult it is to market your dental practice online and the amount of insane efforts it takes to do it well. Do you want all those efforts to go down the drain? They will if there are a plethora of bad reviews about your practice scattered online. Bad reviews can also be the reason your dental practice is not able to take-off despite consistent marketing efforts, doesn’t matter how amazing they are. On the other hand, if there are glorious reviews about you and the way you run your dental practice, they can prove to be the last push a potential patient needs to come to your doorsteps and make your marketing efforts an absolute success. 2. Helps in ranking on search engines According to a Moz study, cumulative reviews can have a 13% effect on your search engine rankings and quite evidently, it’s a lot! Source - Moz Major search engines like Google gives a lot of importance to user-generated reviews. The more you have it, greater are your chances to reach the top. From there, it becomes a self-feeding review generating cycle. As businesses with more reviews gain more visibility through search engines, it results in more foot traffic which in-turn leads to even more user-generated reviews. The main task is to figure out how to get that cycle started (which we will talk about in the next section) 3. Builds customer trust Which practice will a potential patient trust more - a dental practice with a ton of happy user generated reviews or a practice with many 1-star ratings? The answer is quite obvious ain’t it. When you read a bunch of good reviews about a dental practice or any other business, it builds your trust with the brand. You’ll be sure that they’ll take great care of you and will provide you with the best of services. And when a potential customer starts to trust your brand even before availing your services, that’s where the magic happens. Prove to them that you are worthy of your reviews and bam!... you have a customer that’ll stick with you no matter what. Only a thing like reviews can make that happen. Where to begin? Unless you provide a service so good that customers start posting marvellous reviews for your business themselves, to kickstart your review cycle, you’ll have to ask for it explicitly. Most dental practices lack that. Just simply ask for a review and show them the easiest way to do so or the platform you’d want them to specifically review on. Or you can include asking for reviews in your email marketing efforts. Doesn’t matter how you ask them, but you’ll have to take the first step. Use Yelp, Google My Business &amp; Facebook Reviews Okay, these three platforms are the most accessible, biggest and baddest user-generated review platforms out there and you need to target just them to get the ball rolling. You’ll have to claim listings for your dental practice first (and create a Facebook Business Page for Facebook Reviews) on these websites to allow users to submit their reviews. With a monthly traffic of more than 160 million, Yelp is THE platform to focus on for dentists as 30% of the searches made on the platform is related to the healthcare industry. So, if you haven’t yet claimed your business on Yelp, now is the perfect time to do so! And don’t forget Google My business, which can help your dental practice with localization (a topic we’ll be covering soon) as well. Unlike popular belief, online reviews are an important part of your digital footprint, make sure you are giving them the attention they deserve and witness all your marketing efforts leave a mark. On which platform do you receive the most patient reviews and feedback? Let us know in the comments.

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Essential Elements Of A Dental Marketing Plan

Getting the word out about your dental practice is now easier and cheaper than ever… thanks to the internet! For dental practices of today, spending a considerable amount of money on marketing no longer means spending half of their budget on TV adverts and praying they’d bring in more patients. It’s more about making your every buck count utilizing the power of the internet... We have already covered the active role your dental website plays in the grand-scheme of things when it comes to marketing your dental practice online. It’s basically the start and end point of all your marketing efforts. So, it’s vital to have a good looking website that can convince users that you’re really serious about your practice. Before we begin with discussing the vital elements of a dental marketing plan, let’s first look at some basic objectives that your marketing efforts must absolutely fulfill - Attract: Grabbing the attention of a potential patient is paramount when it comes to making your marketing efforts a success. Capture: Setting up a mechanism to collect information from users. Taking feedback, offering newsletter subscriptions, e-books &amp; other resourceful information is a nice way to do it. Convert: By this point, your potential patients are ready to convert to a customer. Retain: According to a study, existing customers bring in 67% more business than new customers. While acquiring new patients is kind of the reason you are marketing your practice online in the first place, you must never lose sight of your old patients. With the objectives of a marketing plan set, you need to choose the mediums you will target to get the best out of your marketing efforts. And the mediums or elements or areas of executing a dental marketing plan I am going to tell you are not, in any way, specific to dental practices but are widely used all over the globe for other niche industries as well. Here we go - Content Marketing Pushing relevant, quality content to your patients (or potential patients) that helps them in solving real-world problems related to your industry should always be at the heart of all your varied marketing efforts, doesn’t matter the platform or medium. That’s the true essence of content marketing right there and not the self-promotional stuff from brands you see online. Starting a new blog is the right way and often times the first step to kickstart your content marketing journey. Say, for a dental blog, the topics you can capitalize upon could be about ways to maintain the right dental health, the latest treatments in town and other informational but relevant topics. If done right, a well maintained blog can generate a steady flow of traffic coming to your website from scratch and keep the momentum going for long. But don’t think your content marketing efforts are confined to just marketing your own blog, even the content on your web pages can serve you well if marketed in the right place and at the right time. And it doesn’t matter if you’re posting a on Social Media, if you’re playing with content, it’s already a part of your content marketing efforts. Search Engine Optimization I am pretty sure you must have used Google or some other search engine at some point to make your life easier. Infact, I don’t blame you, there are 32.8 million searches made on Google everyday and they are all made by people looking for some answers. Suppose, even if a small fraction of them are using Search Engine Optimization for best dental practices around them, you could be drowning in some serious traffic right now but in order for that to happen, you need to rank on Google. Making yourself visible on Google is no walk in the park. You’ll have to base all your website and blog content (see, I told you it’s all about content) around keywords and that takes a lot of time and research. If you are looking to give keyword research a go, our keyword research guide can give you a headstart. Yes, it’s a pain... but if done right, Google can drive massive traffic to your keyword optimized website. Social Media Marketing Can you name a place where all your potential dental patients hang out? It’s Social Media (or Facebook to be more precise). In recent years, the entire Social Media space has evolved as a marketing arsenal of its own. You can expand your outreach endeavours on Social Media and build a loyal following with the help of engaging and visual posts, provide exceptional &amp; quick customer support, have a look at important marketing analytics and what not, all through a single platform... which I think is amazing! And it can turn out to be amazing for your brand exposure as well. You can choose to spend money on marketing on these platforms or stay organic, it’s completely on you. Yes, paying for marketing on Social Media has its own advantages but staying organic usually reaps enough exposure to get the ball rolling, after it, it’s up to you how creative (but relevant) you can get with your posts to make your fans stay. Patient Support Remember the part about retaining patients? Patient Support is all about that and more. You absolutely need to have a relationship manager for your dental practice who will be the sole point of contact for all your patients.Being present on all the various platforms (including your website) comes with responsibilities.By marking your presence and actively marketing on all your preferred platforms, you give your users a way to contact you as well. And Social Media has emerged as a preferred way for users to submit some feedback (good and bad) or get support. But they can give you a call as well or submit a query on your website or send you an email, so you need to be present for them when they need you wherever they are or you’ll lose them if their queries go unheard or unreplied. Most practitioners don’t pay much heed to this part of their marketing plan and loose patients through the back door. But sometimes, a good support system or a complete lack of it can make all the difference in the level of success of your marketing plan. Modern day marketing is not about doing one thing, you’ll have to do a lot of things and do them all simultaneously and in sync to keep the ball rolling. Only optimizing your website for SEO won’t work well unless you have keyword wrapped content on your website. Having Social Media profiles for your dental practice is great, but if you don’t have a website to channel them further through the sales funnel, you won’t see much conversions. Just adding content on your website won’t help you gain exposure if it fails to create value…. It’s all interconnected and you will have to optimize your practice for each of them to see the best results.

