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Patients want to be sure of a few things before they select a dentist; they want a friendly atmosphere, a clean environment, and most of all, they want to see the person who will be sticking hands in their mouths! Dental Marketing strategy turns a great website into a grand tour of your practice. Whether it’s general dentistry, pediatric, orthodontic, or surgical practice, investing in Web Design allows you to convey some of the most important things for converting prospects to patients- the quality of your work and the personality of your staff.
Effective Web Design helps your visitor overcome their potential reservations and guides them into taking action- such as calling for an appointment. Your new website will immediately increase leads because it tells your story and speaks to your potential patients in the most effective way.
When it comes to dentist marketing, an effective website from HLM will grant you the biggest return on investment. Because so much of your marketing efforts direct people to your website, like SEO, paid search, social media, and traditional advertising, improvements here will have a positive impact on everything you do.
Building trust online starts with actual customer reviews. Your reputation affects nearly every channel of dentist marketing, especially organic search. Everywhere you look now, you’ll see reviews on Google, Yelp, and several other places online. Reviews are some of the best ways to let people know they can trust you. Having a few bad reviews is ok when you do enough business; it’s actually likely. What is critical is that you respond to them and demonstrate to the public you’re willing to do what it takes to make the situation right. Potential customers don’t expect perfection, but they do expect authenticity and your willingness to help them out.
One bad review with no response can turn away a substantial amount of business. Keeping on top of negative reviews and building positive reviews will set your practice apart. Because search engines, like Google, use reviews in their ranking algorithm, it’s critical for both short and long-term SEO to continue to get positive reviews. Every dentist should have a minimum of five great reviews on Google to even be in consideration for ranking well.
Anyone can create a website that makes their business look top notch, so what can be the tiebreaker often for customers? Reviews. Most often a potential customer will reach out to an dentist with the best reviews first. With HLM’s technology and only 15 minutes a day, your office admin can be the difference in several leads going with your competitors.
The landscape is competitive; no matter where you are located, you’re guaranteed to have a competitor or two in your city. Move just a few miles away from your practice and you could have dozens of other dentists to compete against. Effective SEO strategy for dentists works hand-in-hand with web design to not only create a visually stunning website but one that represents all your services. Users will usually arrive to your website from a search for one of these services. Dental SEO gives you visibility at the local level and increases its effectiveness with SEO-related citation platforms like Google My Business and even voice search. Whether you’re in a small town or major city, this full-circle approach will make sure that you are found for your services on all devices.
SEO ramps up visibility for your practice over time. You can expect steady month-over-month gains, but SEO takes time to elevate your website ahead of other ones. Remember, Google only wants to include relevant, useful content at the top of their results, so they are careful to promote reputable dentists who demonstrate authority in the topic to top spots. For this reason, gains generally are incremental. With continued management of your SEO form HLM, you’ll see visibility beginning in your local area and expanding outward. This strategy makes your business more difficult to knock out of the top spots once they are achieved.
Consistent visibility gains take time, but once achieved, can pay dividends over the course of years, especially when considering the wide variety of dental, cosmetic, and surgical procedures your practice could be gathering new patients from. Effective SEO for dental practices anticipates changes in the landscape and new technology, so features like local citations, smartphone optimization, and voice search optimization are already in-place when consumers use a new method of finding your business. This positions your dental practice to always be visible, making it one of the most fundamental tactics a dental practice can use to market themselves.
Paid Search provides a way to cover 100% of the possible dental keywords being searched in your selected geography. Unlike SEO, which cannot always cover every possible combination of words in the English language (or other languages!), Paid Search is configurable to capture as wide or narrow of an audience as is profitable for your business.
Unique features like click-to-call buttons, incentive callouts, review ratings, and more, make paid search sometimes more effective than SEO alone; these are designed to call attention to paid ads over organic search results - and usually achieve this goal with great messaging and a compelling offer.
Also unlike SEO, Paid Search can specify the geographies you would like your practice visible in. This is the only channel that can guarantee visibility outside your local geography. This makes the platform perfect for areas where specific pockets of a metropolitan area that lack heavy competition or rural areas where it is not uncommon for patients to drive 50+ miles for a checkup.
Paid Search offers immediate visibility on multiple search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) or even 3rd party providers like Yelp. There are even features that allow you to “remarket” to previous visitors to entice them back to your business. Remarketing as a tactic is one of the least expensive Paid Search campaigns for dentists to run (with high ROI) and is not available in SEO marketing.
Calculating returns for Paid Search is easier than SEO, as platforms like Google Ads are completely transparent on what campaigns, keywords, and geographies are performing the best for your dental practice.
Because every interaction with potential patients costs money, expert optimization of your Paid Search campaigns from HLM is an absolute must. Many dental practices have had negative experiences in the past trying to run their own campaigns, only to find out that they are in way over their heads. Having experts to consistently monitor, adjust, and test strategies provides the most visibility at the lowest possible cost per interaction.
Paid social media campaigns and Facebook Ads are one of the most inexpensive channels to drive new dental patient leads to your practice. Like Paid Search Remarketing, Facebook Ads and Remarketing campaigns allows to you reach those customers who have been on your website while they are using Facebook. This helps your business keep engaging potential customers who have demonstrated interested in your company or service.
Facebook Ads are an “instantly on” strategy that can get results immediately. The positive impact on your business will be felt in the short term, but can be continued long-term as a supplemental lead activity.
Familiarity with your brand creates a greater potential for people to call your dental practice first. For some of our dentists using paid social ad campaigns on Facebook, we’ve seen their cost per lead as low as 1/10th the cost of leads compared to Paid Search. However, the effectiveness of this channel is dependent upon the traffic going to your website. So in terms of visibility and potential volume of leads, it does not scale as large as Paid Search.
Social media can convey personality - a huge component of converting dental leads into patients. Remember that patients want to know about the people who will get to know them intimately; social media provides a way to show them! Conveying your brand influences public perception for both existing and future patients. With a great brand, users are more likely to recommend your business and to return to it. Though branding is a huge component of social media, lead generation can also occur via giveaways, specials, and current patient stories.
The value in consistently engaging with current patients can turn them into brand promoters. Meaning those that will recommend your business when they inevitably get those “does anyone know a good Dentist?” questions on social media. These types of recommendations are influential in growing your business and creating a successful social media strategy you can build upon. Creating an audience and keeping them engaged is a long-term strategy that takes time and consistency.
Social media ROI is sometimes difficult to calculate. Because branding is a large component of social media, calculating ROI usually focuses on engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and more. Having a smart Social Media Management strategy can tie together social media activity to website activity through advanced analytical tracking, but that does a disservice to the platform; it is not just a lead generation tool, but a lifetime value tool. Considering what ROI means to you is key in selecting social media management as a channel you would like to pursue with HLM.
