Essential Elements Of A Dental Marketing Plan

Getting the word out about your dental practice is now easier and cheaper than ever… thanks to the internet! For dental practices of today, spending a considerable amount of money on marketing no longer means spending half of their budget on TV adverts and praying they’d bring in more patients. It’s more about making your every buck count utilizing the power of the internet... We have already covered the active role your dental website plays in the grand-scheme of things when it comes to marketing your dental practice online. It’s basically the start and end point of all your marketing efforts. So, it’s vital to have a good looking website that can convince users that you’re really serious about your practice. Before we begin with discussing the vital elements of a dental marketing plan, let’s first look at some basic objectives that your marketing efforts must absolutely fulfill -

1. Attract: Grabbing the attention of a potential patient is paramount when it comes to making your marketing efforts a success.
2. Capture: Setting up a mechanism to collect information from users. Taking feedback, offering newsletter subscriptions, e-books & other resourceful information is a nice way to do it.
3. Convert: By this point, your potential patients are ready to convert to a customer.
4. Retain: According to a study, existing customers bring in 67% more business than new customers. While acquiring new patients is kind of the reason you are marketing your practice online in the first place, you must never lose sight of your old patients.

With the objectives of a marketing plan set, you need to choose the mediums you will target to get the best out of your marketing efforts. And the mediums or elements or areas of executing a dental marketing plan I am going to tell you are not, in any way, specific to dental practices but are widely used all over the globe for other niche industries as well. Here we go -

Content Marketing

Pushing relevant, quality content to your patients (or potential patients) that helps them in solving real-world problems related to your industry should always be at the heart of all your varied marketing efforts, doesn’t matter the platform or medium. That’s the true essence of content marketing right there and not the self-promotional stuff from brands you see online. Starting a new blog is the right way and often times the first step to kickstart your content marketing journey.

Say, for a dental blog, the topics you can capitalize upon could be about ways to maintain the right dental health, the latest treatments in town and other informational but relevant topics. If done right, a well maintained blog can generate a steady flow of traffic coming to your website from scratch and keep the momentum going for long. But don’t think your content marketing efforts are confined to just marketing your own blog, even the content on your web pages can serve you well if marketed in the right place and at the right time. And it doesn’t matter if you’re posting a on Social Media, if you’re playing with content, it’s already a part of your content marketing efforts.

Search Engine Optimization

I am pretty sure you must have used Google or some other search engine at some point to make your life easier. Infact, I don’t blame you, there are 32.8 million searches made on Google everyday and they are all made by people looking for some answers.

Suppose, even if a small fraction of them are using Search Engine Optimization for best dental practices around them, you could be drowning in some serious traffic right now but in order for that to happen, you need to rank on Google. Making yourself visible on Google is no walk in the park. You’ll have to base all your website and blog content (see, I told you it’s all about content) around keywords and that takes a lot of time and research.

If you are looking to give keyword research a go, our keyword research guide can give you a headstart. Yes, it’s a pain... but if done right, Google can drive massive traffic to your keyword optimized website.

Social Media Marketing

Can you name a place where all your potential dental patients hang out? It’s Social Media (or Facebook to be more precise). In recent years, the entire Social Media space has evolved as a marketing arsenal of its own.

You can expand your outreach endeavours on Social Media and build a loyal following with the help of engaging and visual posts, provide exceptional & quick customer support, have a look at important marketing analytics and what not, all through a single platform... which I think is amazing! And it can turn out to be amazing for your brand exposure as well. You can choose to spend money on marketing on these platforms or stay organic, it’s completely on you.

Yes, paying for marketing on Social Media has its own advantages but staying organic usually reaps enough exposure to get the ball rolling, after it, it’s up to you how creative (but relevant) you can get with your posts to make your fans stay.

Patient Support

Remember the part about retaining patients? Patient Support is all about that and more. You absolutely need to have a relationship manager for your dental practice who will be the sole point of contact for all your patients.Being present on all the various platforms (including your website) comes with responsibilities.By marking your presence and actively marketing on all your preferred platforms, you give your users a way to contact you as well. And Social Media has emerged as a preferred way for users to submit some feedback (good and bad) or get support. But they can give you a call as well or submit a query on your website or send you an email, so you need to be present for them when they need you wherever they are or you’ll lose them if their queries go unheard or unreplied.

Most practitioners don’t pay much heed to this part of their marketing plan and loose patients through the back door. But sometimes, a good support system or a complete lack of it can make all the difference in the level of success of your marketing plan. Modern day marketing is not about doing one thing, you’ll have to do a lot of things and do them all simultaneously and in sync to keep the ball rolling. Only optimizing your website for SEO won’t work well unless you have keyword wrapped content on your website. Having Social Media profiles for your dental practice is great, but if you don’t have a website to channel them further through the sales funnel, you won’t see much conversions. Just adding content on your website won’t help you gain exposure if it fails to create value….

It’s all interconnected and you will have to optimize your practice for each of them to see the best results.