The secret to successful dental practice marketing is more than just the flash and fanfare of one single eye-catching campaign. Yes, bright colors and bold text are vital to grabbing people’s attention, but a truly great dental practice marketing campaign requires more than just a few social media posts.
Common Mistakes
Take a look at most dental practice marketing content and familiarize yourself with the competition. You might notice a few repeated things if you look with a critical eye.
- It’s feature-heavy, meaning it suffers from “-est syndrome” (think greatest, latest, best, etc.)
- It’s often loaded with dental jargon. Your colleagues will love it, but the public? Not so much!
- It’s crowd focused, not individual focused. The text reads like you’re speaking to the masses instead of being too “you” – writing to the reader.
Those three observations alone are the relative norm for dental practice marketing. While this may not be the case for all practices, most could improve their marketing with a focus on:
- Benefits over features.
- Content that’s conversational.
- Speaking to “one” person, making the text feel more personal.
Rethink Your Creativity
What ties together these three fixes? A focus on being yourself! The key is positioning your dental practice marketing in a way that feels unique and personal.
While it may seem like common sense, it takes some major courage to step away from the crowd and try something new and different. Sure, it’s easy to use templated marketing strategies and follow how-to guides line by line but if you want long-lasting results you need to get personal. These are for the offices that want more than one-and-done visits. You want long-term referrals from devoted patients!
There’s so much dental practice marketing “noise” out there, that it is essential to carve out your niche in the industry with personal touches. This need is also incredibly timely.
COVID-19 changed the marketing game for us all over the last year and a half, as well as the way dentistry is done. Stop us if you’ve had these conversations with your team this year.
- “We have to start doing dentistry differently.”
- “We need to find new ways to engage with our patients.”
Sound familiar? Not only have you had to make major changes over the last few months, but you’ve also had to evaluate the best way to appeal to the public need and desire for dental services. With all these changes in the marketing sphere and our world at large, it’s safe to say we’re in a new era of dentistry.
How do you use that to your advantage? Let’s focus on a few core ideas!
SOME BASIC YET CREATIVE DENTAL PRACTICE MARKETING IDEAS
Idea #1: Add Some SEO Muscle to Your Dental Practice Website
It’s not an over-exaggeration to say that your practice’s website is perhaps the most important tool in your marketing toolbox. Now more than ever, your website is the first thing a potential patient will ever see or know about your team – however, setting up a website is more than just purchasing your domain (as much as we wish it was that easy).
You have to optimize! If you’ve heard the term SEO (search engine optimization) before, then you know the tip of this marketing iceberg. It’s part – but not all of a healthy website.
Optimizing your site requires some serious creative thinking.
- See your website as an entire usable platform rather than a simple IP address on the internet.
- Maximize your website environment just as much as your office environment. Just like your in-person space, your website is where people and patients connect, interact, and engage with your services. Take the same time and care with your website as you do with your office.
- Offer free downloadable content and resources to your website for your existing and potential patients, just as you would have brochures in your office. Name the content after key search words that patients would be searching for online.
- Have a FAQ or question and answer area that you can fill with SEO-friendly keywords along with helpful info for your patients.
- Write a blog full of useful knowledge and keywords to help your website rank higher in searches.
Idea #2: Constantly Evaluate Your Web Design
Evaluating your site is where your creativity can be applied!
- Design your website around visitor appeal. 90% of web based users form their opinion about a website based on design, so this step is critical[1].
- Make sure your site is uncluttered and easy to navigate. Is the phone number and address easy to find? Is there a big call to action directing patients to book an appointment? Make the most important info the most obvious and easy to find.
- Confirm that your site is up to date with both desktop and mobile capabilities. Google will penalize a website that is not optimized for mobile and you will not rank highly in searches.
Remember! 38% of site visitors will click away if the website design is difficult to navigate or looks unappealing[2].
Idea #3: Engage Your Site Visitors and Current Patients with Patient-relevant Solutions
- Before you create and publish content, ask yourself: is this useful to my patients? This will help you answer real questions and solve common problems a regular visitor may have about their oral health.
- Add an online scheduling portal. This addition is time-saving and convenient and will make appointment requests easier than ever. Eliminate all the barriers you can!
- Give your readers a reason to care about oral health benefits with attractive images and fun video content. Visual media is powerful so be sure to use it to your advantage!
- Provide patients the opportunity to securely make payments, request prescriptions, and complete necessary appointment forms online.
- Increase visitor and patient communication access with real-time chat and messaging apps built into your site.
- Add or update your Google My Business profile to give the public and patients another online access point.
Idea #4: Define Yourself as an Industry Leader with a Dental Blog
Fresh, useful content published on a routine schedule will set your dental practice website and marketing apart from your competition.
Why?
Creating original content takes time that many other practices are unwilling to invest. While it may seem daunting, the long-term payoff is worth your investment! Coming up with topics to write about is the biggest roadblock for many practices. Be creative and leverage these blog content ideas:
- Confront current events, myths, inaccurate data, and the numerous assumptions about dental care. Search newsfeeds, popular opinion articles, etc while bringing your own expertise to the narrative. People love relevant content – so keep on top of the news!
- Share tips on routine dental topics like whitening, brushing, or flossing. Look for a fresh angle or technique on each and give your website visitors something they can use to improve their health or lifestyle.
- You’re the expert, so make a FAQ section! Answer common and routine questions that the public and your patients are often searching for or asking about.
Idea #5: Make Friends with Your Community on Social Media
Social media is the modern day gathering place. Not a moment goes by that your “audience” (you included) isn’t checking one or many social media channels.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Youtube, Reddit… The list goes on! It’s where people go to hang out, read their news, form opinions, show off their skills, communicate, comment, and generally interact with each other in our modern world.
Using social media in a creative way needs to be a major factor in your dental practice marketing. Your patients are online, so you need to be too if you want to maintain a lasting, relevant connection.
- Use your fresh blog content (or a newsletter) and provide teasers on your practice’s social media feed. This will draw your community back to your website.
- Post attention-grabbing statistics, visuals, infographics, or short videos. We are a visual species, so take advantage of it!
- Tell a compelling dental success story using “before and after” images of a client.
- Encourage more dental reviews for your practice by sharing recent positive testimonials.
- Host Facebook “live” events on specific dental topics.
- Show your local community vibe by sharing local milestones, events, and more. Remind your patients that you’re a part of their community.
- Let your social media community see the real you by posting team pictures and videos.
- … And that’s just a start!
As you create, never forget:
Your desire for long-term patient loyalty should be the engine that powers your dental practice marketing creativity.
Check out these related resources to generate ideas and create a dental marketing strategy for your practice:
3 Reasons Why Your Dental Practice Should Pivot to Digital Marketing
The Best Dental Marketing Tactics and Strategy
Contact Imagination Design Studios (IDS) to get started transforming your office from a mundane to a magical patient experience.