The Digital Marketing Guide for Dentist and the Dental Practice

The overall goal of the dental industry is to prioritize the improvement of their patient’s oral health. Maintaining oral health is definitely important as it is closely linked to the overall health and well-being of humans. Fortunately, the new media paved its way to trends and techniques in attracting and educating people to prioritize their dental health.

At present, consumers find things that they need within seconds through the Internet. With the help of this new media, consumers easily locate what they need and on the other side of the coin, this allows business owners of different industries to meet the demands of the market by marketing online. Hence, this is digital marketing.

According to the article entitled Digital Marketing For Dentists: How It Works and Why You Need It by Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, at least 85 percent of consumers search the Internet in finding local businesses. People are now closely linked to the Internet that wherever they go, they mainly rely on it. Thereby, this is the perfect time to use digital marketing to help increase the reach of your business and improve the continued success of your dental practice.

Marketing is key to the success of any business and the dental industry is no exception to this strategy. When marketing is combined with the practice of dentistry, it is called dental marketing. It is a combination of techniques, practices, and methods to promote your dental practice with the use of either traditional or new media. Traditional media include the use of television, radio or print media in promoting your clinic or your practice. On the other hand, new media uses the Internet through e-commerce websites, blogs, social networking, search engines, and social messaging platforms. With these media platforms, you can market to a wide range of people and be successful on your specialization.

However, new media provides effectiveness better than the traditional media. With traditional marketing strategies, you increase general awareness for your practice, but you might not have direct revenue associated with the people you genuinely want to reach. You might be entering the masses, but you might be wasting money on people who are not actively looking for a dentistry office. Hence, it is more effective to market your dental practice in the Internet as this enables you to narrow down your target market while being able to edit your preferences whenever you want. 

Benefits of Digital Marketing in Dental Industry

Traditional channels are beneficial in increasing awareness about dental practices to the community but this doesn’t directly affect the revenue of your business. Besides, traditional media doesn’t let you narrow your target market on those who need it the most as these form of media is targeted for the masses. Thereby, as what Crystal Clear Digital Marketing stated, “this limitation in the conventional press mainly increases your brand awareness rather than earning new patients.”
On the contrary, connecting with prospects and building connections with these people is better with digital marketing. According to Chris Brogan, the Chief Executive Officer of Owner Media Group that marketers first need to build digital relationships and reputation before closing a sale. This is easier with digital marketing as almost 4.48 billion people are actively using the Internet using various devices. With this information, dentist professionals can directly build connections with their target market and provide better dental services for their clients.
Digital marketing offers a lot more benefits for dentist professionals. Other benefits that you can obtain include customizing your preferred audiences, automating your campaigns, tracking and analyzing your progress, and competitive advantage. Hence, digital media has various benefits into the promotion of your dental practices.

Customize Audience Preferences

Offline advertising has limited opportunities to target audience compared to online marketing and advertising. Although it may reach more people, digital marketing can reach potential patients. With digital advertisements and marketing strategies, you are most likely to target people who are likely to become new clients. So, this provides a more immediate effect on your overall revenue generation.

There are various types of clients who have different kinds of needs, and digital marketing can alter your message based on the consumer’s profile. With the newest form of advanced targeting for advertisements, you can orchestrate online campaigns that will target potential, current and former clients. Thereby, your campaigns will be seen only to those relevant consumers at the perfect time over their ideal online platform.  

An example of online advertising is search engine marketing wherein you advertise your specialization and offers to those who only search for specific keywords like “dentists near me.”

Moreover, content marketing will also help you to only cater your dental practice to specific people. On wherever part of the world, there will always be people who will search for general information about dentistry. Although these people might not be close to your area and don’t have knowledge about your services, you can produce good content that will help these people.

It is important that you provide these people good content that will keep them coming into your online platforms. Explain how your dental practice works, how a specific dental service costs, and carefully provide information that will be beneficial to your audience. For instance, a written guide about dental implants could receive traffic from people looking for information about how dental implant works, how much would it costs or if it hurts. With blogs, articles, and other content you produce, if you have written it perfectly, your audiences will surely kept on visiting your online platforms and there’s a big chance to convert them into your newest clients.

