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Dental Marketing Best Practices

Whether your dental office is just getting started—or you’ve been marketing for years—it’s essential to keep up-to-date on the best practices for dental marketing. By creating a comprehensive plan combining an optimized website, SEO, social media, and email marketing, your firm can dominate local search results and attract new patients!

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Create an Optimized Dental Marketing Website

The first step to marketing your office is to create a professional website. Ultimately, there are thousands of different designs to choose from, but each should have the same basics. Here’s a checklist of all the features that will help your website stand out!

  • Mobile optimization (resizing correctly on phones and tablets)
  • Dental care content to attract new patients and increase traffic
  • Forms and Calls-to-Action to capture the contact info of new leads
  • Patient reviews to support your reputation marketing efforts
  • Optimized user-experience, so new visitors intuitively understand your site’s navigation
  • Full descriptions of the services you offer, each hosted on its own page for optimal SEO

If you’re not sure your website makes the cut, reach out to our dental marketing experts today! We’ll walk through your current website and offer recommendations to fully optimize your marketing.

Talk to a Dental Marketing Expert!

Ramp Up Your Social Media Presence

When you’re ready to attract new clients, it’s essential to take full advantage of social media. Given that almost 70% of American adults are on Facebook, having a fully-fleshed out profile and sharing frequent posts will help you to organically attract new clients in your area. And when you’re ready to aggressively grow your business, Facebook also provides targeted advertising options that will help your practice bring in new patients in your area! In order to make the most of your dental marketing, here’s what you should be doing on social:

  • Posting five times a week to stay top-of-mind with your clients—and attract prospects
  • Sharing compelling content that conveys your expertise
  • Quickly responding to messages and comments so visitors feel welcomed and appreciated
  • Keeping your hours, contact info, and services accurate and up-to-date

Mastering Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The most technical of digital marketing techniques is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When Google is deciding what websites to rank on the first page for each search, SEO helps them narrow down their options and pick out winners. SEO is constantly changing as Google updates their algorithms frequently throughout the year, but here are the current dental marketing best practices:

  • Utilize central keywords throughout your website
  • Have a separate page for each of your specializations, like cleanings or root canals
  • Ensure that each page on your website has at least 300 words of content
  • Utilize headers (H1s and H2s) and ensure you include important keywords in your H1s
  • Add meta descriptions to each page (160 characters or less)
  • Include alt descriptions on all images, especially your photo and pictures of your office
  • Highlight your location frequently, as you want to attract people in your neighborhood
  • Resubmit your XML Sitemap to Google Search Console whenever you make major changes

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

While ranking on Google can bring in a constant flow of new business, there’s another method to get your name in front of interested prospects. Pay-Per-Click advertising allows you to appear before other listings for the keywords of your choosing, and this can be a quick way to fill your appointment book. Though the most important element of PPC is consistent testing, here are a few best practices to get you started:

  • Fully optimize your keywords based on the services you want to offer
  • Include location on all keywords so you’re targeting the right audience
  • A/B test both headlines and copy to see what performs best
  • Organize your keywords by keyword groups and direct them to relevant landing pages
  • Monitor the results of your campaigns and pause the ones that aren’t providing ROI
  • If you’re being outbid by competitors, consider raising your budget

Dental Marketing Postcards

Direct mail is sometimes thought of as a thing of the past, but it’s still thriving in the dental marketing industry. The ability to reach people in your neighborhood for the cost of a card and a stamp is an impactful way to fill your appointment book. Here are some best practices for conducting your direct mail campaigns:

  • Use precise geotargeting: People aren’t going to travel for more than 30 minutes to see their dentists, so ensure you’re reaching out to the zip codes immediately surrounding your practice.
  • Include some sort of offer or promotion. If the people you’re reaching out to already have a dentist, you need to give them a compelling reason to switch.
  • Include your full contact information, including phone number, email, address, and social media handles. You want to make it easy for prospects to connect with you!
  • If you provide the ability to book appointments online, mention this on the mailer and provide a link to the direct URL where they can book their visit.
  • In order to track conversions and understand your return on investment, consider directing them to a unique landing page that includes the ability to book appointments.
  • If you’re sending it out in an envelope, use a hand-attached stamp rather than a pre-printed one. This looks like a real person prepared the letter and increases open rates.
  • Don’t send it out to your existing clients, as it can spark confusion and frustration. You can easily do a V-lookup on Excel to remove existing clients from your list.

Highlighting Patient Reviews

Given that dental practices rely largely on word-of-mouth, it’s essential to collect reviews and provide what marketers call “social proof.” When prospects see reviews on your site, they recognize you as a trusted authority in the neighborhood. There are a few best practices to collecting reviews, so here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Create review pages on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Dental Directories
  • Ask clients in-person, as they’re more likely to respond to a friendly face-to-face request
  • Add a bit of text that says “Review Us!” on your practice’s email footer
  • Run a promotion with a raffle entry for everyone who reviews you
  • Highlight your best reviews in separate social media posts

Delighting Your Existing Clients

As any marketing expert will tell you, it’s more expensive to recruit a new client than to retain an old one. That’s why delighting your current patients should be an integral part of your dental marketing plan! While your greatest asset will lie in a friendly office and excellent customer service, there are other excellent ways to delight your existing clients. Here are some tips:

  • Have an automated reminder system that sends notifications about upcoming appointments
  • Quickly respond to Facebook messages, emails, and phone calls to your office
  • Provide dental resources to help patients care for their teeth between visits
  • Post on social media at least five times a week to boost engagement
  • Give out branded swag…bonus points for unique offerings typical dentists won’t have!
  • Share personable messages, staff photos, and events on Facebook to build community
  • Volunteer with local organizations and schools and highlight this on your website

Video Marketing for Dentists

If your dental practice faces a lot of competition, it’s essential to find ways of standing out from the crowd. Video marketing for dentists gives you the opportunity to show up first on Google search results, appear on YouTube, and make potential patients feel welcomed and supported. Here are some of the benefits of incorporating video in your dental marketing strategy:

  • Our video marketing team comes to your practice to capture footage of your location and staff
  • Google often places videos ahead of organic results, so you can rank above your competition
  • You’ll likely be one of the first dentists in your area to market on YouTube
  • Nervous patients will feel more comfortable after seeing a video introduction
  • Showcase your friendly staff and gorgeous dental office
  • Create video testimonials from your long-time patients to build your local reputation
  • ProSites provides constant reporting and metrics so you can track engagement and leads

Mastering Your Dental Marketing

Building your practice requires ongoing testing, support, and dental marketing expertise. If you decide you want a dedicated dental marketing team to help attract new patients, reach out to ProSites today!

Talk to a Dental Marketing Expert!