Dental Marketing Services

Dental Digital Marketing Done with Precision

Dental Marketing Services

If you’re new to dentistry, or perhaps hitting the refresh button on your website, you might find your dental marketing practices in a place of needed update as well.

While dental marketing is a specialized field, it isn’t unlike other marketing sectors, where the goal of attracting and retaining customers acts as the primary and measurable metric.

The specialty in dental marketing comes from a couple of factors, but overall, remember the goal of marketing is to cast a net into a population of could-be buyers to find the ones who are in the market for what you do.

First – know that your customers are actively looking online for dental services and they do so in a very specific way. Most often their search includes reference to their town or community like, “Walla Walla Dentist.”

We call this “local search marketing,” and in order to find how people search, you should invest in here.

Because dental offices are based and integrated in local communities and 99% of people have teeth, your customer base is nearly as scalable as the local population. In fact, a recent study showed that 65% of American adults have seen a dentist in the last 12 months.

The important thing is for your clinic to ‘show up’ when and where they intend to book an appointment.

Finally, your “re-marketing” efforts can take place in-house so the cost of things like SEO and PPC reduce because you typically don’t have to spend to reacquire the same customer.

Without tons of marketing know-how, you simply train staff to immediately reschedule their next cleaning and set automated reminders to keep people coming back.

For now, we’ll focus on the various places we can cast our nets – in marketing, we call these channels. For each channel, marketers provide an accompanying dental marketing service.

So we begin.

Dental Marketing Services vary greatly and we’ll try to touch on a few of them. If you have specific interest in one or another, you can simply click to navigate directly to that section.

************

Today, it’s difficult to market without some form of online presence. While websites are a key foundation, some dental offices find it equally valuable to place energy in social media channels like facebook and instagram.

It’s important to understand that today’s marketing practices are much different than say 1990. While print marketing in all forms has evolved (and even gotten better) it is simply less effective and less efficient than marketing on the internet.

How the Internet Has Changed Dental Marketing

The internet, even in its most primitive infancy, gave us the ability to rapidly communicate. The velocity of communication became exponentially higher because communication’s demand for proximity became less important.

It was done digitally.

Its primary delivery mechanism – digitization – requires exponentially less space as well, giving people with fewer resources the same ability to communicate as someone with, at the time, their own letterhead or box phone.

This is often overlooked, but the mere existence of the internet leveled the dental marketing playing field substantially. It took us from resource intensive phonebooks, signs, flyers, posters, mailers and newspapers to digital ads and email.

And that was just the beginning.

Today the internet provides a much different landscape. We hardly ever see requests for dental print marketing materials and instead see clients who want to “rank higher on Google,” because that is where their patients are looking.

Overall, the internet has changed dental marketing by allowing us to be present in more places than before and have more people consider our practice who otherwise wouldn’t.

From educational material to direct offers to potential patients, we can take a softer, yet more precise approach by positioning your dental website for more relevant traffic, that yields more customers.

Dental Website Design Companies – The Best in Dental Web Design

It can be really difficult to find a good dentist – your practice represents much more to patients than most realize. There are very few industries where customers have the same sense of belonging.

“My dentist is…”

Being both a caring dentist and web designer is not within the grasp of everyone.

With the abundance of dental offices available in most communities, patients today are turning to research online before choosing a provider.

How does this translate for a dental office?

It means that the first interaction that your patients have with you is going to be through your website. There are a few things to make sure you have in place for just this situation.

A critical first step in addressing dental marketing services is to make sure your website is positioned to attract new patients – or, the patients you want. If you haven’t done so already, make a list of dental website design companies, talk with each and determine which one you’d like to work with.

It’s our belief that this partnership is important and sets the stage for all marketing initiatives going forward.

Why?

Well, if you are going to maintain the online presence we discuss above, controlling and owning digital property provides an equally important value as the physical location you seek to open your practice.

This isn’t to say it’s going to cost the same, just that your online property is how patients find your physical one.

Dental website design companies vary greatly in their approach. Some will be highly adept and promote great design that’s attractive, on-brand and aesthetically pleasing.

Other companies may provide terrific site structure, security and awesome customer service.

And finally, you’ll find companies that provide awesome custom design with a keen eye on the engineering and data-driven content; all geared towards building relevant and convertible traffic.

That’s what we’re after – setting your dental website up to inform and acquire actual patients.

