Digital marketing for dentists
It's time to plan for success
You don’t want to operate on a wish and a prayer when it comes to your dental practice. You’ve put your time, money, and passion into creating a respected local business, so “Let’s throw something on the wall and see if it sticks” is clearly not an appealing approach. Many practices are turning to dentist online marketing strategies to enhance their digital presence and attract new clients. And yet, you don’t recall taking any marketing classes in dental school, which leaves you skimming social media forums and watching sales-pitchy marketing webinars for ideas. That’s a sure path to mediocre (if any) results.
Every Practice and Plan Is Unique
As a dentist, you start nearly every new patient with a comprehensive exam. It’s how you get to know their baseline health, their smile goals, and it’s how you develop a treatment plan. An experienced dental marketing company operates the same way. Our plans are driven by intensive market and demographic research, practice performance metrics, and a clear understanding of your practice growth goals.
With two decades of experience developing dental office marketing plans, our team of strategists has written custom marketing plans for over 2,000 dental practices. You can count on our experience to guide you on a path to predictable success.
Our planning process follows four critical steps:
01.
Discovery and Data
Our in-depth interview and data audit teaches us what you value and what’s really going on in your practice. We’ll look for missed opportunities with lead conversion, patient retention, case closures, and more.
02.
Research
We review everything. Your current marketing, your competition, your market, and your practice demographics. Seriously, everything. Because without proper research, your plan is just a guess (and most likely a template.)
03.
Analysis
Our dental marketing experts use this time to compare where you are, to where you want to be. All that research and data tells us where you’re stuck, which then tells us what strategies are needed to unstick you.
04.
Planning
We put all this knowledge into a mental blender and out comes your very own comprehensive dental marketing plan. Strategies are explained, a calendar maps out your implementation and budget, and suddenly the path forward is much clearer.
Looking for fresh ideas? Download our Dental Marketing Inspiration Guide
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It All Starts With a Plan
When you invest in your practice with a strategic plan, you can finally experience predictable growth, backed by KPI’s that prove the impact so you feel good about your investment in marketing services for dentists. No more “silver bullet” marketing ideas. No more, “it worked for my friend so it should work for me.” Don’t spend another year marketing your dental practice on a wing and a prayer. Plan for your future. Plan for success.
These folks really get to know your dental practice and your area before they suggest marketing ideas. You tell them your goals and they will come up with a plan that is NOT one size fits all.
Jen Bernstein and her team have been very effective in designing and implementing a budget friendly plan that keeps our website relevant and our marketing dollars focused for maximum impact. We count on Golden Proportions to keep the phone ringing.
The GPM team has delivered an effective and organized marketing experience for my practice. They took the time to learn about my practice purpose, philosophy, team, location and procedure mix. We developed goals together and some strategies to achieve them. I am already seeing results, and the ongoing follow-up and communication is outstanding.
Powerful Dental Marketing Strategies for success
At Golden Proportions, we develop powerful custom strategies for dental practices. We believe that when it comes to promoting your dental office, marketing strategies should be built around your unique practice and business model. That’s why we build custom, strategic dental marketing plans that optimize recommended strategies for exceptional outcomes.
So what are some common dental marketing strategies that can help your practice achieve its potential?
Social Media
We always prioritize social media in your marketing plan. Dental offices benefit greatly from a strong social media presence, allowing you to engage with existing patients while attracting new ones. Our expert digital marketing for dentists can help you design an effective dental marketing strategy specifically tailored for social media.
One impactful approach to enhance your online footprint is through personalized engagement. By sharing posts that highlight the distinctive aspects of your practice, you can captivate your audience and drive engagement online. Offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse not only instills confidence but also showcases the valuable contributions you make to your community.
We can also help you revamp your online social media strategies, providing expert guidance on how to properly use interactive content to engage with your target audience. We’ll help you develop a customized plan and coach your team on when and how to post photos, videos, case photography, patient testimonials, and more. With a robust social media strategy, you’ll inspire active participation from your followers and foster meaningful interactions with your patients.
Paid Search
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective ways of targeting your local community and attracting new patients. With customized paid search ads, you can effectively promote your practice’s most profitable care, promoting fee-for-service services such as dental implants, cosmetic dentistry, Invisalign, and more. By precisely tailoring your ads to resonate with the needs and interests of your target audience, you maximize the chances of attracting their attention and driving them to take action.
In addition to increasing brand awareness and generating leads, paid search advertising enables you to stand out in highly competitive areas. It provides you with a competitive advantage by ensuring your practice appears prominently on search engine result pages when potential patients are actively seeking dental services.
Moreover, paid search campaigns offer detailed analytics and tracking capabilities, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. This data-driven approach empowers you to refine and optimize your strategies over time, ensuring you achieve the best possible return on investment.
By incorporating paid search into your dental marketing strategies, you can unlock significant new patient growth opportunities, expand your patient base, and position your practice as a leader in the industry.
Online Reviews
In today’s digital age, online reviews play a critical role in shaping the reputation and credibility of your dental practice. Patients have come to rely on these reviews as a valuable source of objective, reliable, and transparent feedback. It’s almost certain that before scheduling an appointment, prospective patients will actively seek out and carefully read the reviews left by previous patients.
For online marketing, dentists should have a strategy to address patient reviews, whether through the use of review automation software such as Swell or Birdeye (outbound links to each) or even a simple QR code poster featured at the front desk. These tactics can have a transformative impact on the number of reviews left for your dental practice.
By implementing a comprehensive approach to managing online reviews, you can leverage the power of patient testimonials to boost your practice’s reputation, attract more prospective patients, and establish trust and credibility within your community. Having reviews is a key part of digital marketing for dentists, as it not only gives dental businesses credibility but is also a great way to enhance social media marketing and rank higher with search engines, especially for local SEO efforts to promote the practice to potential new patients.
Dental Office Marketing Plan Questions & Answers
You probably think we’re going to say dental websites or social media, right? Wrong. If we had to pick just one dental marketing strategy, we’d tell dentists to treat their patients like gold. Because that’s really what they are. An incredible new patient experience, repeated consistently at every subsequent visit, is worth reviews, referrals, and a lot of name-dropping among friends. And that is pure dental marketing gold.
Running paid social media ads, doing extensive search engine optimization, or creating a beautiful dental website design won’t attract new dental patients if you don’t have an online reputation built on exceeding patient expectations. That being said, if you do provide an outstanding service, digital marketing tactics can help your business really take off.
The best ROI comes from dental marketing ideas that engage people who have reached the bottom of the marketing funnel. (want to learn more about the dental marketing funnel? Read this.) Strategies such as dental social media and advertising tend to be top of the funnel ideas, meaning they are important brand awareness tools but the prospective patient is likely still researching their options, so you may not see as much direct action. The further down the dental marketing funnel you go, the closer someone is to a decision. That’s why dental websites or dental ppc campaigns can feel the most effective, when in reality there were a lot of steps along the way that impacted that new patient’s decision. So the answer is…every dental marketing idea can have the best ROI depending on your point of view!
Dental marketing takes time. You’re going to have development time up front (designing a logo, building a website or landing page, establishing a social media audience, etc.), and often your marketing can’t start until those communication tools are ready. You should start to see a steady flow of calls in about 3 months from Google Ads or social media ads, 6 months from SEO for an established dental website, in the first 2-3 drops of direct mail, and the first 3-4 months of radio and TV. You’ll get some nibbles in the beginning on all of these, but consistent, predictable new patients do take time. We’ll continue to adjust your campaigns until we’ve fine tuned the results and we’re nailing your conversion and dental marketing ROI.
