If you are a dentist but have never applied any digital marketing strategy for your dental practice because you never heard what digital marketing is all about or it is scary or too risky for you to try, then let this blog give you a sense of clarity. 

Now, we both know that for the longest time, dental practitioners like you have relied on reputation and referrals to build and increase your customers. Brand loyalty as well as the consistently high quality of dental services have also played a part in retaining your existing patients and capitalized the word of mouth marketing and referral system to have a sustainable and thriving dental practice. 

Though traditional advertising such as radio ads and adding your dental clinic on yellow pages have done the trick, the fact still remains that just like some of your patients’ teeth, these strategies will eventually decay over time.

Don’t get me wrong, the dental industry is an evergreen practice. In fact, by the time you are reading this, the dental industry is estimated to be worth $37 billion (2021).

However, if you want to stay on top of the game and to make your dental practice more profitable, it’s essential to have a digital marketing plan for your dental practice. 

In 2021, it is more likely that your target patients are on digital media. Whether you are looking for high-quality patients, chances are they are all online and they are consuming some type of online platform (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok)  for their work or personal life.  

Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches per day and at least 85 percent of consumers use the Internet to find local businesses. The rise of online product or service reviews has been the basis for your customers’ purchasing decisions as 72% of patients look for reviews when searching for a dentist.

Dental marketing isn’t just about reaching a larger audience — it’s also effectively delivering the right message for your target customers. Dental marketing can help dentists to strengthen ties with existing patients and also bring in new patients. You might have many goals concerning where you want to be and how much you should have earned in the next five years as a leading dental care provider. 

Now, You might feel overwhelmed with all the platforms available on the market but the key in marketing for dentists is to understand where and how to connect with your potential leads can strategically target and filter high-quality clients in order to attract, retain and market to your patients are some of the advantages in learning the basics and benefits of digital marketing. 

Let’s look at some of the benefits of digital marketing for dentists and learn more about why it’s necessary for the continued success of your dental practice. 

Benefits of Digital Marketing For Your Dental Practice 

Boost Online Visibility and Brand Recognition 

Generally speaking, your potential patients are more likely to look for dental services from a practice they’ve heard of before. In just one click, patients can research all the dental clinics they can visit. Raving online reviews are also their basis of whether or not they will set an appointment with your dental office or your competitors nearby. 

Depending on your brand identity, you can create relevant, and insightful content for your potential clients to be informed and entertained about your dental services so that increases your chance of being remembered beyond your dental clinic name. 

Digital marketing plays a big role in establishing your digital presence and making sure to execute marketing strategies that are in line with your brand message, value, and your services. 

SEO and its Role 

When you have established an online presence, your efforts will be useless when the website is not on the first page of search results. SEO is done to make your website to be on the first page of search results. 

For some, you might feel that it’s a bit overwhelming to understand what SEO is about, but having a dental marketing agency will help your dental practice to get as much online visibility through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Remember, In order to rank higher than your competitors in search engines, it all begins by optimizing your website page, doing keyword research to target terms being used to search by your potential clients, and lastly your backlink profile. 

There are tons of dental marketing agencies out there, however getting the right dental marketing agency should have experience in building links from high authority websites that are within the dental market category. 

Accessibility To Leads

Digital marketing allows your patients to connect with you on search engines, social media, email, and your dental practice websites. Being both visible and accessible to your potential customers using their mobile is also a game-changer. 

A whopping 77 percent of American adults own a smartphone and are likely to use it to check the news, use social networking apps to connect (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), and buy products online.  Digital marketing can help you to strategically access them via social media marketing campaigns, SMS marketing, and email marketing. 

Balancing between creatively marketing your dental practice with the given data, you are opening the doors of instant brand recognition, connection, and loyalty. 

At this point, your dental marketing should be mainly digital (online) otherwise you’re wasting a lot of potential to thrive in this digital age and improve your digital marketing practices for your dental clinic even during a pandemic 

Generate High-quality leads

If you try to resonate with everybody, you will not resonate with anybody. 

You may have all the digital marketing in place, but the end goal of all dental marketing services is to target potential clients and to filter qualified leads and convert them into paying clients.  

Qualifying high profile clients and converting them to paying one is possible as long as you can analyze your target audience’s online behavior; such as their fear and pleasures towards the dental practice subject, you will be able to create marketing content that resonates with your target patients’ needs. 

There are tons of dental clinics out there. Getting the riches from your niche is all about successfully creating a digital marketing campaign targeting a potential, current or former patient with the perfect message, at the perfect time and over the ideal channel. 

