Effective dental marketing is key to running a successful practice. However, finding time and making it a priority is much easier said than done. Here’s a checklist to help you prioritize quick yet beneficial marketing tactics to make a positive impact on your practice.
1. Write a blog post. While it may seem daunting at first, blogging offers a lot of positive benefits for your practice. It can improve your credibility, build trust, and help your website rank higher within search engines (search engines love fresh, new, and relevant content).
Every few weeks (or even once a month) take a couple hours to write a 1-2 page article that addresses common patient questions, explains complex dental procedures, after procedure care, or any other topic that your audience would be interested in learning about.
For ideas and inspiration on article topics, reference online forums to see what patients are asking about (such as this one on Reddit).
2. Share team photos on social media. The more approachable your practice can be, the more enticing it is to potential patients. By sharing photos of your happy staff, patients, and team photos, you can further personalize your presence on social media. And remember, not every photo op has to be staged. In fact, some of the best engagement comes from candid photos of staff celebrations or new office milestones. Just make sure to always ask permission before posting and encourage staff to tag and share the photo on their own social networks for maximum visibility.
3. Update your website design. Depending on your website platform, making updates should require minimal effort. Design trends are constantly changing and it’s important that your website doesn’t appear dated. If you haven’t updated your website in the last 2 years, it may be time to do so. It’s also become critical to ensure your website is mobile-friendly (responsive) to ensure an optimal viewing experience across any size screen. Not only will most mobile visitors leave if a website isn’t mobile-friendly, but Google has started to favorably rank mobile-friendly sites on mobile searches.
4. Update your profile within dental-specific online directories. This benefits both search rankings and patient experiences.
It’s common for dentists to have profiles across various online directories, even if they didn’t create it themselves. This is because data aggregators crawl directories and automatically create profiles to help people find providers. If your practice hasn’t claimed them, it could have empty or false information, and you could be missing out on patient reviews.
Take some time to search for your practice and claim any profiles that you find of yourself. Make sure to fill in consistent information across all online directories for maximum search engine visibility.
5. Review your website for strong calls-to-action and contact information on every page. This may seem like common sense, but it’s surprisingly often overlooked. Go through your website to ensure your contact information (phone and address) are easily viewed across every page. It’s also recommended that you include contact information in your website header and/or footer, so no matter where visitors navigate to, your details will always be accessible.
Additionally, make sure each page is direct and guides the visitor to a specific action, such as requesting them to schedule an appointment, watch a video, or ask for more information.
Writing a blog post, sharing staff photos on social media, updating your website, and claiming dental directory listings are great marketing tactics that don’t require much of your time.
About the Author
Fanny Barrientos is a digital marketing expert at ProSites with over 7 years of experience. ProSites delivers innovative dental website design and online marketing solutions that help professionals achieve measureable practice growth. Their comprehensive suite of solutions includes ready-to-go and custom website design, search engine marketing, social media management, automated patient communications and pay-per-click solutions. Trusted by over 14,000 dental, medical and professional practices, ProSites is endorsed by 11 state dental associations, a five time honoree on Inc. 5000’s list of America’s Fastest-Growing Private companies and a 2015 and 2016 Dentaltown Townie Choice Award recipient. To learn more about ProSites, visit the ProSites Blog, LinkedIn, and ProSites Resources. To reach a ProSites representative, call (888) 932-3644 or visit www.ProSites.com.
