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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
