Ideas to Market Your Dental Practice

When it comes to implementing top-notch dental marketing ideas, it’s worth remembering what will work and what doesn’t. Just because email marketing works for your fellow practitioner, it surely doesn’t mean it will work for yours as well. Marketing without a plan is like firing in the dark. It won’t help you any good.

However, if you want your marketing plan to be effective, back it up with a substantial outlay of cash. No matter how good a plan you have, if you don’t have the required budget, it will be no use. Have a look at these dental marketing ideas and remember to execute them intelligently and decisively.

 

Traditional Forms of Marketing

Direct mail marketing: You can never know what direct mail postcards can do to your practice. They are sometimes frustrating but stunningly effectual. A crucial thing to consider when marketing through postcards is that a professional should design them. It should be encouraging enough for prospective patients to contact you.

Newspaper Advertising: Advertising in your local newspaper can be immensely effective and it’s inexpensive as well. A great thing about newspaper advertising is you can target people who live close to your office. Often dentists make mistake of spending too much on targeting audience that is far away.

Referrals: Have a referral scheme in place and reward those who bring more referrals. Believe me it works like a charm. Reward can be in the form of small gift, discounted bills or free dental checkup.


Modern Marketing Strategies

A Professional Website: If you don’t have a website, then what are you waiting for? Most patients these days depend on dental websites for procuring information. You don’t stand a chance, if you don’t have a website. A professional website contains user-friendly design and content. Add some patient testimonials. It’s even better to have “before” and “after” photos.

Website Ranking: When we talk about online presence, search engine rankings are everything. If you don’t appear on the first page of Google, chances are you will never be contacted. Hence, get SEO done for your website.

A Dental Blog: Free leads to your website: that’s what you get with regular blogging. By writing helpful and informative posts that belong to your specialty, you can develop a list of followers who will turn to you for any dental related issue.

Don’t Leave YouTube Behind: Short introductory commercials is the need of the hour. Patients get to meet you even before they have actually met. Promoting your dental practice with YouTube is good even from SEO point of view.

These are ethical and proven ways to get your brand name out there. The clients will not come to you just like that. You have to make that extra effort to have a thriving enterprise on your hands.

Four Reasons It’s Priceless to Have a Practice Blog

More than half of patients instigate a search for a new medical practice over the internet. For this particular reason, many medical practices are running websites that showcases their services. In today’s diminishing economy, having a strong online presence is imperative. Without it, your practice won’t survive for long.

Of course, you can do much more. If you want to establish an enduring online presence, then have a blog linked to your website. A practice blog has numerous benefits. To commence with, it can draw more leads to a practice’s website. In addition, it can facilitate announcements about new services. However, a relatively low-cost venture is an exceptional attribute of blog. From medical practice marketing point of view, it makes an ideal investment.   

A blog can help any medical specialty build credibility in multiple ways, including the following:

Using a practice blog to promote upcoming events (if you are organizing any) can pay huge dividends. If your practice is participating in some community event or launching a new service, raise awareness among probable patients by writing something encouraging on your blog. However, post your blog in advance and not a day before the event. Give your readers sometime to grab the information.

In order to succeed in tough economical scenario, a medical practice has to stand out from the crowd. A blog builds a valuable platform for a physician to highlight that his/her specialty has the edge! You can use a blog in multiple ways, be it talking about innovations made by the healthcare industry or new developments that have taken place at your clinic recently.

Earlier in the healthcare industry, physicians used to stay in touch with patients on a constant basis. Now with the advent of new technology and higher demand of doctors’ time, they are unable to communicate with every patient. A blog provides the perfect platform to connect with patients. You can now easily develop your brand identity.

In addition to being a great platform to share information with patients, blogs can help strengthen a practice’s SEO efforts. As you pen down your blog, focus on making it keyword-rich.

A blog represents your medical practice. It can easily fit in your marketing campaign. It will bring timely positive results, only if you keep in mind its main purpose.