Marketing Automation

As mentioned earlier, traditional media is less beneficial compared to digital marketing as it helps you streamline your digital marketing processes online.

To help you understand what this is, marketing automation is the use of web-based software and tools to manage your marketing processes and various campaigns across different platforms. Whether you are building a strategy to advertise your dental practice or creating new content for your audiences, there are various tools that you can use for free or with payment.

For instance, you can automate the emails that you want to send to your audiences. You can use email marketing automation tools like MailChimp to automatically send a series of messages for specific audiences.

Social media platforms also offers free tools for you to utilize. Like what Facebook did, they created Facebook Page to cater to businesses of all types and offer analytics and other free tools for you to use.

Moreover, the best part of marketing automation is the creation of a marketing funnel. This will help you identify the right audience, design purposive content, and automatically trigger actions based on your client’s behavior. By doing all of these, you will be able to create new leads that you can easily convert into valued and loyal customers.

Lastly, using marketing automation will benefit your campaigns and your dental practice as you can easily customize it according to the behavior of your target clients. This lets you save time and resources as you won’t have to manually do all of your marketing strategies on various online platforms. Hence, marketing automation will increase the reach of your dental practice and drive more revenue to your business.

 Track and Analyze Progress

The use of digital marketing in the dental industry allows consumers to browse and consume information and content while you to store data from your prospects and clients. However, this doesn’t mean that you will just use these data after your digital marketing campaigns. You need to track your progress to adjust your future campaign tactics. Hence, you need to monitor your progress while your campaign is ongoing.

In tracking and analyzing the progress of your campaigns, the key to its success depends on the data that you gather. These data includes your website traffic and social media engagement. Afterwards, these should be rechecked to check the accuracy of the results. Lastly, measure the success of your campaigns according to different metrics relevant to your platform and campaigns.

For instance, to track and analyze the progress of your website, you can use Google Analytics. This is one of the various web analytics services offered online to track and report website traffic. This will allow you to track and monitor your content’s performance and your audience’s behavior on your website.

Social media platforms also offer analytics tools to help you measure the success of your campaigns. With your business page on Facebook, you can utilize its Publishing and Insights tools. Then, Instagram and Pinterest also provides you an analytics tool on every photo that you share on your platform and you can analyze your overall performance with its analytics dashboard. Furthermore, without having a business account, you can still check the performance of your tweets on Twitter. Lastly, keep in mind that each of these social networking platforms cater different metrics so study these accordingly and use it to carefully analyze the success of your social media content and advertising campaigns.

Competitive advantage

With the Internet taking traditional media over, you should use this to extend the competitive advantage of your dental practice. Regional and start-up businesses often have a hard time competing with more essential industries but digital marketing has the role of levelling the playing field for all businesses.

In terms of exposure, the Internet offers more space for your dental practice. Buying a space for the newspaper, air time for radio, and screen time for television are expensive. However, online exposure is more affordable for businesses of all sizes and it expands the reach of your dental business better than the traditional media.

Although, digital marketing strategies offer these benefits for your dental practice, your success still relies on your knowledge on digital marketing. You need to acknowledge that in order to achieve success, you need to learn how each platforms and marketing strategies work. This means that you should be a leader on the dental industry online, build a brand for your dental practice, and continue providing value to your prospect, audience, and customers on your website, social networking platforms, and other parts of the Internet.

Get started with  Digital Marketing for Dental Practice

According to Cydney Hatch from Disruptive Advertising, dental marketing has two main goals. These include attracting new patients and bigger revenue. Traditional media can reach an audience or potential clients but only a small percentage of these people have landed on the last step in their buyer’s journey. However, with digital marketing, there’s a big room for improvement, editing and modification of information with lesser cost. Thereby, for the dental industry, there’s an enormous advantage because people need good dental hygiene for the sake of their overall health.

