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Running a dental practice is a lot of hard work. Spending five days a week with patients who want to improve their oral health can’t be easy, and it probably doesn’t give you a lot of time to work on marketing your dental practice.
In an industry that is as competitive as dental, you need to build a name for yourself if you want to stay ahead of the curve. According to the American Dental Association (ADA), there are 198,517 dentists in the USA. This only emphasizes the fact that your dental practice needs to be marketed to people consistently to help you continue serving patients.
Here are 12 things you can do to market your dental practice right.
To keep up with today’s standard online marketing standards is to make sure you get your dental practice listed online. This is to ensure that your business information appears when people look for your services online.
Since you run a dental clinic, the sites your practice is listed on need to be specific to your niche. Make sure your get yourself listed on the following directories:
In addition to the ones mentioned above, you need to be listed on major directories like Google My Business, Yelp, your Local Chamber of Commerce, and Yellow Pages. Here’s the business information you’ll need to add to your listings
Aside from this primary information, most listings sites require you to add information that is specific to your store location. This information includes location images, whether or not you have a parking facility, pet-friendly, handicap-friendly, etc.
Synup is a dedicated local marketing tool that can get you listed on 48+ directories all in one shot. And the best part is that you can manage all these listings from one easy-to-use dashboard.
In the introduction of this guide, we mentioned that there is a large number of practicing dentists in the USA. Your dental practice needs to stand out if you want people to remember it. Having an innovative and impressionable logo backed up by a catchy tagline will help your dental practice build your brand.
But as a dentist, you might not have the time to create a logo for a business. You can always hire the services of a local graphic designer. You can turn to sites like Upwork or Fiverr to find freelance graphic designers. Just keep in mind that your logo needs to be relatable, and it needs to communicate what makes your business stand out.
In case you want to design your own logo, you can use a site like Canva that has ready-to-use logo design templates. You can even use a website like Graphic Springs that breaks down the logo generation process. You can try this method to create a rudimentary design to give your graphic designer an idea of what you want.
As a dentist, your primary focus has to be in garnering calls to your office; you need people booking appointments with you. Click to call ads can be a help you scale this function.
Click-to-call ads are Google AdWords or Facebook ads that appear on searches that are designed to get people to call you. You can add these ads to your present ad campaigns as well.
By extension of the above-mentioned point, you can market your dental practice better by adopting Facebook ads. You can run hyper-targeted ads on Facebook where you can reach prospective customers.
Facebook Ads come in several shapes and sizes: you can add several multimedia (images, videos, text). You can even create carousel ads where you can sift through a series of images in your ad.
All Facebook ads have a certain format that you’ll need to follow before you create your ad copy:
But what makes Facebook Ads stand out is that you can define your audience based on several criteria. You can create a target audience set based on the following criteria:
To get a better idea of what Facebook’s ad targeting do to help you market your dental practice, you can refer to this infographic by Wordstream that breaks it down for you.
(If you don’t already have a Facebook Business Page for your business, you can refer to a comprehensive Facebook guide that covers all that there is to it. Take a look at it here: Facebook business Page Guide.)
Getting your dental practice listed on Google My Business is an absolute must. A GMB listing will help your business appear on searches in Google with the information presented in knowledge graphs and increases your chances of appearing in the local-three pack.
Some of the perks in having a Google My Business account are as follows:
What we’ve mentioned above are a simplified summary of what a Google My Business listing can offer to your business’ growth. Learn more about how you can use Google My Business to market your business better.
Building online business reviews can help you strengthen your online presence. Not only will it help your prospective customers have a positive impression of your practice, it can even help you rank higher in searches. As a bonus, ranking on search results also helps you appear on voice search results.
Given that reviews can boost your online presence, you need to find ways to generate positive reviews. Here are some things you’ll need to do build reviews for your dental practice:
In today’s digital atmosphere, having a website that is well-optimized to appear on searches is important. But with the advancements in mobile-first indexing and voice search, your business website needs to be optimized to the core to be responsive. In December 2017, Google announced that they algorithms will (during the course of this year) use the mobile version of site content to rank for searches, understand structured data, and to show snippets from the site.