SEO for Medical Practices

Remarkably, there are deluge of things you can do to kick-start your 2013 medical marketing campaign with a boom and that too without making an investment. Thanks to search engine optimization, medical practice websites are now being considered by the patients to look for physicians.

Leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo have become trusted source of information for people looking for a doctor. For the past decade, conventional means of marketing have paved way to online search and as a medical practitioner, you need to adapt to this change as soon as possible.

In order to capitalize on SEO, one crucial attribute is the ability to recapitulate your website’s content. You need to make relevant changes from time to time to put your website in the driver’s seat. Once you have got hold of that, you are ready to roll!

KEYWORDS AND PHRASES: Keywords and phrases are primary elements to increasing leads to your website. In simpler terms, keywords are what patients type to search for a doctor. Pay attention to what keywords and phrases patients often use because in the U.S. alone, 95% of the internet fraternity accesses search engines each month. Google’s Keyword Tool will help you find a list of keywords that associate with your practice.

ON-PAGE SEO: On-page SEO generally means writing effective content for your website defining what is it all about. Once you have sorted out keywords, induce them into the website content to gain more traffic. When search engines index your web page, it will try to match the keywords on your site to give patients the best possible search result. On-page SEO also contains “Title Tags” and “Meta Descriptions.”

OFF-PAGE SEO: Off-page SEO is all about building credibility for your website through trust and content. Trust will depend on how you treat patients and content will come from articles, blogs and press releases. Off-page SEO provides necessary back links that help in improving website’s ranking.

VIDEO PROMOTION: Create a short professional video that introduces your practice and post it on YouTube. Search engines prefer websites that have professional videos. It not only helps in SEO, but also gives prospective patients a clear idea of your practice.

Why Content Matters for Dental Practices

When it comes to finding the right way to market a dental practice, there’s no messing with the content. Germane content speaks off the desires and needs of your patients in a way to motivate and get them to contact you. Content marketing is composed of fresh, informative and useful content to a dentist’s web page, blog and article. Content may come in diverse formats like text, video and images. Preference should be given to quality, rather than quantity.

Having original and relevant content updated regularly onto a dentist website makes it interesting to prospective patients. Your content must have the prowess to answer their queries, clear doubts, provide enough information about dentistry and more. Search engines also like revived content. Induction of fresh content makes sure your website is growing. In addition, it helps improve the website’s ranking in search engine listings.

A lot goes into writing a comprehensive content for dental practice. There are many techniques to write the text on your website to make it more influencing for patients to contact you. Some of them are listed below:

Reiterate the sentences so your website is about patients and services provided, not you.

Using relevant questions to initiate a thought process among prospective patients.

Engulfing “call to action” in a way to ensure patients call or visit your office.

Use of engaging phrases in the sentences to build rapport quickly.

Systematic use of keywords to ensure smooth search engine optimization.

Content marketing offers lead generation, brand awareness and website traffic for your dental practice. Newsletters, blog posts, e-mails and social media fall into content marketing strategies. You can reach a wider audience through these mediums.

Good, optimized content can make a huge difference to your dental practice. Dental industry possesses numerous skilled and experienced content writers. Their invaluable knowledge can prove to be a blessing in disguise for your practice. They know how to improve your website’s foundation so that search engines easily index it.

SEO Tips to Improve Your Practice Website’s Ranking

Search Engine Optimization, when done appropriately and with focus on top-notch quality, not only improves your search rankings but also enhances the entire website from search engines’ and patients’ perspective. And that should be the goal of your SEO campaign. So here are some groundbreaking tips that won’t just provide the obligatory boost to your website, rather they will turn a visit to your website a difference making experience:

The most crucial part from SEO point of view is quality content. You cannot fool the search engine bots for long if you have poor quality content. Nobody is going to give a damn about what your practice offers. Contrary, god content with precise information will be widely read and shared. Focus on making your website’s content as unique as possible.

Keyword research forms an integral but quintessential part of SEO. Google’s keyword tool will help you compile a list of suitable keywords for your medical practice. After sorting, place them tactically in your content, headlines and sub-headers.

