Every dental practice is well aware of the importance of marketing. Dental patient marketing will end up bringing you new clients, and it can also help you in cementing your ties with your existing patients. If you really want your practice to thrive and grow, dental SEO is crucial for it. While it is apparent that you should market your dental practice, we understand that it is much more difficult to figure out how to go about it.
Frankly, there is no sure-shot answer or a one size fits all approach for it. There are a variety of strategies that you can employ to achieve the best results for your practice.
11 effective marketing strategies for growing your dental practice
- Local Awareness Facebook Ads: When you want to advertise your practice, specificity is actually quite important. Generally, you would want to market to people within a 50-mile radius, so to this end, local awareness Facebook ads are a great way to reach out to your target audience. With enhanced features such as display of your location, as well as other relevant details about your practice, people can easily reach out to you with links for direction.
- Remarketing Ads: Re-marketing generally helps you in connecting with people who have already visited your website or practice, by showing them audience-specific ads that really focus on luring potential customers. If you already have the practice of collecting email addresses, at your clinic – you can leverage this even further by using them on your Google ads and Facebook through customer matches. Once you create the ad that you need, you can go on and start targeting those potential customers again and send them reminders that would entice them to visit.
- Google Maps Ads: Many people do not realise this, but advertising on Google maps can actually end up leading a potential patient right to your doorstep. Whenever a search for dentists is entered in the search bar, results are shown on the map, and these generally end up including directions and CTAs as well.
- Mobile Call-Only Ads: As per studies conducted by Google, most of the searches that are related to healthcare, are conducted on smartphones. What is even more interesting is the fact that almost one in every 20 searches is generally done for information that is related to health, hence do not miss out on this opportunity to create ads that are made exclusively for mobiles and generally come with call-only campaigns via Google ads.
- Appointment Reminders: Appointment reminders are extremely important to ensure that your patience will visit your practice. You can even go on to streamline this entire process, by utilising Google calendar alerts and also sending confirmations of appointments and reminders by emails. This way you can go on to create reminders for your patience for making appointments for example for an annual cleaning or check-up.
- Emergency Keywords: Healthcare emergencies are pretty common, and using words like urgent or emergencies are a great way to target those customers that need immediate attention and hence generally have a very high conversion rate. The ROI on these keywords is quite high, so make sure that you do provide emergency services, and also ensure that there is easy accessibility to your practice for the facility.
- Instagram: Everyone knows about the wave of influencer marketing, and how Instagram has been a great source of revenue for a lot of brands. Recently it has also become a place for shopping, hence creating an Instagram page for your practice can help a lot in getting new customers. You can advertise new and unique techniques that you are utilising in your clinic, or patient reviews and before and after of procedures etc. Make sure that you keep on regularly updating your page with quality content and you will be good to go.
- Email Marketing: The importance of email marketing is something that should never be lost upon businesses. From making appointments to sending reminders, copies of bills, etc. email marketing can go a long way in drumming up business for you and also making sure that you have a loyal customer base.
- Referral Bonuses: According to studies, over 90% of people tend to trust the recommendations that have been made by their friends. Hence it is a really good practice to encourage these recommendations. By offering people referral bonuses, you will not only retain the customers that you have right now but also be able to grow and expand your practice. Make sure that you offer some kind of bonus to your clients, for each time a referral of theirs makes an appointment.
- Video Advertising: Video marketing is becoming quite popular with the healthcare industry, so you should jump up on this wagon as well. Testimonials in video format from real people regarding your practice can help you in establishing a personal connection with your target consumer base. This, in turn, can help in building up trust, gaining recommendations and hence also appointments.
- Local Events: Sponsoring local events is a great way to gain an audience. You could go on to sponsor little league teams or other such events. Get your name emblazoned on merchandise or uniforms and tossing a freebie – there you have it the perfect recipe for making sure that your practice gets maximum attention. It won’t be surprising if you find that a lot of parents end up switching to your practice after you employ this method.
As mentioned earlier, there are a variety of ways that you can go about when talking about dental marketing, and the 11 that we have mentioned above are quite effective in this respect. One of the great ways to get ahead is to keep an eye on your competition and then determine what are the unique prospects that you can offer in comparison which will help you in standing apart. When done smartly, you will begin to see a steady increase in your appointments and before you know it, your practice will be well on its way to growing and expanding exponentially.