Managing a dental practice requires more than “just” top-notch dentistry skills. Of course, dental skills are vital, but if you want to build a successful dental practice, you will also need to have a strong understanding of certain business processes, such as marketing. By marketing your dental practice well, you will be able to leverage dental marketing and other business skills to attract high-quality, reliable patients.
Marketing is an entire art and science in-and-of itself. Dental marketing is a refined niche with strategies and skills targeted specifically for building up dental practices. There are many factors to consider, including:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website
- Inbound content marketing
- Google Ad Optimization
- Direct mail flyers
- Building and utilizing an e-mail list
- Traditional marketing, such as radio ads
By utilizing the above dental marketing strategies, a dentist can grow his or her practice.
Marketing 101 For Dentists
In order to get the most out of each of the above tactics, it’s important to understand both the basics and importance of marketing. The ultimate goal of marketing is to improve the bottom line, to increase revenues and profits.
For dentistries, this means not only finding more patients, but also identifying and attracting patients who will pay, and who need more profitable services.
When you use marketing, you are trying to communicate with your patients. This could mean push marketing, such as a TV ad featuring a sales pitch. However, people are able to tune out advertisements. As a result, many companies are shifting towards inbound marketing.
This means “pulling” patients in. Arguably, the most important single aspect of your dental marketing efforts is to provide useful information to potential patients. By providing useful info, you can gain a patient’s trust and add value to them. This is a fantastic way to build a relationship.
So how do you accomplish this? By producing content that provides potential patients with dental knowledge. Let’s say you practice general dentistry, and many patients need better cavity knowledge. So, to pull potential patients in you can put together articles on your dental practice website that describes cavities, how to prevent them, and how to properly treat them. Patients who are worried about cavities will find your content and read it.
Meanwhile, you might put together a monthly newsletter to send out to patients via email. This way, patients will be reminded of your dentistry practice and your particular skills with cavities.
They might pass the information on to other people, or be reminded of a service that they haven’t used but need. Then you can push your content out through social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and social media.
Considering More Dental Marketing Strategies
There are many other marketing concepts you should understand if you want to build up your dental practice. Geolocation targeting is now essential for dental practices. This means producing content that is keyword rich for your local area.
Keywords refer to words that patients might type into a search engine. For example, “cavity fillings in Seattle.” You don’t want to stuff keywords, but you do want them to be present.
There’s also Google Adword optimization, which refers to optimizing any paid ads you are running to target specific types of customers. There are various marketing outreach efforts you should consider as well, such as writing guest posts on other dentistry blogs.
When marketing your dental practice, you should look for new opportunities to master and implement marketing strategies. If you’re as busy as most dentists are, you might consider working with marketing specialists as well. A marketing specialist could jumpstart your marketing efforts, help you build your dental practice online.