If you’re looking to expand your practice, take the time to explore all your different marketing options. Services like SEO and social media provide slow but steady growth, whereas pay-per-click advertising can aggressively grow your patient base, but with an increased cost. This breakdown helps you review your dental office marketing options and make an informed decision!
The Benefits of Dental Office Marketing
When your practice is just starting out, it can be tempting to just let new patients find you organically. But steadily growing your patient base is essential for the ongoing health of your practice, especially as patients may move away, change insurance providers, or leave your practice for other reasons. Having a strategic and consistent plan for your dental office marketing keeps your practice busy, increases revenue, and helps expand the impact you can have in your community. So whether you just founded your practice, or have been in business for years, marketing is worth the investment!
Use Patient Reviews to Build Your Reputation
When you look for a new service, where do you start? Like everyone else, you probably look at review websites like Yelp, Google My Business, and Angie’s List to make sure you’re hiring the right provider. To maximize the impact of your reviews, ask your patients to leave positive reviews on these sites. If you work with ProSites, we help you send automated review requests after annual appointments, but you can also do this manually by writing your own emails.
When choosing which review websites to focus your efforts on, we recommend evaluating your competition. If they have the most reviews on Yelp, send your patients there to submit reviews for your practice. Once you have a comfortable amount of reviews on the first site, you can direct patients to another platform. By switching between all three reviews platforms, potential patients can read about your great customer service wherever they look!
Master Your Social Media Pages
Social media is an essential tool for attracting leads and engaging with your current patients. Facebook allows you to continually interact with your community, share dental care tips, and build your brand awareness. To maximize the impact of your dental office marketing, you should launch a few posts every week. Rather than writing your posts one at a time, compose one month’s worth of posts and have your office staff copy and paste the content onto your Facebook page on scheduled days. If your staff is too busy, you can also hire a service like ProSites to create content from scratch and post it for your team.
Use Search Engine Optimization to Gain Local Traffic
You’ve likely heard the term “Search Engine Optimization,” and its abbreviation “SEO,” as it’s an essential part of your dental office marketing. Since patients won’t drive too far to visit their dentist, local SEO should be your central focus to find patients near you. For each service you offer, like family dentistry, teeth cleaning, root canals, you’ll want to create custom content that is focused around your location. This will help potential patients find you when they search for the services they need most!
It takes time and dedication to create an ongoing SEO strategy, especially since Google constantly re-evaluates pages and prioritizes different factors. Since dental offices are busy supporting patients, SEO may be the best option to outsource. Dental office marketing services like ProSites will create pages that focus on the best keywords for your practice and include all the technical minutia that will help you to rank.
Conclusion
While dental office marketing requires a lot of time and effort, it helps bring in a steady stream of new patients that will boost your practice’s revenue. If you decide to focus on your patients and outsource your help to a team of marketing experts, reach out to ProSites for a consultation! We have a team of experts that can help you develop a strategy and execute a tailored marketing plan!
