Attending conferences are a great way to stay on top of current dental digital marketing best practices, but we understand that you must be selective about the times you’re out of the office and which conferences you attend.
This year we went to the Dental Digital Marketing Conference and learned about some key takeaways for your dental practice.
Below are the top three takeaways from the conference that can be used to benefit your practice:
1. New patients are important, but retention is key to practice growth. You’ve likely considered search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing to help your practice attract more patients. However, your efforts are wasted if the patients you worked so hard to get don’t continue to stay loyal to your practice. This is where data and digital marketing come into play.
You can use data to determine if your practice needs to more effectively collect pre-appointments by examining how many you already have scheduled. Getting patients to schedule their next appointment before they leave your practice is crucial as they are far less likely to remember after they’ve left your office. Digital marketing help remind patients via email, text, or phone calls thus reducing no-shows and saving you time trying to reschedule.
2. Social media is the new(ish) word of mouth marketing. The best way to stay top-of-mind to patients year round is through a strong social media presence. Not only does this help build brand equity and loyalty, but it helps patients view you as a trusted expert and forms a stronger relationship with them.
Social media also helps you increase referrals. When someone on social media asks their network for recommendations on a dentist, people can comment and tag your practice, directing users immediately to your profile. If your Facebook page has been set-up correctly, when someone tags you, it’ll show a profile picture, aggregate review rating, and practice address.
Once people click through to your social media profile, you’ll want to include basic information such as hours, contact information and a website address, in addition to a consistent, steady stream of relevant posts and content.
3. Reviews are more important to consumers than ever before. Prospective patients live in a world where other people’s opinions and experiences with your practice can be found instantly and rely on this feedback to help them decide if they want to contact your practice.
Collecting positive reviews is now a must-have, seeing that 88% of online shoppers incorporate reviews into their purchase decision. Here’s a step-by-step way to collect more reviews:
-
- Step 1: Identify two or more patients per day that you request a review.
- Step 2: Ask the dental hygienist to ask the patient what their highlight was from their visit at the end of the appointment.
- Step 3: Inform the patient on why it’s important for them to share that experience with other people online. For example, “more people would get the help they need if they heard from people like you.”
- Step 4: Ask the patient for “help” by leaving an honest review.
- Step 5: Offer to walk the patient through the process of leaving a review by pointing them in direction of your directory of choice (Google, Yelp, Review Marketing Page, etc.)
- Step 6: Set a goal for how many reviews you want to collect, and measure against it to ensure you stay on track.
Following this review collection process will take time, but can pay off when building patients’ trust in your practice.
Patient retention, social media management, and positive reviews are all must-haves in today’s era of dental marketing. To learn more about how ProSites can manage this for you, call (888) 932-3644 to talk to an Internet Marketing Advisor. You can also download the Definitive Guide to Online Marketing today.
