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