Create Meta descriptions (short descriptions) for all your web pages with sorted out keywords. The content should be catchy and propelling enough for viewers to visit your practice’s website. These Meta descriptions are helpful in attracting potential patients’ attention.

Don’t forget to create content-relevant images that will boost your site’s ranking thanks to image search characteristics of search engines. Search spiders can’t analyze images, but they do index name of the image file. Make sure to name the file with your top keyword.

Using flash and images as text will only decrease your website’s ranking because search spiders do not index flash or image files. Stay away from flash animation and text that is in image form. Instead, use coding like jQuery or CSS, which create text-based content.

Web Video to Attract Patients

The gains from web videos for medical practices are crystal clear, and as a marketing avenue, it’s revving up. A web video is an impactful format that assists viewers gather knowledge better that text or images. The human brain extracts chunk of information presented in the form of motion, graphics and images, all combined. There is no doubt web video is proving to be a powerful marketing tool.

For medical practices, video marketing is essential if you want to withstand tough competition. Adding web video to your marketing strategies will surely affect your website traffic and patients because the avenue is so convincing. Web video has a significant influence on patients. Even in search engines, websites that have videos would relatively appear higher than those without.

So how to go about? As with any business, planning comes first. If you have identified your target audience, use that information to think about the content they would like to see. However, there are certain things to keep in mind before making a video for your website:

Your aim with a web video is to connect with patients in a way that gives them personal satisfaction so that they continue viewing. In the video, the emphasis should be on providing potential customers value. Otherwise, they’ll quickly lose interest.

Engrossment is the key factor. Think about the ways you can woo your audience. Content matters a lot. It should be precise and not contain worthless explanations about your services.

There has to be a certain degree of “call to action” in your web video. Organize a brainstorming session and think why your audience would share your video.

There is enormous amount of competition in online video marketing. Believe it or not, but it’s a fact. To fight this competition, employ the services of search engine optimization to help your video move up the ranks.

Getting the video perfect can make all the difference and how the buyer perceives your medical practice. Keep little things in mind like integrating social into video. This will further improve social sharing.

Best Ways to Market Your Medical Practice

There are many fallacies regarding what it takes to be effective in marketing a medical practice. Mere mention of the word “marketing” turns off many individuals in the healthcare industry because they see it as a waste of time and money. However, the present scenario is such that without medical marketing it would be hard for a practice to survive. If you have attempted to market your practice previously and have been ineffectual, it is time to explore new marketing opportunities. Here’s shedding light on some of the best ways to market your practice:

Specify the audience you want to target. Target marketing is an inexpensive way to draw new patients. You can categorize your audience based on sex, income level, age group, type of treatment needed, etc. It is crucial for physicians to spend their income wisely. Target marketing will help you in spending of your budget efficiently.

Brochures, either handed over to patients or mailed can be a powerful marketing tool that establishes credibility of your practice. A brief description about the practice, services, treatments available and contractual information will create an image that patients are looking for when finding the right physician.

No matter what comes, nothing beats internet marketing. A creative web page plays a key role in providing transparency to a practice. The purpose is to educate prospective patients so they can make the correct decision of visiting your practice. However, positioning of your website in the search engine listings matters a lot. For considerably higher ranking, employ the services of a prominent Search Engine Optimization company.

Many people choose not to respond to emails sent by medical practices. However, if your email contains proper information and good “call to action” content, it becomes highly valuable. Besides saving money on postage and printing costs, email marketing allows you to send crucial reminders to existing patients about appointments.

In order to establish a successful practice, you need a strong referral base. Build positive relationships with current patients and other practitioners. Reward those patients who provide referrals in the form of gifts such as free checkup, discount on the bill, etc. That way they will become eager to refer.

Medical Practice Advertising Ideas

Medical practices are like any other business. They too have advertising attributes. Whether you run a dental, cardiology, physical therapy or gynecology practice, advertising is what will make your practice noteworthy among potential patients. However, appropriate treatment and care for patients will remain the ultimate key in the expansion of patient base and retain full appointment books.

