Many dentists who own a dental clinic do not apply adequate dental marketing strategies due to which their business grows at a low pace despite having good facilities and knowledge. On the other hand, there are dentists who pay special attention to their business marketing as a result of which they grow their dental business faster than others.
If you own a dental clinic but lack a dental marketing strategy, then you are losing potential clients (and money) every month. With competition growing in every sector, dental practices must pay attention to make an effective and well-formulated marketing plan to succeed in their business. In this article, we will focus on the top dental marketing strategies employed by successful dental practices which can skyrocket your dental practice too.
1. Discover and Conquer “How the Client Finds a Dentist?”
This step is the most crucial for your success. Have you ever thought how a potential client finds dentists in his/her area? In majority of the cases, it is through “Google” (Google search). For example: If a person based in Houston wants to search for a dentist, he will probably query using search terms like “dentists in Houston”, “Houston dentist” etc. If your website does not come up on the first page of Google when a person searches for a dentist online, then you are already losing clients to your competing dentists who are ranking high in Google.
It is important to note that 90% of people searching on Google do not go past Page 1 of Google search which means that if you are not on the front page, you are missing out clients. Now comes the main question “How do I rank my dental website to the first page of Google?”.
In order to rank your dental business on the first page, you will need to implement a proper SEO strategy for your dental website. SEO means “Search Engine Optimization” which broadly includes 2 factors namely “Online SEO” and “Offline SEO”. SEO, in general, includes many parameters like the number of backlinks, quality of backlinks, keywords, content, etc. Since SEO strategy changes with time due to Google updates, hence it is essential to remain updated with the latest SEO strategy.
You can alternatively hire a result-oriented dental SEO service to grow your dental practice.
2. Pay Attention to Video and Social Promotion
A dental clinic can also gain from other digital marketing strategies like Video promotion and Social network promotion. Youtube is one of the top 10 visited sites in the world and it ranks high in Google for several informational videos. Posting local-optimized Videos on Youtube can get additional clients to your dental clinic. Embedding videos on your website can lead to an increase in response from your website visitors because according to research, an average user spends 88% more time on a website with video. Further, videos convey your ideas and messages much better than a simple text on a website due to which the chances of getting leads increases.
In recent years, the perception about social media has been changing owing to its increasing potential and reach. Social networks have not been just limited to a networking channel, rather it has been successfully been employed as a business medium too. Out of all the new marketing platforms, social networks had the most impact on marketing strategies.
In older traditional marketing strategies, marketing and communication is one way but on social media, both the businesses and customers can interact, ask questions, leave ratings and can form a relationship due to which the trust level and business can grow much faster. Further, promoting your business on social networks can serve as an added advantage as having a business presence on social network adds more credibility.
3. Increase Local Engagement Offline
The traditional offline advertising strategies like free checkup, sponsorships, seminars, events, work well for dental marketing too even though they are more expensive when it comes to acquisition cost per client. Let us take a look at these methods one by one:
A) Free Checkup
The word “Free” carries its attractive power everywhere. Hold a basic free dental check-up campaign as part of dental hygiene or dental care campaign. Once you get people at your doorstep, then there are multiple ways to turn this free checkup into a business growth strategy. Make sure to extensively promote your free check-up campaign (through pamphlets, flyers, newspaper ads) at least 2 weeks ahead of the scheduled time so as to ensure maximum impact.
B) Sponsorship
Make a list of popular events in your region. After this, reach out to the event organizers for sponsoring these events in exchange for advertising of your clinic. You can also get your clinic name marketed by giving away sponsorship to students in schools and colleges.
C) Seminars
You can get hold a free seminar on dental problems and can get people to attend it through any of the offline advertising methods (through pamphlets, flyers, newspaper ads). In order to make your seminar more attractive, you can mix it with other marketing methods like free checkup.
D) Events
Hold out events catering to various issues and reward the event attendees with a discount on dental problems. You can also utilize these events to make people aware of growing dental problems and ways to treat or stay safe from such problems.
4) Utilize “Paid Ads” Online
Paid ads are one of the fastest ways to gain exposure online, however, they can drain your budget quickly without producing the desired result if you do not know how to optimize a paid ad marketing campaign. In order to run an effective paid ad campaign, you must know various dimensions related to it like choosing the right keywords, creating a well-designed landing page for higher conversions, track traffic and analyze your ads, perform A/B testing of landing pages, conversion tracking etc.
