The best endorsement for your dental practice can come not from paid advertising or other forms of promotion, but from your own patients. New patients will typically have a greater trust in the reviews, comments and ratings that other people provide about you. Therefore, one of your dental marketing goals must be to have people talk favorably about you online.
A Nielson survey show that 90 percent of consumers tend to believe the recommendations made by other consumers, where as only about half the consumers will believe the self-promotional content that a marketer typically creates and posts online about a brand. Marketers have historically recognized the importance of consumer backed endorsements and word of mouth publicity, particularly for a service oriented profession such as dentistry.
One of the simple and interesting ways for a dental practice to promote itself effectively over the Internet can be to forge partnerships with local bloggers. This can help the dentist to promote the practice indirectly online and reach out to a wider audience within the local territory. The key to success lies in choosing the potential bloggers in the cyber space that are interested in writing on subjects that match with what the dental practice may be offering.
It is important to ensure that there is a good fit between the chosen blog and the dental practice. It is possible to reach an understanding with the blogger for endorsements and content promotion. The blogger can receive high quality, original and unique, customized content from the dentist, which can help in the achieving of a higher readership.
The dentist can also leverage the power of social media networks to reach out to potential bloggers who may be interested in such content. If the dentist is regularly posting interesting, useful and informative content over social media, strategic hashtags can be applied with such postings. Hashtags will allow the dentist to build an online community of like-minded and interested people online.
One of the powerful social online tools that has emerged in recent years is Google+ which enables the users to connect and interact with other people with similar interests. An active presence of Google+ Local will allow the dental practice to gain higher rankings through local searches online. The dentist can provide the details of their practice, post videos and images, and seek reviews and comments from patients, bloggers and other online influencers.
By: Naren Arulrajah with Vikas Vij
About the Author:
Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of 130+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps doctors who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call Naren direct at 877-249-9666.