Often medical practitioners fail to understand how advertising can bring in more patients. Let us see in detail the medical advertising strategies that will help you build an established practice:

A practice logo is of very much importance. Create one for your practice or get it done with the help of professionals. Logos should be precisely designed with an ideal color theme in mind. It should be attractive enough for patients to visit your office. Don’t make the mistake of creating it too flashy. It may have a contradictory effect.

Create an informative brochure showcasing the specialties of your practice. Provide complete information including address, contact information, operational hours, etc. Use bold font to highlight what services your practice normally offers. Slip in some in the newspapers or leave them in your lobby.

No matter how much influence internet has today, people still watch television. Through television advertisements, you can convey the right message, which would otherwise be difficult with a logo or brochure. An investment in television can be great for your practice, as you will begin to see positive results immediately.

Newspapers are always enthusiastic to give advertising space. Compared to previous decades, people now are more information hungry. With newspaper ads, you can reach a wider audience, especially the old age people. Make sure the advertisement is concise and designed by a professional designer.

The concept of Yellow Pages in 21st Century might be conventional, but that depends upon the area where you operate. If people living there are not in terms with the internet yet and look for Yellow Pages for information, you will be in a win-win situation.

Marketing Strategies for Medical Practices

Marketing Strategies for Medical Practices

Marketing a medical practice is amiss if you restrict to just regional press promotion. It will not help you in anyway. And marketing without the right strategies will not only pull you away from desired goals, but also give you sleepless nights. These are tough economic times and you need to be aggressive about informing your referring doctors and your patient base, both existing and new, on what quality services you can provide, to ensure that you get better output for your medical practice. There is a saying “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.” You have to be tough enough to battle this phase. With economic future uncertain, these groundbreaking medical marketing strategies will get you closer to your desired goals:

Before stepping on the paddle, consider the monetary side of marketing. How much are you at ease spending? Does your budget allow you to go over the limit? Such calculations will help you arbitrate what strategies are useful for your practice. An ideal blend of conventional and modern marketing methods would do wonders for your practice.

A user-friendly website is critical to attract patients. Your website should have relevant information, emulating your credentials, specialized services, working hours and much more. More than anything else concentrate on the content. Forget the flashy images. It’s the content, which encourages prospective patients to call your office.

Another importunate technical investment is Search Engine Optimization, in which experts work through multiple strategies to make sure your website ranks higher on the list when a patient searches Google, Yahoo or Bing. Remember: competition is tough in search engine optimization. So hire only a repute company.

As a medical practitioner, you want your patients to be informed constantly. Create a blog for your practice. Blogging is one of the prolific marketing strategies that showcases your practice in a broader sense. In addition, it attracts much needed leads to your website.

The concept of social media marketing has panned out well for medical practitioners in recent times. Creating a social networking profile on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn has given doctors an extra opportunity to inform patients about their practice.

Online Marketing Strategies for Dentists

Marketing Strategies for Dentists

Exploring the right marketing strategies have proven to grow a dental practice and attract new patients. With people using the internet more than ever, it’s significant to have a strong online presence. When contemplating online dental marketing strategies, it’s best to commence with the basics and build on the relationship with your patients. Here are some simple internet marketing strategies for dentists:

Google Places

Google offers free listing of business. Make sure you have one. This is a rapid-fire way to ensure your practice information shows up in local search. 90% of the internet fraternity search Google to browse information. Having a listing in Google Places increases your chances of being recognized. Google Places offers an area for image of your clinic, working hours and links to your website.

SEO Friendly Website

There is more to online dental marketing than just having a website. You need to be aggressive while marketing your website. Search engine optimization will ensure that your site appears considerably high search engine listings. Make sure your website has fresh content based on particular keywords.

Have a go at Email Marketing

Investment of time and money is the key feature of email marketing. Acquire email addresses of your current patients. Provide information on latest developments at your office. Send them appointment reminders. You can easily increase revenue with email marketing.

Social Media Platforms

A unique way to market dental practice online is to use social media platforms. Social media is all about connectivity. A Facebook fan page is easy to set up and so is a profile on Twitter. It is a great way to provide updates from your office, inform patients on new procedures, and promote events happening in your office. Encourage users in a way that makes them like your profile.