What good is a dental practice in New York City if all of your website traffic comes from Chicago?

It’s not.

Your site should focus on location(s) – even if you have more than one.

It’s also not good if you have no traffic at all – we’ll talk more about that below.

In short, we’ve had a number of dental clients approach without a plan for the site after it moves beyond development.

The idea that a website “will get found” just by simply existing is not something you should plan on. If that is the approach, you’ll likely find a good bit of disappointment.

In fact, there are certain actionable steps that should be taken to introduce your website and your business to Google and other search engines.

Dental PPC

Pay Per Click Marketing or PPC has been a total game changer for Dentists. While there is a solid learning curve to deploying ads, it’s not impossible to effectively drive traffic to your clinic.

Alternatively, you could hire a dental ppc agency that does all of this for you. Most likely this agency is going to offer other dental marketing services as well, and if needed, provide a well-rounded approach.

The idea behind Dental PPC ads is that you present potential clients who are searching for services that you offer, with an option to click through to your website (or a landing page) for a search that they enter into Google.

You’ll notice often that the first and last results to show in Google search results are marked by bold Ad text.

I often hear from people, “I never click on the ads.” Well, maybe not you, but somebody does – especially when they need something. If someone is looking for a new dentist, they probably fall into that category.

If you live in a high population area there’s really no reason not to compete in this channel.

New York City for example has almost 9,000 dentists and has a population of over 8 million. Running PPC ads to capture your share of potential patient traffic seems like a reasonable endeavor.

PPC ads also provide a super clear ROI – your ads are going to cost a certain amount per click. If your ads are set up right, or maybe well-tested, you’ll find that a certain number of clicks provide a reliable number of engagements like calls, form inquiries and messages.

Of those inquiries – a certain number will convert to appointments. And, if served well and circumstances provide, a certain number of those initial appointments will recur thus increasing the lifetime value of your customer.

Calculating your return is a critical step in determining if PPC ads are for you. I also recommend seeing what your competition is doing. Are there lots of ads being deployed in your area? Might be time to invest in Dental PPC Ads.

Dental SEO Marketing

Dental SEO is a foundational practice for any dental clinic and chief among dental marketing services.

Even small town dental offices should consider investing in improving in this area of marketing because the benefit of a strong organic search presence is its lasting nature. Results you gain in search ranking are sustainable – you’ll rank for a long time even if you stop working at it.

Dental SEO is built on a firm foundation of website content. While content marketing is related, it is the after-effects of the content effort that really make SEO effective.

When it comes to describing your practice, your staff or your services on our website there’s really no such thing as ‘too much.’ The more detail, the more words, the more quality, the better, especially if you’re in a highly populated area.

Understanding how each dental service is searched online is an important step here, so you can invest in content that matters most to your future patients.

If you consider it from a patient standpoint, they most likely are researching in succession: They’ll be looking for who provides a service (where it’s convenient), what the service involves, who might perform the procedure, what the clinic looks like and finally, insurances accepted and how much will they pay out of pocket.

Covering these details sets the stage for ranking on google and other search engines. As a general rule, ranking on search engines and improving your dental seo, requires your website to provide information on the topics you want to rank for.

A second key step in Dental SEO Marketing is acquiring backlinks. While directories in general are taking a turn downhill, professional organizations and solid dental directory links can bring validation and legitimacy to your practice’s website. The key is to invest some time in requesting these links.

See, for search engines to recognize a website’s authority, they need some vote of confidence from other website’s that they recognize as authoritative.

Here’s an example and bear with me on this:

Government websites are the only such that can use the ending ‘.gov’ – vs the .com or .net we are used to. People like us can’t even buy a .gov because they’re designated specifically for government websites. Government websites rarely link to websites owned by private companies.

Imagine a link to your dental website from a website that’s owned by the government. That would be a pretty solid thumbs up.

Now, it’s not that backlinks (as they’re called) need to come from .gov sites, it’s that they need to come from websites that have authority as recognized by search engines. Google, you might already understand, has a massive algorithm dedicated to determining the interaction and ranking of websites – all based on each’s “authority.”

Among 200 other rank metrics, generally speaking authority is established with great structure, quality of content and backlinks.

Taking on your dental practice SEO in-house is a big endeavor but if you have the staff dedicated to it, you’ll probably benefit.
If you’re looking for experienced Dental SEO professionals who provide other dental marketing services as well, click below to begin the journey.