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5 Tactics to Target the Right New Patients

When it comes to dental practice marketing, identifying and targeting your ideal target audience can help you have more effective marketing messages and increase practice growth. While targeting your ideal patient may seem simple in theory, it can be difficult to execute. The key is getting in front of potential new patients in the right place at the right time, with the right message that resonates with your audience.

Here are five actionable tips to help you attract your ideal patients.

1. Define your ideal patient by creating personas. According to Buffer, “A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.”

Creating marketing personas helps focus your marketing strategies and tactics so that your efforts are likely to resonate with your targeted audience. In this case, you’ll want to create a persona based on the type of patients that you want to attract. Once you have identified your persona(s), put yourself in their shoes. Think of what their goals are – a mother with a goal of keeping her three kids happy and healthy – and what their challenges may be in trying to achieve their goals– like finding enough time to go to the dentist between working a full-time job and juggling after-school activities. This way you can create marketing messages that resonate with your audience and address their concerns (flexible hours, driving directions, programs for fearful patients).

Check out this guide to help you get started.

2. Answer common patient questions with content that includes keywords a patient is likely to use. Once you identify the types of patients that you want to target (e.g. moms in your community), put yourself in their shoes to think about what types of keywords they’d use to find services that you offer. Moms are likely to search for children or family dentist. Young adults may want cosmetic dentistry or teeth whitening services. Use online tools like AdWords keyword planner to find and expand your list of keywords to utilize throughout your website’s content.

Alternatively, you can use Google’s “suggested search” and “related search” to find other phrases that your target audience might use.

Related search (bottom of results page):

3. Earn search engine credibility by optimizing your existing content with keywords. You can improve your ranking on search results pages by creating new content with targeted keywords (e.g. cosmetic dentistry) and also including these words within your existing website pages.

In the eyes of search engines, optimizing your content improves topic-relevance and credibility, which encourages search engines like Google to show your website high on a results page. Because prospective patients trust search engines results, they perceive higher organic rankings as more trustworthy recommendations.

Pro-tiphyperlink all new content that you create (e.g. your blog posts) to other pages on your website throughout the article. For example, an article comparing composite fillings to amalgam fillings could include links to other pages on your website that talk about the various types of fillings that you offer. Doing these types of links helps draw readers deeper into your website, and allows search engines to easily crawl your website and rank it favorably.

4. Use a blend of traditional and digital marketing channels. Not all of your patients will respond exclusively to digital messaging like email, search, and social media. Use traditional marketing methods, such as postcards, to keep a balanced marketing mix. Dental postcards can be beneficial since they have staying power—people can’t just click “delete” like they can on an email—and people may put them up on their fridge as a reminder.

5. Consider pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC advertising means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. When launching a PPC campaign, you must identify:

• Your audience

• Keywords your audience uses to find answers to their questions

• Amount of search volume per each keyword

• The specific keywords you want to target and bid on

 In creating a persona and keyword strategy, you can utilize this information toward your pay-per-click campaign.

PPC is useful because it can be fully-customized and tailored to your target markets. Additionally, PPC can show results very quickly, as your ads can go live within a day and be shown toward a very specific audience. Read the guide to PPC dental advertising to learn more about how it works.

Want to learn more about targeting the right audience for your practice? Call (888) 932-3644 or fill out the form below to review your plan with an Internet Marketing Adviser today!