These strategies will help you expand your patient base, connect with other professionals in your area and get the positive word out on your dental practice.

Improve and Enhance Your Office Staffs Phone Skills

Your supporting staff probably is not inclined towards knowing how patients and customers come across your practice, particularly over the phone. Those accountable for handling telephonic conversations often judge that they are being obliging and pleasurable, but the actuality is quite different. Many front office representatives view telephone as a source of annoyance and dissatisfaction. This irritation often comes aloud and clear to the caller. They either lack skills to represent the doctor or are not fully trained to communicate effectively on the phone. Unfortunately, your practice pays the price. Year by year you lose thousands of dollars due to mishandling of incoming telephone calls and new patient phone inquiries.

There are a number of simple and easy steps you can take to radically improve your staff’ telephonic skills. But there are few, which you can implement straight away:

When existing and probable patients are calling your practice during operational hours, they expect the representative to pick up the call quickly. A delay in attending the call or letting it go unanswered can have a bad impact on the patients and they can avoid scheduling an appointment.

The greeting should always be professional. Each staff member must follow a precise and reliable procedure when attending the phone. Answering the phone in a casual manner is strictly discouraged. Whether your staff knows the caller personally or not, a proper greeting is required.

Keep a track record of patients who consistently call the practice for similar reasons such as to schedule an appointment, reschedule, cancel, inquire about a bill, ask about specific services, etc. Keeping a list of such callers will help your staff prepare answers to those questions. This will further ensure that anybody in the team can answer fundamental questions when patients call.

Always smile while you speak. Smile is a quintessential tool in making a positive phone impression. Current and prospective patients expect to have a sense of comfort when they call your practice. Convey that with a soft voice and a smile.

What Social Media holds for Dental Practice?

Social media is a swashbuckling business if only one knows how to do it right. Have a look at Facebook! The user database will tell you the whole story. There are more than 300 million tweets everyday on Twitter.

Many dental practitioners have started to shun down traditional marketing gateways and realized that in order to build a stronger connection to their patients, social media platforms is the place to be. More dentists and medical groups are going beyond the conventional doors of marketing to connect with the patients. First, let’s look at what social media has in store for dentists:

Brand Identity.
Familiarization with products and services.
Targeted prospective clients.
Full appointment book and hefty ROI.
Client faith and trustworthiness.

Social media is everything including a valley of conversations. The difficult part is how to jump into a conversation or start one that will encourage others to join. That happens because instead of talking at the people, you are talking with them. Patients find social media to be the place to get relevant information about dentists. With social media marketing in your kitty, you can achieve various set goals including:

Keeping an open eye on what is being said about your dental practice.
Quick response to the questions, concerns, and needs of prospective and current patients.
Strengthen your response so that it reaches more individuals.

Social media should be an essence and not an afterthought to your practice’ marketing program. Develop a clear framework for evaluating the potential of social media, invest in training for the team responsible for handling social media activities, create a performance chart and keep track of things. A blend of these things will give your dental practice the necessary boost.

The bottom line is you cannot treat social media marketing as an option in 21st Century. It leads the pack when it comes to dental marketing strategies. It creates buzz, build your practice’s brand online, target potential patients, and convince the world that you can do a lot better than your counterparts can.

Ensure the Future of Your Practice In 2013

2013 is here and it’s time to focus on creating a growth strategy for your practice. To ensure a secured future for your practice in the New Year, you have to follow the current medical marketing standards. Often in medical practices, marketing takes a back seat. No matter how big or small your practice is you must possess a growth strategy to measure your practices performance year over year.

To ensure the future of your practice in 2013, you need to be fully engaged with a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy should comprise of a plan, which many practices fail to make. The downfall of this is that practices that operate without a marketing plan tend to spend much more than they would if they created a marketing plan. A step-by-step strategic plan ensures that you are poised for success.