But the question is, how do you would you build a dental presence online? Well, here are the details on building your website and social media accounts online!

Identify Goals

What do you want to accomplish in establishing a digital presence? How are you different from your competitors? What are the problems that you want to solve for your target market? What experience do you want to give to your clients?

Before building your digital presence, you should answer all of these first. These questions will help you to clearly identify the direction of your business through the Internet. With this in mind, determine the things that you want to achieve over a specific period of time in establishing your presence on the Internet. Thereby, define the goals of your dental practice first before moving onto the next step of your strategy to help you set up realistic targets.

In identifying your digital marketing goal as a dentist, it should also be SMART which in this case means:

• Specific – What are the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business in the digital market? Your answer should be detailed to pinpoint all of this and give credibility on your goal.
• Measurable – How many people do you want to convert into clients? How much sales or revenue do you want to achieve? Do you want to target specific people of various ethnicities? Your explanation should identify both the qualitative and quantitative aspect of your digital marketing journey.
• Achievable – Do you know how to use the different tools on the Internet on your marketing strategy? Do you have any background in this new form of marketing? Your background reflects a lot about your success. So, create a goal that can be used to improve your dental practice while keeping it related to your experience.
• Realistic – With all the key variables such as your marketing tactics, tools, time, experience, and others, can you be able to achieve your goal? Keep in mind that it should be relevant to your business or your industry.
• Time-bound – When will your strategy starts and ends? You should give your campaigns deadlines for you to review overall output.

Determine your Buyer Persona

When you are marketing your dental practice traditionally, everyone can be your clients. These can be people of all backgrounds as long as they have oral problems. However, with this kind of traditional marketing, you don’t have a definite idea on how these people know about you because you cannot track their data and behavior. Hence, you have a wide market but you don’t know how to target them.

On the other hand, you can track your clients who have contacted on your business online. You can achieve this by creating a buyer persona which is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers. You can gather this from your existing customers or through market research. This figure will act as the targeting option of your marketing strategy. For example, your advertising campaigns are all targeted for people in the Philippines, you can create a buyer persona according to the background of this region. Afterwards, as digital marketing is performed through automation, you can track how these people interact with your advertisement.

But before creating campaigns targeted to various individuals, you should answer these questions first:

• Who is your target market?
• Who is your ideal customer?
• What past clients think about your product and services?
• What do they think about your brands?

These questions reflect a lot about your dental practice. You can use this to target past customers that interacted with your specialization offline. These will also tell you on which background most of your clients came from. For this reason, you can create a marketing strategy solely for this group of people.

Lastly, do keep in mind that the data that your buyer persona needs include a combination of demographic and psychographic information. The demographic data is the quantitative aspect of your target market which mainly includes their location, age, income and job title. Meanwhile, the psychographic or the qualitative information of your prospects include their goals, hobbies, interests, and priorities.

Identify your Marketing Techniques

Your digital marketing strategy requires various approach to achieve your goals in increasing the reach of your dental practice online. These strategies are your efforts to accomplish your online marketing goals on different digital platforms like social media, search engines, e-commerce and others. Hence, this prompt you to carefully select the best digital marketing techniques according to your demands.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on both technical and creative elements required to improve your ranking in search engine results, increase awareness about your dental practice, and drive traffic into your website.

According to Drew Fortin, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing at The Predictive Index that a smart SEO strategy is the process of organizing a website’s content by topic and optimizing it in order to help search engines like Google to provide the best results according to the user’s intent.

In this case, with your smart SEO strategy, you can rank well on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP) for specific keywords related to your dental practice.

Moreover, improving your SEO builds trust and credibility into your platform and your specialization. One of the many goals of dental practitioners is to create a strong foundation to be discovered and with digital marketing the main market are search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Many elements can be considered to establish authority in search engines like Google. Well-organized and well-optimized SEO means better user experience, increased engagement, traffic, and conversions. It is also important to add that SEO prioritizes targeting of locations. Local SEO, for instance, focus on specific towns, cities, regions, and states to establish a viable medium for a brand’s message on a local level. Thereby, you can improve the reach of your strategy in your locality as well as target it to broader clients.

