2024 Marketing

For the average dental office, marketing is a huge challenge. If you are a dentist and you own your practice, you’ve been formally trained to provide excellent care to your patients, and that is what you do best. Unfortunately, offering great care isn’t enough – you also need a marketing plan to find those patients and bring them into your office.

That’s where a quality dental marketing strategy comes into the picture. With a carefully crafted plan that utilizes some of the most proven dental marketing ideas in the industry today, you can supply your business with a steady stream of new patients while you focus on making sure everyone who comes through the door gets the care they deserve.

On this page, we are going to dive into the topic of crafting a digital marketing strategy for dentists. Whether you are interested in dental PPC marketing, social media posts for dentists, or any other kind of promotional techniques online, the information below will be a great starting point. Of course, you might not have time to do this all yourself, so feel free to reach out to DentalROI today to learn more about our services and how we can help your practice reach new heights. Let’s Get Started!

The Basics of Dental Marketing Strategy

The thought of promoting your dental practice to potential patients can be overwhelming at first. It’s a big world out there, and countless marketing opportunities exist – so where do you start? After all, you likely don’t have a million-dollar budget for these advertising efforts, so you need to make sure whatever you spend money on offers a nice return on the investment.

Before we get a little bit further into the details of marketing solutions for dentists, let’s start with a big-picture overview of what you are trying to accomplish. By gaining some clarity over the process, you can then start to look at specific techniques and opportunities to put an effective process into action.

• It’s a local market. By definition, the people that you are trying to reach with your promotional efforts are going to live within a specific geographic area. This does not apply to all businesses that use digital marketing, but dental care is an in-person practice, so the people you reach need to be able to conveniently reach you. For example, if you operate a dental office in Seattle, it doesn’t do you much good to put your information in front of potential patients in Portland. Wherever you are located, you need to identify a zone around your location from where patients may be willing to drive to see you. Focusing your efforts on dominating digital marketing in the area immediately around your office is going to yield the best results. Of course, if you have multiple locations, a more advanced marketing strategy will be needed to coordinate your efforts geographically.

• Present your services. Another important aspect of marketing this type of business is making it clear what kinds of services you offer to your patients. This will serve a couple of functions. First, it’s just good customer service, as you don’t want to bring people into your office only for them to find later that you don’t offer what they need. For example, if someone is in search of some cosmetic dentistry work, and that isn’t something you feature, you’d simply be wasting their time if you don’t make that clear. Also, and perhaps more importantly, making your services clear can save you money in marketing. You don’t want to be paying for clicks and ad impressions for people who need something you don’t offer. Having clarity on your services and which types of treatment you want to highlight can help your marketing dollars go as far as possible.

• Engage in the community. This gets back to our first point, but one of the best things a dental office can do to create a bigger profile in the local area is to be active at events, special occasions, etc. This is where some creative dental marketing ideas really come into their own. For example, your office might have a booth at a community event where you offer promotions for new patients to get a discount on their first cleaning or exam. The details of what you offer will be up to you, but getting outside of the office to engage with people will go a long way. Dental care tends to be a business where people want to truly trust and know who they are working with, and there are few better ways to build that kind of credibility than simply getting out around town and meeting as many people as possible in a positive environment.

If you build your dental marketing strategy on the back of getting to know people and promoting your services in the local area, you’ll go a long way. Of course, walking around town shaking hands isn’t going to do it all, and you don’t have time to be out meeting people day after day. That’s where turning to

 ideas become important, and that’s where our focus will go in the next section.

Five Fundamental Digital Marketing Ideas for a Dental Office in 2024

For the uninitiated, digital marketing is simply the idea of promoting a business online. Where digital marketing was once a niche market, it has gone fully mainstream by this point in history – companies from simple one-person operations up to the biggest corporations in the world use the internet to find customers, and your dental office should be no different.

But where to start? There are nearly as many digital marketing possibilities as there are sites on the web, so you need to narrow down your choices to figure out the online dental marketing solutions that are going to work for your business. Below, you’ll find a list of five possibilities to help get you started.