Discover smarter, more resourceful methods to use internet media and optimize your patient connection in today’s digitized world. Internet has revolutionized all the attributes of modern-day life, be it banking, retailing, consumer electronics or medical practices. Advertise your practice online by with article and blog writing, creating social media profiles and constantly updating it, search engine optimization for your website, etc.

It is important to train your staff for the growth and success of your practice. They play a crucial role in retaining patients. Your staff’s ability to handle patients can actually make or break your practice. Prior to visiting your clinic, a patient interacts with your staff. If they fail to clarify his/her doubts on phone or in person, the consequences may be severe starting from a dent in your reputation. Organize various training programs to polish your staff’s skills.

Meet your clients’ needs with compassion and satisfy them with outstanding treatment and care. Satisfied patients are good source of referrals. A positive word of mouth from them can build your practice’s credibility along with fetching more patients. To become a successful physician, always focus on what your clients require.

Take the help of an expert in healthcare practice growth and success. It’s never too late to get assistance from medical marketing agencies that primarily focus on practice’s growth. They offer marketing ideas ranging from website development to managing social media profiles for your practice.
Follow these marketing trends and you’ll be able to maintain your practice independence in 2013. 

Dental Website Marketing Ideas

Nearly ¾ of the internet users globally search for healthcare related issues online. As a dentist, the idea of having a website might bring a smile on your face. But hold your horses! A bad first impression on a potential patient may drive him/her away from your website. You have to make sure your website is aesthetically pleasing and performs astonishingly when turning your prospects into patients.

Nevertheless, sometimes it so happens that your website’s performance doesn’t matches your expectations. As a result, you lose patients. A lot goes into creating a website. However, to make your website result-oriented follow these elements:

Your site requires a good “call to action” to appeal to the patients. More importantly, it needs to convey the right message. If your USP is general dentistry, then stay off from mentioning huge operations. The design plays a significant role in capturing your visitor’s attention. This part specially cannot be overlooked. It should be simple yet appealing.

Marketing your website in the correct manner is critical. Your entire site must comply with a marketing plan. Every image, word and link should be projected towards achieving your desired goals i.e. generating new clients.

After developing the website, search engine optimization is obligatory. It contains both off-page and on-page promotion like link building, classifieds, bookmarking, local business listing and so on. When prospective patient types a certain keyword related to dental practice, your website should be one of the first listed.

Words have the undisputed power to attract patients. There are various articles and blogs submission websites where you can submit written data to generate a healthy traffic to your main website. In order to maintain the flow of articles, hire a professional copywriter who will make sure of an effective communication between you and patients.


A dental website is a mirror image of your practice. Getting it right will not only build your credibility but also add to your current patients.

Most Valued Dental Marketing Strategies in 2012

Marketing is an important feature of establishing a solid patient base in your dental practice. Perfect dental marketing strategies would allow you to know exactly what your patients think about your practice. Unfortunately, conventional methods don’t work in today’s internet savvy environment. So you’ve got to make the best possible use of available sources. Here are some dental marketing ideas to which patients responded in 2012:

Dental Website: Many dentists believe word of mouth is best source to generate a new lease of patients. However, this is a misconception in 21st Century. Lot of prospective patients prefer internet to other mediums to search for a dentist. They find website as the most valued method to gather information. Having a professionally created dental website will only make your practice reputable.

Dental Marketing with Social Media: Utilizing various social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn provide a dentist the ability to cohere with probable dental patients directly. The difference between social media and other marketing avenues is that social media requires investment of time. An extra bit of time and effort can go a long way in providing a rewarding experience.

Deal with Negative Feedback: Handling negative online reviews can be a headache for many dentists. One negative review can hamper the reputation of the practice. The only way to turn a negative review into a positive one is to deal with it directly. Actively listen to what patients are referring to in their comments. Do the needful. Negative online reviews can be a dental marketing opportunity only if you know how to tackle them satisfactorily.

Video Marketing: Studies showed more than half of the dental websites listed in top Google search listings possess introductory videos. Dental videos are an easy way to gain patients’ attention and beat competition in search results. Nothing beats video marketing when it comes to having that extra on your dental website.