With this in mind, improving the search engine optimization of your website includes these steps.

• Create a list of topics

Since keywords are “the heart of SEO,” you must start by creating a list of topics you’d like to cover. Compile a list of short words and terms associated with your practice or services. To be able to do this, use Google’s Keyword Tool, which will identify Google’s search volume and come up with variations that may relate to your business. This step will make your website competitive enough to rank highly on any search engine platforms.

• Make a list of long-term keywords

Photo from www.wordstream.com

Create a list of long-term keywords based on your specialization. Use your keyword tool to identify five to ten long-tail keywords that relate further to your original topic keyword. You must also use subtopics to come up with a blog post or webpage ideas. Use a reliable keyword research tool to assist you in this step.

Do keep in mind that “topic cluster”, according to Hubspot is an SEO model that is created to form a cluster of subtopics which is a new search engine algorithm that depend on them to connect users with the information you may need. By creating a cluster of subtopics from your main topic or keyword, you can create more dentistry-related content that will increase the visibility of your website and content to new clients.

• Build various pages per topic

Create different pages on your website for each topic that you want to target. With the keywords you listed in the first step, create a web page for each one that outlines the problem at a high level. To improve this, use the long-tail keywords that you have created in the second step. The number of topics created should be related to the number of your products, offers and services.

• Create blogs

After having an idea on what you want topics you want to create content from, you can then start creating your blog. Blogs, in general, are effective ways to rank for keywords and engage with wider clients.

To do this, make sure your blogs are related to your service and practice. Include educational discussions and tips for parents, children, clients, and other dental professionals. On each blog, include different content for your clients as well. This can be in the form of photos, videos, infographics, and others.

Moreover, in your blog creation, consider the following tips in relating your SEO with your blogs:

1.) First, do not include your long-tail keyword more than five times on your page. This hinders your ranking on search engines as this is already keyword stuffing which is an act of spamming to manipulate the SERP ranking.
2.) Then, link your content into related blogs or pillar pages (a comprehensive guide that covers all aspects of one core topic on a single page in your website). After posting your blog, you can then link it on the pillar page. Doing internal linking lets your clients stay in your website as internal links help them navigate and find other content that are related to your blog.
3.) Lastly, build consistency in posting your blogs. It is recommended to create blogs at least once a week as this will cue Google to pay extra attention to your website because you have more content for Internet users.

• Create a link-building plan

According to Hubspot, this is the process of attracting inbound links (also called as backlinks) to your website from elsewhere on the web.  Generally, the more page authority you have, the more it affects the rank of your website. By generating inbound links, you can gain authority in the dental and marketing industry.

However, achieving backlinks require time and effort. Other dental practitioners on the Internet won’t be linking your website if you don’t have any content. This means that you should create valuable blogs that lets your audience and other dental practitioners gain insight. By creating content for your website, other clients and professionals in your industry will look at you as an authority in your field. Hence, they will link your website.

Moreover, it is also required that you link to another website. This is important in sourcing another authorized individual or websites. This will also let your clients know that your statements are based on facts as it comes from professionals in your industry.

• Content Marketing

Content Marketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing strategies for businesses, especially for dental marketing. This form of marketing strategy is focused on creating and distributing content to attract clients and increase engagement. Moreover, this is also key in creating a digital presence as this helps you build credibility and authority in the Internet. Besides, your practice needs to explain necessary technical terms for people to understand. Hence, simplifying your messages into different approach is crucial in content marketing.
1.) Blogs

As mentioned previously, blogging is one of the best ways to improve your SEO and drive search engine traffic conveniently to help your content be shared in a wide audience. Besides, according to Forbes, websites with blogs have a greater chance of ending up on the first page of the SERP for people with the best intent to see.