Here’s a checklist of things you can use to build your website to be optimized for both voice and regular searches and for being mobile-first.
The above-said points are conducive to your website being voice-search-friendly as well. In addition to these points, you’ll need to work on the following as well.
Here is some material you can read to help you implement these pointers: Mobile-first Optimization Voice Search Optimization
Geofencing is a great way for you to attract customers who are in the vicinity of your clinic’s location. Geofencing is a technology that allows you to create a virtual geographic boundary with GPS or RFID technology. This technology sends out SMSs or app notifications to set a target audience (customers who given their contact information, downloaded your app, etc.) who happen to be within the limits of this virtual boundary.
Geofencing can help you boost your audience engagement efforts. You just need to plan out the messaging that you’re going to disseminate. You can promote offers or services to attract more attention to your dental clinic
In addition to this, you can make use of Snapchat Geofilters that allows businesses to create customized templates as Snapchat filters that people can use. You can learn how to use Snapchat geofilters for your dental clinic here.
Urgency and fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) are great marketing tactics that are on your side. Consider these two facts:
With these pointers in mind, you can create ads by leveraging a sense of urgency and FOMO appeals. For example, you can run a Facebook ad that will expire after an hour; this ad can have a coupon code that people can use to avail a 10% discount. This will attract the attention of your target audience. In addition to this effort, you can change the messaging in your ads and other content strategies where you can talk about the consequences of being ignorant. This will engage them, and urge them to take action because you’re stating the problem and offering your services as a solution.
Instagram is steadily becoming a prominent social media platform that helps business owners engage with consumers. In 2016, there were 69 million active Instagram users in the USA, and presently there are over 96.8 million users. This indicates that the photo and video sharing social media site has a potentially good engagement rate and that your prospective customers are using it. Using Instagram, you can increase the chances of making a personal connection with your customers.
Here are some tips to get you started:
(If your clinic doesn’t have an existing business account on Instagram, you can use our Instagram for businesses guide to find out how. In case you already have a Facebook business page, it’s going to be quite easy for you to add your business to Instagram.)
With respect to the healthcare and medical industry, it has been observed that customer/patient referrals are a great way to get more business. Additionally, you can build better relationships with your customers.
Here are two important things you need to keep in mind when you want to create a referral program:
A great branding exercise for your dental practice would be to participate as a sponsor for community events and charities. This will help you build a positive brand image in your locality, and subsequently, you will get more customers. Giving back to your community can only help you build a stronger brand presence. You can sponsor or host events like health camps, the local flea market, conferences with respect to healthcare, etc. You can engage your target audience and build your professional circles. In any crisis situation, you can even donate money, food, clothes, etc. to victims of catastrophe and so on.
A keyword repository for your clinic will help you narrow down on the kind of searches you need to appear on. It can help you scale your marketing efforts by directing it in the right direction. If you want your website content and your ads rank in searches, then you need to have a keyword repository of the keywords that will help you scale. In case you don’t have a search marketer or an SEO person working for you, you can try these basic methods to find your keywords.
Run a basic Google search to find some keyword suggestions. You can use these suggestions to make your keyword repository.
You can even get Keyword ideas by using Ubersuggest will generate a list of keywords with information like competition for the keyword and its search volume. Using this, you determine the search volume of keywords and the competition, pick the region you are targetting, and export your list of keywords in a .csv format.
Just to make things more interesting, we thought that we’ll host a challenge about carpet cleaning marketing. Try any 5 of the aforementioned marketing campaigns, and write to us about your experience with them at hello@synup.com. Tell us about your process and whether it was successful or not. If we find your email interesting, we’ll feature you on one of our future posts. We hope that you found this marketing guide helpful! Liked it? Give it a share so that it reaches more people from the carpet cleaning community and helps them market their business better.
And, less time obsessing about your local presence.
