Good dental centers are built on great reputations. If you help someone with an emergency root canal, make a child’s first visit to the dentist fun, or solve a problem during a routine check-up, your patient will have a positive experience. You can bet your bottom dollar they’ll tell their friends. Word of mouth is the oldest form of marketing, and it’s incredibly powerful.
When the time comes to scale your business, however, you’ll need to develop a digital marketing strategy. This is an essential tool when it comes to bringing in more clients.
Here are five genius ways to grow your practice quickly and easily.
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Content Marketing
Imagine a world where your practice is at the top of every Google search. Sounds good, right? That’s what content marketing aims to achieve. Here are the core elements.
Read more: Learn the basics of content marketing.
Blogging
Blogging is one of the most powerful tools for growing your client-base as a dental practice. Its value comes in its longevity. A post written today could still be a key part of your sales funnel years from now. If you’re wondering how a blog can be part of a sales funnel in the first place, let us explain.
First, it’s an effective way to add combinations of keywords to your website to boost the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website, which builds awareness of your practice’s brand. It’s also a fantastic way to answer frequently asked questions and help people understand that you can help solve their problems, which will generate leads. Content lets your brand personality shine, which ensures people have a positive experience while interacting with your business.
Blogging, building awareness, generating leads, and demonstrating brand personality all help to draw potential clients to your website, where they can learn about the services you offer. The last of these can be particularly beneficial for dental practices, as many people feel uncomfortable visiting a dentist, so being able to show some personality and warmth in your blogs can alleviate that.
Read more: Learn the tried and tested blogging technique we teach our clients.
SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) should be a major focus of your digital marketing strategy if you want to be successful. It makes your content easy to find on search engines, which allows customers to find you when they need your products and services, which generates leads and allows you to grow your dental practice! There are five key components we use for SEO for our clients.
The first is keywords, the terms people search when they are looking for information. In addition to the obvious single words that you may be familiar with, we also use “long-tail keywords.” These are actually phrases, such as “SEO for dental practices,” and are terms that people are likely to search.
The second key component in SEO is called backlinking. Search engine use links as a sort of referral system. Think of it as the website posting the link is saying that the website the like goes to is worth checking out. This helps webpages rank higher in search results. Now that we’ve pointed it out, you might notice the links scattered throughout this post.
Read more: Find out the other three components of our SEO strategy here.
Social Media
Social media is now an essential element of every successful digital marketing strategy. It is an easy way of connecting directly with your client base and can allow you to provide a more personal touch. It also opens up a two-way dialogue with your clients, allowing them to provide criticism and feedback of your service, which is invaluable when you want to grow your practice.
There’s an ever-growing number of social media platforms and the way they are best used varies between them. The biggest is obviously Facebook, however, its user-base tends to be older now as younger people gravitate towards newer platforms. Among these are Twitter and Instagram; Instagram in particular is a great platform for what we call “influencer marketing,” which involves people with lots of followers making honest reviews about a product or service in return for payment or free goods/services. The latest platform to come to prominence is TikTok, which is super popular among young people and has also seen lots of successful influencers.
The right platform for your practice will depend on your target demographic, as well as the amount of time and money you’re able to spend to develop and share your messages.
Read more: Which social media platforms work best for dental practices?
Digital Advertising
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is one of the biggest revolutions in advertising in recent times. Because of the huge amount of data Facebook collects about its users, you’re able to target your dental practise to exactly the demographic you want to be serving! Facebook ads are also dynamic, so you can constantly tweak them to improve outcomes and test wording and imagery optimize performance.
An effective process for determining the best way to run ads is called A/B testing. In this model, you can run two different versions of the same ad at the same time, with different text or images, to see which one performs best. That way, you get immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t, so you can ensure you’re getting the maximum impact possible from each ad.
Read more: What are Facebook Ads and how do we use them?
Google Ads
Google is the world’s most popular website, and it has been estimated that as many as 63% of users would click on Google Ads. It’s been estimated that it handles as many as 7 billion searches a day, meaning that there’s a huge amount of potential in putting your dental practice in people’s eye-line. Google reports that its advertisers make an average of $8 for every $1 spent. That’s an 800% ROI!
Most people probably already know what Google Ads look like, but you may not realize that there are two different systems that underpin the two types. The first type is Search Ads. These typically show up at the top of your search results page and can be distinguished from “organic” results by the little green box with “ad” in it next to the URL. The system used to rank these ads is called pay-per-click. This means that companies bid a maximum amount they are willing to pay each time someone clicks on their ad. This, along with data about the usefulness of the ad and the page it sends people to, is used to determine whether your ad beats out the competition to be shown in the best spots.
The second type of ad is the display ad. These allow visual imagery to be used alongside text and are shown on websites, typically down the sides or across the top of webpages. They can be identified by a small grey box that says “ad.” The pricing structure for these differs because they can be used differently. The use of visuals means you can achieve the goals of your marketing campaign without having people actually click on the ad. This is why this type of ad is based on a pay-per-impression structure, where the company pays each time someone “sees” the ad.
Read more: Do Google Ads work for marketing your business?
Ready to get started?
We hope this post shows some of the ways you can rapidly grow your business. You can do them yourself, but if you’d like some professional help, we have years of experience and a strong track record in dental marketing. Schedule a free consultation.