Other than SEO, blogging can also help you when it comes to building a relationship with your prospects and current clients. The more valuable content you offer, the more you will target a wide audience who are most likely to be your next clients.

2.) Videos

According to Cisco Visual Networking Index Complete Forecast, it was predicted that nearly 1.9 billion Web video users will be watching 3 trillion minutes of videos per month in 2021. For this reason, to keep your pace in the digital marketplace, you must grab the attention of potential clients with videos.

Online users who visit websites spend time on it if these sites have video content. The more time your customers spend on your website, the higher your company’s chances of making a sale. Besides, 78% of people watch online videos every week and viewers retain 95% of a message when it is through videos rather than reading it. So, as this form of content provides better engagement and return on investment than text formats, you should utilize this to provide better content for your dental practice.

 If you like to harness video then you should consider what your audience wants. On this part, you should go back to your buyer persona. Based on your market research or client survey, what they want to know more about your dental profession? In answering this question, you can easily create the kind of content your clients wants.

3.) Infographics

This form of content helps in educating your potential clients. This must provide short yet valuable information that adds value to your leads or clients. Moreover, this is a visual marketing format with data such as statistics so that they can better visualize how something works. Thereby, you can use this to explain complicated subject, offer diagram for a process, and present statistics in a better way that normal people would understand.

Normally, any information that can be used as a visual aid can be an excellent topic for this content. However, in considering this into your content creation, you should choose the topics that are suited for infographics.

4.) Case Studies

According to Lyfe Marketing that consumers like case studies because this type of content helps them better understand how you can add value in their lives. Furthermore, these forms of content can be used to help illustrate customer stories and highlight special applications and how to use your services and products.

Case studies are useful in real-life setting that may relate to your service, practice or even products. If you plan to add this in your marketing strategy, then carefully consider what audience you want to cater. After strategically choosing the right client and creating this content, you can use these for your website, blogs, ebooks, social media posts and other forms of content.

5.) Ebooks

Ebook is a book publication made solely for digital devices that aims to provide value. Like any other form of content, you need to provide this long-form content with useful information about your dental practice. With this, you need to offer useful insights and information that can help your clients to solve their dental problems. Hence, you can build a relationship with your target clients.

Although ebook is much longer than the normal blog post and requires more time, you should strongly invest in this digital content. This is for the reason that this is key in converting your leads into clients. The more valuable and informational your ebook is, the more leads will think of you as a thought-leader in the industry.

6.) Social Media Posts

Of all content marketing strategies, social media posts are often the most modified and played. As mentioned previously, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can help your dental practice grow and reach more clients in various ways. Your blogs, videos, and case studies can be shared on your social media platforms. Your dental practice may take advantage of these familiar and popular content formats to bring and draw attention to a specific topic.

However, although posting on social media is quite easy, carefully plan everything beforehand. Every social media content that you post should be dependent on your goal. Your posts can either lead to new leads, inform clients on offers, and retarget past clients into your website. It is of utmost importance that you plan your social networking posts and base it according to your overall digital marketing or social media marketing goals.

Social Media Marketing

According to Digital Marketer, “79% of US internet users are on Facebook and six out of ten Americans stay updated with the news through social media while 35% have used social media to look for a job.”

Social media marketing is more than just using Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. There’s a lot of social media platforms to choose from and each requires different strategies. For this reason, using social media as your digital marketing strategy requires careful planning and research.

Posting links on your social media channels can generate traffic to your website or blog. With this, you will be able to engage with both your past and future clients. This is about nurturing the trust and building a lasting relationship with your target market. However, in order to reach this level, you must have a network of followers that engage with your social media pages.

The first thing to do in order to achieve a great social media following is by presenting your specialization will. Directly convey your message and why they should follow or subscribe to your account. Provide valuable content and let them know that your social media accounts is one of the best ways to reach you.

Although, there’s online advertising which lets you advertise your business to different platforms, it is recommended to maximize organic opportunities first especially if you are still building your digital presence. As this method particularly is more time-consuming and perhaps would require the most work, you need to really extend your patience with this.

