Digital Marketing for Dentists: A Complete Guide

Dental Digital Marketing

Does your dental practice or dentistry business find itself struggling for clients despite boasting the best equipment, dentists, and value for money? If so, it’s likely that your problems can be attributed to poor marketing strategies – and now is the time to fix it!

Quite frankly, there are two words you cannot ignore: digital marketing. Here’s all you need to know about the modern approach to marketing for dentists, and how mastering this task can transform your venture for the better.

You spend your career fixing smiles; now is the time to let us fix yours.

Why Digital Marketing?

Before implementing any idea in business, you need to know that the investment is worth making. Digital marketing endeavors aren’t only worthwhile; they are essential.

Studies show that over 85% of consumers now use the internet to find local companies. Given that dentistry work isn’t something you can simply order to be delivered, your business will certainly benefit from being able to hit this market.

Digital marketing offers many advantages over traditional marketing, here are five of the most significant;

It’s cheaper, meaning better value for money.
Targeted marketing can be used to reach specific demographics.
Cookies and AI ensure that interested users and shown further advertising.
It’s easy to remove or change ideas that aren’t working.
Analysis gives you quantifiable results.

Essentially, then, digital marketing is better. Whether used instead of traditional methods or alongside them, incorporating the right streams into your approach is vital.

Digital Marketing For Dentists

Appreciating the need for digital marketing is easy, but building a strategy that works is another challenge altogether. Ultimately, you are aiming to increase the awareness, gain the trust of prospective clients, establish yourself as a valuable service, and generate leads. If you can do this, success is assured.

One of the most important aspects of building a digital marketing plan is to ensure that you’ve covered all the bases. The perfect strategy should cover the following areas;

Website Design & SEO
Paid Marketing
On-site Marketing
Email Marketing
Customer Reviews
Sponsored Posts

So, let’s take a look at each of those elements in greater detail.

Website Design & SEO

The design of your website and supporting SEO (search engine strategy) should be the first items on the marketing agenda. Always.

Web Design

Let’s face it; if your website doesn’t look the part, visitors will leave immediately. The term bounce rate describes the number of people that are leaving after viewing just one page, and a high percentage shows that you need to improve the look of your site.

A successful website should tick the following boxes;

Load quickly (no longer than three seconds)
Have a clear and attractive web layout that boasts easy navigation
Utilize a good color scheme and use images to brighten the page
Be optimized for mobile screens
Look professional and provide the necessary info in a convenient way
Be seamlessly integrated with social media pages
Make users want to stay and consider buying your products.

Ultimately, first impressions count for everything, and the design of your website will play a telling role.

SEO

SEO is a term that describes how well your site performs on Google and other search engines. Appearing on the first page of a localized search will give your business a serious boost because over 90% of users stick to websites on the first page. Meanwhile, studies show that most users associate a strong SEO presence with a reliable and trustworthy service – not least because the Google algorithm is more advanced than ever before.

Search engines will provide most of your organic traffic, which is why getting it right is vital. As a dentistry business, you must look to perform well on searches based on dental terms as well as the geographic location of your services.

While SEO is influenced by many of the elements also mentioned below, here are the key factors to consider when building your SEO for dentists strategy.

Quality content
On-site keywords
Image keywords
Meta titles and descriptions
Backlinks
Voice search-friendly terms
Mobile-friendly search terms
Social media integration

Get all of these items under control, and you won’t go far wrong. However, given the continual evolution’s of SEO, this is one area of marketing for dentists where expert support may be required.

Paid Marketing

Paid digital marketing for dentists is a great way to get the business seen by your core demographic. Moreover, your budget can get to work with immediate results. This section can be broken into four sections: PPC, paid search, paid social media, and display ads.

PPC

PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is a particularly popular option for dentists and other businesses alike. They can be created using images, text, or a combination of the both to display a message about the company itself or a specific service, such as teeth whitening.

Once PPC campaigns are live, the adverts will be shown in prominent positions whenever users are browsing the internet. These are the ads that appear on the top or side of your page. As a business, you can stipulate which demographic the ads are shown to. As a dentist, this means setting geographical parameters.

The great thing about PPC ads is that you only pay once a user clicks the ad. So, even if it takes 20 impressions of the advert to secure their interest, you’ll only be charged once.

Paid Search

Paid searches are a form of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) that allow your business to be shown at the top of the first page of results. Given that over 90% of users will only click links from the first page, this gives you a major advantage.

The paid search will be based on a keyword, such as ‘dentistry [your city]’. So, whenever a search engine user browses for that term, your site will be promoted in the spot designated position. Paid searches can be used on Google, Bing, and other major search engines.

