By In this age and time, competent dental practices know the importance of dental marketing better. If properly done, it not only brings in new patients to a practice but also contributes strengthening ties with existing patients.
Online marketers in London are of the opinion that the most challenging part of dental marketing is to draw strategies about how to market a dental practice. There is no fixed number of strategies that can bring you success. Strategies largely depend on your creativity and innovation. You can easily blend different strategies to yield the best result.
Let us explore some tried and tested methods to market any dental practice in the following sections of the blog post.
Table of Contents
Mingle with the community
Dental practices look for patients within a limited geographical periphery. In other words, they all are local businesses by nature and count upon the local community for their patient flow.
Do the necessary spadework to know your community better. Invest your time and effort in doing that. Try building personal relationships with members from the neighbouring community. How do you achieve that? Attend events and festivals, sponsor a small-scale sporting competition, and volunteer to teach dental hygiene at the neighbourhood school. There are lots of ways to get nearer and be a part of the local community. All these efforts work on how the community sees you. Gradually and automatically, your reputation will spread through word-of-the-mouth campaigning.
Build your community on social media
Social media is another great tool reaching out to your target audience, build and nurture relationship with them. Facebook is a tried and tested platform for dental practices to build online patient communities. Provide your updates and other relevant information to your audience over social media regularly to stay in touch with your patients. Collecting positive reviews from patients is an excellent approach to market your practice. All these things or factors provide more potential touch-points to new patients enabling them to draw a positive impression about you while meeting for the first time.
Invest in local SEO
Optimising your website for the search engines using local keywords is the assured approach to drive new patients to your practice. Remember, it won’t serve your purpose in any possible way when your practice is located in downtown London at Harley Street and a patient based in Edinburgh searches you out on the web.
Marketing dental practices with local SEO means ranking for terms like “London dentist” than only “dentist”. This marketing approach not only allows you zero-in upon your target audience easily but also awards you with a distinct edge in voice search.
Create a robust, well-navigated, user-friendly website
Chances are greater that the maiden interaction with your potential patients will occur across the virtual web. So it is important that you cut out a positive and reliable first impression. Your site must look professional with easy, logical navigations and comprehensive information.
Rely on content marketing to offer greater value
Skilled marketers working at a renowned dental marketing agency in London stress on using content marketing to offer greater value to your target audience or patients. It is the approach to use content in form of text (blog posts, articles and e-books), graphics and others to:
- Bring visitors to a site
- Earn their trust and build relationships
- Finally converting them to customers (patients for dental practices)
When you publish blogs and FAQs as a part of on-site content marketing, you can easily add fresh content as well as new keywords to your site. This helps securing higher rankings on SERP to drive more traffic to the site.
Invest in Google Ads (AdWords) campaigns
Google offers a robust and reliable pay-per-click (PPC) platform in form of AdWords. It allows you display your ad to those web users, who are searching for specific keywords. When they search for “London dentist” or “Harley Street dentist” your practice will automatically pop up.
Make sure adding location-based keywords in Google Ads (AdWords) campaign. This boosts the relevance of placing your advertisement. While highlighting unique offers and other impressive features that set your practice apart, use headlines and descriptions.
Send out postcards and mailed offers
A dentist office caters to the local audience. Considering this fact, consider sending out mailed offers and post cards to the local community say within a radius of 4 kilometers from your office. This is guaranteed to hit the target audience.
Every individual requires sound dental treatment and care.
- Send discount coupons with welcome greetings to people setting up homes in the locality.
- Mail or send brochures regarding costly cosmetic dentistry procedures to residents living in upscale localities.
Reminders for appointments
Growing your practice does not only mean attracting new patients. Maintaining relationship with old and existing patients is also a crucial aspect of growing any practice. Stay in touch with your patients – both old and new – and keep them engaged.
- Send them appointment reminders
- Remind old patients to schedule appointments
To facilitate patients with greater convenience, allow them to schedule appointments through texts, e-mails and phone calls.
Newsletters
Newsletters are similar to content marketing. It revolves around the approach of you reaching out to them instead of waiting for them to find and reach you. Make sure to include snippets of valuable information in your newsletters that your patients (or target audience) want to see.
If they do not see that information, they won’t think twice to unsubscribe you before you know. Do not send newsletters frequently or they may end up in the spam. You should also ask patients for their consent before enlisting them in your newsletters list.
Campaigns for remarketing
The approach to reach out to old and existing patients and trying to get them take specific steps is known as remarketing. Rely on remarketing to connect to them as well as potential patients, who visited your website but did not convert to patients. If you are planning remarketing, consider using Facebook Ads. It is one of the most reliable remarketing platforms for businesses including dental practices. It allows retargeting audience based on specific activities on your site.
Remarketing also proves helpful promoting new services, cosmetic procedures in your dental practice.
Keywords diversifying
Keyword research is crucial if you expect your site to rank well in organic search results across the search engines. Stick to the basics but at the same time, get your keywords diversified. Use your creativity and innovation for the purpose. When dental practices are involved consider using keywords like “emergency dental service”, “emergency broken tooth”. It is also a great approach to pick up “dentist open on weekends” as one of your search strings.
SEO Consultants at DubSEO are of the opinion that emergency service has higher services of getting searched by the target audience through voice search. However you should not remain confined to the strategies discussed above. There are lots of ways to market a dental practice and the ones discussed here cover the basics.
First know your patients and then try connecting with them across the relevant platforms. For more information feel free to contact us.