• Groups: You can join industry-specific groups and indirectly promote your dental practice and gain more followers. However, it’s important that you first provide value before promoting your page.
• Content:  Don’t forget to create great content that your target customers would love. Post something interesting and reach more people with eye-catching, interesting and valuable content.
• Hashtags: Don’t forget to use hashtags in every post. There are millions of people who use  hashtags to search for content. By using this, you would be able to increase your brand visibility.

Posting on your social media accounts is highly important to keep your audiences updated on the latest news, information, and offers from your dental website. At this level, you should be able to influence and network on your page.

The process of social networking is sharing content that would ignite conversation. Your goal here to share the content that fills the gaps of your prospects. It also includes creating a good relationship with the brands similar to yours. And in doing so, you are able to transform those partnerships into something profitable.

When it comes to influencing your audience, it’s crucial that you engage with them. Whether it’s an inquiry or not, be sure to reply in the comments or in private messages. More people are sharing their thoughts and opinions and would eagerly ask to interact with you. With this, you’ll become a recognized authority in the dental industry.

As this is still part of your digital marketing strategy, these are the measurement of success that you should always check:

1. Commitment rates. For months have your audience increased, decreased or just the same? Have you converted these audience into clients?

2. Inbound connections. Analyze if you have increased your connection with your audience and if you were able to give them better customer interaction in the platform.

3. Mentions. Check the mentions from your audiences or other dental and industry professionals. These are important in building relationships within your industry.

4. Connections. This is essential on LinkedIn wherein you can connect to other industry professionals. Are you connecting with prospects or you have contacted them already? Build business connections and increase your brand’s reliability.

5. Traffic by channel. As you are sharing your website content in social media platforms, you should also check whether there’s a high traffic from all of your social media accounts. If not, build more content that are valuable and click-worthy.

6. Offer value. Individuals see and react to offers that they find valuable. If they find posts that are of value, this means that you need to increase these types of content and make sure that it will reach your audience.

7. Retargeting. With social media platform’s hyper-targeted advertisements, you can retarget audiences who have visited your website and motivate them to become customers.

• Email Marketing

Most people have email addresses. Email marketing is essentially sending promotions, ads, newsletters, and content via email. According to Susan Ward, the Small Business Expert for The Balance that email marketing has two significant advantages — price and ease. Sending messages via email is inexpensive because it is easy to set up and easily modified which is also easy to set up and track.

For your email marketing service, you can use websites like Optin Monster, MailChimp, and GetResponse. Then, collect email address by putting an opt-in form on your website where people can sign up. Be careful not to build your list by sending unsolicited email because most of the people will surely turn down your efforts as you are already spamming their inbox. To ensure that you won’t be called a spammer, you need to adhere to the rules of CAM-SPAM Act where regulations are in of having a non-deceptive subject line, methods of unsubscribing and a lot more.

According to Ward, you need to use your emails in building rapport with potential clients. It is better to organize your schedule of email in terms of what content to send and whom to address it.

In completing every client’s journey, people who experienced your excellent service will be the ones recommending your practice. You may want to encourage people to refer more people by referral bonuses. This way, you can expand your practice and express gratitude to your clients. You may also want to create a holiday or seasonal discount to encourage more potential clients to book an appointment in your dental office.

• Advertising

Advertising online varies on the goal that you are trying to achieve. There are native advertising, display advertising, search engine marketing, and social media advertising, and Pay-Per-Click marketing that are spread across the Internet. With all of these advertising options, these only have one similarity wherein it only allows you to pay when someone clicks your advertisement.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising allows your business to use advertising platforms to put your content in the front line. You will only pay the online advertisers like Google Ads when someone clicks on your ads. This cost is according to the market value of the keyword or expression you’re interested because when building a campaign, you can control the message chain, and you can track every result of your ad campaign.

PPC has several strengths that businesses should consider. Unlike impressions, clicks are extremely straightforward to track. You have to pay for the clicks you need. Also, you can place a budget cap on traffic coming in through extensive networks.