1. Build a Great Website. Building an excellent website is at the heart of digital marketing for your business. Custom dental websites can go a long way in helping you get the results you need and deserve from the efforts you make online. Too many dental offices allow their website to fall out of date and into a state of disrepair – which can have a surprisingly negative impact on business. Just as you wouldn’t let your physical location fall into poor condition, neither should you let your website do the same. People interact with businesses today primarily through the web, meaning most of your patients are going to come across your site at one point or another. Investing time and money into the process of creating a great site is just a good business practice, and it really won’t take as long or cost as much as you might think to build something great.

2. Invest in SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is the practice of taking steps on your website to hopefully improve the way your pages rank in Google search results. We can highlight how this works by continuing an example we used earlier on this page. If you owned a dental office in Seattle, you would want to rank highly for search terms that might be used by people in that market who are looking for your services. So, naturally, a search for “dentist in Seattle” would be one that you’d love to rank highly for in the search results. But that’s far from the only useful keyword. There could be other searches like “teeth cleaning in Seattle”, or “Seattle root canal”, and on and on. Good SEO involves researching the relevant searches in your market and then creating content and using other techniques to rank as highly as possible and acquire more traffic. It’s true that SEO efforts can take a little while to pay off, but it’s an extremely powerful tool to grow your business once you get the ball rolling.

3. Experiment with PPC Ads. Where SEO is great for gradually building up a base of traffic that will come into your website month after month, PPC is a powerful tool for getting traffic immediately. In this case, PPC stands for pay-per-click, which is a popular form of online advertising. Just as the name makes it sound, you pay for each click that you receive on your ads, and those clicks direct potential patients to your website. Since you are paying for each visitor, it’s critical that you have a quality landing page for them to see when they arrive, and a clear call-to-action that aims to get them to contact you and make their first appointment. It takes some practice and a bit of trial and error to dial in a great PPC campaign, but this is another useful digital marketing tool that you don’t want to ignore.

4. Actively Manage Your Reputation. One of the things people commonly do online is leave reviews about businesses. This is seen all over the web – no matter what kind of business it is, if it has customers, you can bet that someone has left a review somewhere. This is just as true in the dental field as it is in other industries. While there isn’t much of anything you can do about what people say, you do have control over how you respond. When a patient leaves a review on one of the many platforms, it’s a good practice to respond to that review. This action lets other potential patients know that you are active and engaged, and you care about the satisfaction of those you serve. For positive reviews, you can simply say thank you and we hope to see you again soon. When a negative review is posted, you’ll want to apologize for the issue, ask for more information, or see what you can do to help. Of course, you want to avoid arguing about it in a public forum like the internet, as that would be a bad look for your business. Take the high road with negative reviews and you’ll impress potential future patients with your professionalism.

5. Use Social Strategically. We’ll talk more about the matter of social media posting below, but safe to say this is an important part of a good overall digital marketing strategy for dentists, as well. One of the great things about using social media for your business is that the platforms are typically free to use, so you can incorporate this approach into your marketing plan without adding to your budget at all. Not only might you be able to find new patients through the social platforms, but this is a great way to keep in touch with current patients and make it more likely that they’ll keep coming back again and again.

The list above is likely exciting and intimidating – it sounds like a lot of work to implement these various techniques, especially if you haven’t done it before. That’s why it’s best for most dental offices to hand off the job to a digital marketing agency like DentalROI. We focus specifically on serving dentists with outstanding online marketing performance that takes the pain out of the process and puts together a system that can generate new leads and new patients for years to come. You are welcome to contact us today to learn more.

Social Media Posts for Dentists – Doing It Right in 2024

We mentioned above that using social media is a valuable part of the online marketing strategy used by many dental offices. In this area, some business owners tend to run into trouble because they think they already understand how to use social media. After all, you have personal Facebook and Instagram accounts, right? You already know how the apps work, so it’s easy enough to believe that transferring that knowledge to marketing would be simple.