Paid ads come in different models like PPC (Pay Per Click), CPM (Cost Per Mile), CPA (Cost Per Action) etc. For most segments, PPC ads are the most preferred as they are effectively targeted and provide a good ROI (return on investment). Paid ads require a good enough budget because PPC rates on top performing platforms like Google are high owing to intense competition. Some of the most popular and converting paid ads platforms are listed below:
A) Google Adwords
Google Adwords is the top choice when it comes to paid advertising as Google can provide a high volume and ROI for your money. It also offers various targeting options like country, city, time of day etc. However, it is the most expensive ad platform owing to high competition and hence one needs to have a proper optimization strategy to ensure that the budget is effectively utilized.
Having inadequate knowledge of Adwords can quickly drain your budget because the amount of traffic available on Google Adwords is high enough to spend your budget quickly if targeting is very broad. So you must gain a good knowledge of Adwords to increase your “return on ad spend”.
B) Facebook Ads
Facebook ads have a comparatively lower cost than Adwords but the traffic quality and volume is not as great as you can get in Google Adwords. Facebook has a good reach and offers plenty of customization and targeting options. You can also make a dedicated Facebook page for your business and can get more people to subscribe to it using Facebook Ads.
C) Bing Ads
Bing ads have a much lower ad cost than Google Adwords but the volume is very low as compared to Adwords because the user base of the search engine “Bing” is very low as compared to “Google”. If you are new to “pay per click” (PPC) advertising and have a limited budget, then you can get started with Bing advertising.
There are also several smaller search engines and advertising channels which allow paid ads, however, if we consider the quality and volume of traffic, then they are nowhere near the above-listed ones.
Since Google ads have a greater reach and conversion ratio, hence most of the digital experts focus mainly on Google ads only. You can learn the strategy to optimize and run Google ads yourself or alternatively, you can hire a digital marketing firm/service to get exposure through paid ads online.
5) Use Online and Offline Content Marketing
Content marketing can become an effective tool to bring more clients to your business. When it comes to online content marketing, you can tie up with local online communities on social networks like Facebook, Instagram to provide regular tips and information related to dental problems. While providing such information, you can also offer discounts and coupons for your business which will provide an added incentive to your clients.
Apart from this, you can write guest posts on big health-related sites and forums to gain added visibility (and higher rankings for your website in search engines). By having your business name spread across many sites, forums and groups online, your business credibility increases with time which further opens the door to write for big news publications. For offline content marketing, you can publish your posts on local newspapers to gain more attention for your business.
6) Traditional Offline Marketing
Traditional offline marketing methods like flyers, postcards and billboards are still effective to gain wider public reach. Presenting your business/service on billboards of crowded streets and densely populated areas is much more effective than showcasing your offers on billboards along highways. Though they are not precisely targeted, but they are still employed successfully to gain more visibility. However, one important thing to keep in mind regarding this type of marketing is that it requires consistency and a greater budget than online marketing.
7) Reminders and Relationships
For a successful dental office, not only gaining new customers are important, but maintaining a relationship with existing customers is also crucial. The best part about targeting existing patients is that they can provide free “word of mouth” publicity if they like your service. For any patient visiting your dental office, you must make sure not only to give good service but should also try to get as much communication links as you can like phone number, address, email etc. The more information you have about your existing patients, the more you can utilize it to reach and advertise new promotional offers through various mediums like text, email, phone call, postcard etc.
Maintaining a healthy relationship with existing customers not only helps to get recurring business but it indirectly helps in the growth of your business through positive reviews online, client testimonials, free publicity offline among friends and relatives of your customers etc.
Hire an Affordable Dental Marketing Agency to Grow Your Business
There are several dental marketing companies which charge an arm and a leg to show results. If you would like to increase clients to your dental office at an affordable price, you can contact us to get started.
There are so many bits and pieces of modules which must be rightly arranged in order to see results of any marketing strategy. Any marketing strategy for dental office requires consistent focus, timely execution and constant update with the changing marketing dynamics. Many dentists do gain the knowledge to bring more clients with dental marketing but when they try to implement it, they do not remain consistent in their approach due to which they do not see success.
If you cannot afford to devote a portion of your time to learn dental marketing or to implement it, then you can try our service. We, at HealthBacklinks.com, focus primarily on the marketing of businesses in the health sector only due to which we have gained expertise in dominating our clients’ performance in Google search results and in increasing our clients business.
Feedback: Did you find our post useful? Do you have any other doubts or do you need further clarification on any topic? Which method do you intend to employ or which method has worked the best for you? If you have any of the above questions or any other relevant question, then feel free to ask it in the comments below!