With this in mind, there are different categories for PPC.

1. Paid Search – also known as search ads, these are online ads that appear in search engine results like Google Adwords and Bing Ads. When a person searches a keyword related to your line of business, search advertisements are the ones that will appear on top areas of the SERP.

2. Paid Social – also known as social advertising, these are the ads that appear on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. To promote your dental practice, you can boost posts, offers, and promotions through PPC. Social advertising can help you target potential patients depending on their personal, professional, demographic and behavioral parameters. This can also allow your business to reach the relevant people who are most interested in your specialization.

3. Paid Display– these are ads on the top or side corners of your website. These can range from video ads, traditional banners, and even photo or infographics. These types of ads are reserved for paid advertising and are aimed to generate a call to action.

Before advertising your specialization all over the web, you should first create a perfect landing page. According to Madeline Blasberg, digital marketing manager at Leadpages, that a landing page is a web page that is specifically designed to prompt visitors to take an action. Thereby, after clicking your advertisement, a potential patient’s journey must end up with  booking appointment or other actions that you want your future clients to take.

Moreover, a landing page’s primary purpose is to avoid web traffic. This page is useful when you’re promoting one-off events, products or services. Take note that you need to complete all the information on the landing page to prevent prospects from bouncing off your page and not becoming one of your clients.

In creating a landing page, fit all the information of your one-time deal and services through different elements. Identify your lead story and provide the purpose of your landing page. Decide what content to be used and don’t forget to include call-to-action buttons.  Your web designers might also suggest you use a template that’s not crowded and is optimized for all devices.

Build your Website

Before building a website, make sure to know what your customers want to get from your site. Create an impression that you want your audience to feel in visiting your site through visual representations like fonts, features, and colour schemes.

In building your website, you can use stock photos. However, if you want to create an authentic feel for your site, include pictures of your team and your dental practice.

Your services are the driving force of tradition. Take pride in your practice by adding the services that you want to offer. Include the complete contact information and address for your viewers to know where to look for your clinic.

Afterwards, optimize your website for mobile phones. According to Smart Insights, 57% of users are multiscreening which means that they access the Internet on both their desktop and mobile devices. A mobile responsive site uses a design pattern that has a desktop version and a mobile version. A responsive template and structure for your website are easy to manage since it is efficient and cost-effective without having to provide two different designs for your site. Ensuring that your website caters to all digital devices includes providing an optimal user experience for your viewers. Hence, your online presence with a mobile responsive website increases the chance that your viewers will stay on your site.

Strengthen Your Social Media Accounts

Other than your website, be sure to utilize social media platforms too in order to build trust among your clients and prospects.

Social media marketing has been beneficial when it comes to searching for new clients and patients, getting and collating reviews and interacting with your clients and potential patients. According to Victoria Schmid of Marketing Insider Group, social media platforms are newer ways to solve problems. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and other social media platforms have broken down barriers between companies and their customers… instead of calling a customer service line, many people turn to social Media to solve problems or find information.

Then, when you want people to know about your dental practice, carefully target your market. Social media platforms like Facebook have a demographic targeting available that your clinic or business can use. You can modify settings like language, relationship status and employment of people near you and your clinic. One of the many advantages of using social media is that people use mobile phones more than they use their desktop computers.

Moreover, being responsive to social networking platforms is a must. Create a system for tracking potential patients, and answer their inquiries and complaints. Additionally, your social media pages should be linked to your website and vice versa. This way, your blogs, content, and announcements will be displayed all over the Internet.

Since social media is a useful key to connect with your clients, you should create a bond with them. A report posted by Texas Tech University stated that being active in social media creates more loyal customers. For this reason, you should engage with the public to build connection and rapport. Provide your followers with useful information, help, and entertainment.

Furthermore, use call-to-Action buttons to your social media accounts. Follow this strategy to let people know, especially your potential patients to pick up the phone and book an appointment. This way, there’s also a sense of urgency.