That’s a mistake, however. Using social media for marketing is a very different thing from using it to promote your dental business in a way that is effective over time. If you would like to get more results from your social media efforts, keep the tips below in mind –

• Be authentic. One of the most important aspects of using social media to market your dental office is authenticity. You don’t want to present a cold, impersonal front through your social media accounts – you want to be real and show some personality that allows your patients and potential patients to get to know you better. Of course, it’s important to retain some degree of professionalism at the same time, so this can be a tricky balance to strike. With practice, you should be able to find a “voice” that is just right for your brand and builds trust effectively with the audience.

• Demonstrate knowledge. Part of getting people to trust you as their dentist is showing what you know and how you can help them with their oral health problems. So, creating some short videos that you can post to social platforms is a great way to quickly do just that. For example, if you offer teeth whitening in your office, you could shoot a short video on the teeth whitening options that you offer and how they work. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy or formal – it could just be you sitting in the office and talking about the topic. Not only does this kind of content demonstrate expertise, but it also gives your social pages a personal feel as we were mentioning above.

• Involve your patients. Social media is supposed to be just that – social. So, instead of only having one voice on your account, you could bring in other voices in the form of past patients who would love to sing your praises. If you have any patients that you’ve gotten to know well over the years, ask them if they would be willing to record a short testimonial about their experiences in your office. This kind of content goes a long way toward building more trust, as people love hearing the thoughts of others who have been in their shoes.

• Stay engaged. It would be a shame to put effort into crafting social media posts and building a presence only to neglect the account and not interact with the audience. Feel free to respond to comments that you get on your posts and try to develop an ongoing banter with those who follow you. This ongoing interaction can be seen by anyone who comes by, and it will paint you as an interested and engaged business owner.

We’d Love to Help!

We understand that all of this can be a bit overwhelming, and you might not feel ready to take on digital marketing on your own. Fortunately, you don’t have to! DentalROI is a digital dental marketing company offering a full suite of digital solutions that leverage the power of AI to get great results. Whether you’ve been frustrated with past online marketing results or you have never tried to find new patients through these channels, we’d be happy to serve you. Reach out today to learn more.

Frequently Asked Questions

Thanks to our extensive experience in dental marketing, we have encountered some questions that seem to come up over and over again. If you have had any of these questions yourself, feel free to explore the answers below. Of course, we are always happy to connect with you directly to answer questions and explain our services, so feel to reach out at any time to get started.

Q: What is dental marketing?

A: As the name would suggest, dental marketing is the process of using various marketing techniques to promote your dental practice to the local community. Under this umbrella term, just about any form of advertising could apply. Digital marketing is certainly one important and popular approach, but there are also physical mail campaigns, TV and radio ads, sponsoring local events, and much more that can be included in your marketing tactics.

Q: What are some common mistakes to avoid in dental marketing?

A: One of the biggest mistakes a dental practice can make in the marketing realm is having a lackluster website. In the modern world, your website is your virtual front door, and it is likely to be the first meaningful interaction that potential patients have with your business. Investing the time and money into building a great website is a huge step toward impressing patients and growing the practice over time. Also, failing to leverage the power of social media is another big error that can be easily avoided.

Q: How do you measure the success of dental marketing efforts?

A: The right way to track dental marketing success depends on what it is you hope to achieve with each initiative. Of course, ultimately you would like to see growth in the number of patients you serve month after month, but that’s only one measure. For digital marketing efforts, tracking how many visits are recorded on your website each month is a good way to watch for growth and find proof that your hard work is paying off. As long as those website visitors like what they see, at least some percentage of them will likely turn into new patients.

Q: How can a dental practice use social media for marketing?

A: The beauty of social media for promoting a dental practice can be seen in its local nature. Despite social platforms being massive corporations, the communities that develop within them often have a local feel. So, by taking part in the right discussions, and by being part of the right groups, it’s possible to earn plenty of attention from potential patients by actively engaging on a variety of social platforms.

Q: What are the benefits of PPC for dentists?

A: PPC is a great way to get instant traffic to a website. Once a PPC campaign is set up, it can simply be turned on, funded, and the clicks will start to flow. Of course, there is plenty of hard work needed to optimize the campaign and make sure it is profitable, but the speed of results that are available through PPC can’t be easily replicated with any other form of digital marketing.