Paid Social Media

Paid social media ads can be used on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Creating your ad campaign through the individual platforms is very easy and lets you promote the business and a particular dentistry service in an engaging manner.

Those ads are shown in news feeds, and are shown to be a great way to grab the attention of users as they are actively interacting with the screen at this time. In many ways, then, you can think of this as a similar idea to placing an ad in a magazine.

Display Ads

Have you ever visited a website only to be met with a video or display banner that takes up the whole screen for a few seconds before you can access the on-page content? Those adverts are called display ads, and they are very effective indeed as they are unavoidable for the user.

Display ads are a part of Google’s Display network, so your dentistry office can reach users across millions of websites. Once again, you’ll have full control over which type of sites and clients are targeted.

On-site Marketing

Your website will always be one of the most significant tools in terms of converting interest into converted sales. Prospective patients will always do their research before trusting you with their mouths, and visiting the site is a key element. Here’s how to make the most of that marketing opportunity.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are the pages that users will meet when clicking an advert shown on a search engine, social media channel, or external website. They serve as a precursor to your homepage, and essentially provide a full-page advert for the brand or whichever service you wish to promote.

As a dentistry service, you can use this to promote a special deal or the fact that you offer flexible payments. This is a great place to celebrate accolades too.

Perhaps most importantly, you should encourage a CTA (call-to-action). This could range from booking an appointment to signing up to an email newsletter. Either way, a great first impression here can boost your hopes of gaining new patients before they’ve even looked at the main content on the site.

Blogs

Blogs are a particularly useful solution for on-site marketing. The content of the posts showcases your professionalism, knowledge and expertise in a way that confirms your place as an authority in the industry. Moreover, they can be used to promote specific services through persuasive language and internal links.

On a separate note, it’s a great way to boost your SEO through keywords and on-page features. The opportunity to use a more conversational tone is particularly useful when targeting voice searches. Given that over 20% of all mobile searches are now voice-related, this is of growing importance.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most traditional forms of digital marketing for dentists and has been a central focus for over 20 years. It allows you to send adverts directly to their inboxes, which can be used to promote the business or a specific service.

Meanwhile, email marketing streams can use a series of emails to slowly edge prospective clients towards confirming their appointment. For example, if users sign up to receive communications on teeth whitening a series of emails could be used to promote the company, the benefits of the service, and why now is the perfect time to act. The final email could even use a timed special promotion that forces them to make a decision one way or the other.

Using an external email marketing service like MailChimp allows you to customize the appearances and add personalized features like the names of individual recipients. By splitting your mail list into subcategories and audiences, staying relevant becomes an easy task too.

For speed, cost efficiency, and practicality, this is one of the best solutions out there.

Customer Reviews

All consumers need to trust businesses, but this is even more significant when they are considering dental work. While your marketing campaigns can certainly hold a huge influence, nothing generates trust like reading positive words from happy customers. There are two main ways to achieve this.

Testimonials

Testimonials gained through TrustPilot and similar platforms are shown to be very useful indeed because they are verified and impartial. Another fantastic trick is to start an affiliate scheme as this will incentivize patients to recruit new business from their friends and relatives.

Google My Business

Signing up to Google My Business should be considered essential in today’s digital marketing arena. This will ensure that your dentistry practice appears in localized searches conducted on the search engine while the reviews left on this platform are hugely influential on the decision-making process too.

Local business directories are another element that must be given careful consideration.

Analysis & Remarketing

Digital marketing offers many benefits over traditional marketing. However, the ability to monitor the success of individual campaigns is undoubtedly one of the best. Using analytics shows where you are over-performing and under-performing. Pinpointing these elements allows you to focus on the positives and adjust/remove the negatives.

It’s possible to analyze a number of features all from one platform. These items include; audience demographics, impressions, click through rates, and cost per conversion. Tracking the results is a particularly important element that allows you to work smarter. Ignoring it is not an option.

Remarketing is a concept that describes the fact that adverts are often sent back to users that have shown an interest in a service or product. If you’ve ever visited a website and then seen adverts for it later in the day, this is remarketing in action. This is achieved through cookies and browsing histories.

As a dentist service, you only have a set audience to work with. Therefore, pursuing the avenues linked to people that have already shown an interest could be key to boating long-term conversions.

The Final Thought

While traditional marketing through radio, TV, and publications still has a role to play. However, it’s impossible to survive in the current market without implementing a strong digital marketing strategy.

Complete all of the items above, and the visibility and reputation of the venture will soon soar. In turn, the bookings will come thicker and faster than ever before.