Lastly, to maximize the reach of business, you should add it into  Google My Business (GMB). Set up your account and verify your business on the platform and update it with all of your information. With this, you can advertise your business locally when people search on businesses near them through Google Maps.

Get Reviews from Clients

According to Statistica, online reviews determine the quality of local businesses and online business reviews are the most critical aspect of building trust among customers.

Online reviews serve as social proof that drives people to continue their buyers’ journey. Potential patients search their desired dental services on search engines before booking an appointment. Online reviews can help feed the content machine, keeping your clinic favoured by algorithms.

Aside from appearing trustworthy, online reviews expand the conversation about you. When people have good things to say about your business and your services, they are most likely to share their reviews on more external sites, including their own.

Good reviews come from excellent service. When your brand is visible online and your dental service is excellent, it encourages people to talk about you. Social media is a great tool but the ability for customers to talk about you on other channels is a crucial component of your presence.

According to a study entitled “Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com” by Michael Luca of Harvard Business School, online reviews have a positive impact on sales.

Further, online reviews create an avenue for customers and potential patients to leave their comments and for businesses to learn from these reviews. In getting reviews, you may ask these from your previous patients. You can also mention this to new patients, especially after a positive experience. You can also link your profile pages on review sites. Show the links to your review sites on your receipts and invoices or add it to your email signature as well.

One way to get your dental clinic more positive reviews from your patients is through ReputationStacker. This site works by uploading your customer’s email addresses or phone numbers into your dashboard. The website’s system sends an invite to your customers and patients to provide you with feedback about their experience. The system automatically directs customers who had a positive experience to your profile pages. Hence, increasing the credibility of your business.

Monitoring Progress

 Tracking your digital marketing strategy is important in identifying what is working and what needs improvement.

        For instance, what is the status of your Facebook marketing campaign? What are the metrics that you need to track? What content fails to gather engagement? What date and time is your posting schedule? Are you posting enough? Do you think your overall Facebook marketing campaign is failing? What needs to be improved?

        These are only some of the questions that you need to check in monitoring your progress. In doing so, keep track of the engagement metrics for your website and social media platforms as these mostly represent on how your prospects like your content. Each social networking platforms offer their own analytics tool for business profiles while for your website, you can use Google Analytics and other tools that works the same way.

        In tracking your progress, you should understand where your traffic came from. It is important to highlight this because you need to understand where your audience know about your business. In this manner, it is now easy for you to analyze and do a comparative test to all of your strategy because you have already identified the necessary tool that is needed in different digital marketing strategies.

        Another thing to monitor is how your audience interact in your platform. You need to keep in mind that the success of your campaigns lie on how many people have you converted into clients over the people who become the audience of your platform. Checking this data is crucial in your business as it tells more about your audience. Hence, you have information about them and a reason for you to change your strategy according to various success metrics.

Conclusion

Nowadays, dentists like you and the dental industry in general needs to catch up with the ever-evolving trend of the marketing industry. You need to understand how marketing works especially on the Internet which becomes the biggest platform where people connect with each other.

However, the most important aspect of marketing is still quality service. This strongly affects the dental industry and helps to dramatically change other people’s quality of life as well.

According to R.L. Adams in Entrepreneur Magazine, excellent service provides your clients information about your service that will create a strong professional relationship and trust between the both of you. In this way, you show your clients on how you aim to provide valuable service and how concerned you are about their health.

If your practice is promising, your success in digital marketing is possible. You can easily reach wide audiences and increase the revenue of your digital marketing campaigns because you already proved an excellent quality of service.

However, this can be a difficult task if  you are still building the name of your specialization and business. For this reason, you need to market yourself online with all the details in this Digital Marketing Guide for Dentists and the Dental Practice.

With the help of this guide, you will have an idea on how digital marketing works for your specialization. This will then allow you to reach online users that you can convert into your clients. Thereby, you can use all the inputs above to provide better services to your clients online and in return, reach your goal as a dental professional!