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Don't Miss Out On Potential Business For Your Dental Practice: Get Online

Do you know what separates an average dental practice from the spectacular ones? It’s how they market themselves both physically and virtually. In this generation where life seems worthless without an internet connection, if you are not making an effort to market your dental practice online, chances are that the exposure you’ll get for your practice will be limited only to just 30% of your potential! The importance of marketing yourself digitally is indeed increasing every day. More than 4 billion people today have access to the internet and the number will only go up in the coming future. Which should be a tell-tale sign for you to showcase your dental mastery to the digital world (if you haven’t done already) Now, to market your dental practice online, what’s the first thing that pops up in your mind? Getting a website and optimizing it for mobile? Most dental practitioners’ thinking of marketing themselves online starts and ends with getting their own beautiful dental website but marketing yourself digitally goes way beyond that. The truth is that online marketing reaps the best results when all its components are stitched together and streamlined as one. While creating an informative website for your dental practice is the main component of an online marketing strategy; starting a blog, maintaining and marketing your social media profiles, search engine optimization and managing online reviews are other few important components that require an equal amount of attention as well. And the best part is that it’s free! Unlike printing flyers or cold calling, which requires quite a bit of investment, marketing yourself online organically doesn’t cost you a penny. Which substantially increases its ROI (Return On Investment) and makes it all the more attractive to someone who’s redundant to take the required steps of maintaining a digital presence of their practice. So, let’s talk about the major online components that constitute a stellar online marketing strategy - The Supreme: Website Setting up a new website for your dental practice is like building your clinic all over again…. digitally. According to a survey, 97% of patients prefer to have a look at a dental practitioner’s website rather than picking up the phone and calling them for information. Also, your website is the place where all of your other online marketing efforts will lead prospective patients to so you’ll have to make sure that it matches your branding, gets the message across, portrays your dental practice in the best light, is mobile responsive and mentions your physical and contact information clearly. Build relationships using Social Media The first rule of marketing is to market where your potential customers (or in this case, patients) are. And that is why Social Media Marketing has picked up so much heat recently with almost every brand out there trying to penetrate the inner circle of their customers. Having a strong social media presence serves not only to stay in constant touch with your patients and remind them of your dental practice but also to attract new patients and give them an inside look of your clinic and services. Also, a dental practice that actively engages with their patients in some way or the other on a regular basis is more likely to appeal to prospective patients as well. Start a dental blog ‘Blogging’ has recently become a buzzword for getting a lot of website traffic and eventually clinic patients. But that is not the case. The essence of successful blogging lies in providing value to your patients. And it takes a lot of consistent efforts to get successful at it. If done correctly, it can generate a lot of exposure for your dental practice and redirect a myriad of new potential patients to your website regularly. Leverage the power of online reviews Online reviews are the 21st-century version of ‘Word of Mouth’, 84% of people confirmed that they trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation. Reading online what your past patients have to say about your clinic or practice, in general, helps them decide if they want to become your patient or not even before entering your premise. So, it’s highly advisable to manage your reviews on your active social media platforms and the internet in general. You can use a service like Get Five Stars to manage all your patient reviews on the web. Search engine friendly Search engines like Google also play a very big part in getting your website in front of the world. People search on Google for great dentists every day, a lot of it, and if you’re at the top of the search rankings for most of their searches probability is more than they’ll click on your website. Your social media activity, a relevant website filled with useful content, successful blog, online reviews and a plethora of other ranking factors are taken into consideration for ranking your site on Google's SERPs. While these are the most basic and equally popular methods to enter into the online sphere with a bang, they still require a lot of efforts to execute perfectly and in sync. We understand that as a dentist, it may not be possible for you spend a lot of time in front of a computer rather than doing what you do best.

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