Nurture interested or existing leads

Aside from targeting fresh leads to your business, digital marketing can help you convert interested or existing patients into paying ones. 

You never know if there are people within your area who are thinking about getting their teeth straightened but haven’t searched for the right dental clinics for them.

Returning to our hypothetical radio advertisement above, there’s another audience segment that we haven’t discussed: people who are interested in receiving dental services but haven’t started looking for dentists yet or some patients already searched a dental clinic nearby online but haven’t decided if they will book the appointment yet

This is why your website and its content should be compelling enough to remove the fear and uncertainties of your leads. The successful sales process is about converting the feeling from uncertainty to an act of certainty.  

Speaking of certainty, there are dental marketing companies that can promise you “conversions” or “site visits” but the question is, what are the possibilities of guaranteeing that these are not just wasted marketing efforts that don’t guarantee a call from your clinic to book an appointment with you?  

Working with a dental marketing agency that not only can boost traffic to your site for new or existing leads but also to specifically pinpoint the actual name of the patients booked from the marketing campaign is worth considering when picking the right dental marketing agency for you. 

Flexible Content Per Target Audience

Radio advertising can also be helpful in spreading awareness especially if your product or service is widely and generally used by the market. From detergent or food products, generally, people will be attracted to this type of campaign as these are essentials. 

However, if you apply traditional advertising to your dental practice you might have vague results. The listeners will receive the same message even though each audience has different levels of buying state; thus might not be relevant.  

When you use digital marketing for your as part of your dental marketing strategy, you will be able to craft your ideal avatar; their age, income level, lifestyle, and purchasing decision and adjust your digital marketing content or campaign to establish rapport and trust in this type of audience.  

Remember that your content relevance is equivalent to your response rate and the bottom line sales. 

Measurable Digital Marketing Success 

Again, traditional advertising can run via newspaper, posters, billboards, or radio ads. 

As fancy as it may sound to be announced on air or be seen on a billboard by passengers, there is no sufficient data available that can prove its effectiveness and if the conversions are coming from the ads as most consumers today are already online.

 That’s why digital marketing has proven its efficiency because you are now able to see the tangible analytics to which traditional advertising lacks. 

You can now see the website statistics and check the number of site visits, clicks per page or the device used when they check your site.

From your social media campaigns, you will be able to see how much does it cost to curate paying leads or your cost per click and if it is even worth the money or marketing efforts.

From this data, You and your dental marketing agency can gauge how you can strategically craft your website and content, your social media postings, and even your weekly newsletter. 

Hiring the right dental marketing company that can be flexible to find tactics that work and are transparent to adjust your budget to another marketing campaign and create content that converts the most paying leads is very vital towards any digital marketing success.

Affordability 

Knowing about the perks and benefits of digital marketing is great but at the end of the day what’s the catch? Every great proposition comes with a price.

You might be thinking, this sounds awesome! But how much does it cost? Will it create a hole in my pocket? The answer is absolutely not.

For example, if you run a traditional marketing campaign for your dental clinic’s grand opening; you will have to consider the cost to hire a graphic designer, printing, permit payment, as well as the manpower to post all the posters. On the other hand, social media marketing requires less overhead, making it more cost-effective.

It is better to invest in dental marketing services with visible and measurable results rather than spinning your last coin for an expensive traditional radio ad that is targeting the mass market that doesn’t guarantee that there will be a return on investment.

The great thing about investing in digital marketing is that every marketing strategy is specific and measurable. From targeting specific lead categories to actually seeing the numbers of how many people actually visited the site or click through the ads. 

From there, you can launch specific campaigns and run a paid test online campaign ads to see which one works well and to stop the ones that cost more leads per click, and increase the budget for the ones that will work well.

Ready to Get Started?

Digital marketing is by far the most effective way to promote your dental practice right now. 

Adjusting to the new ways on how dental marketing can be done nowadays can be challenging just like other industries are still trying to adapt.

But the faster you adapt and upgrade your dental marketing strategies, the faster your dental practice will thrive from your competition.     

Remember when you are choosing the right dental marketing agency for you, one should not only build a site, create a social media campaign for your dental practice, but also actually convert traffic to actual sales. 

Moreover, would it be nice to actually know the names of the booked patients all coming from the marketing efforts of the digital marketing agency that you hired?  

This is why Rise DDS is the leading and only dental marketing services provider in the U.S. that shows you actual visible results by patients’ names from our marketing efforts.   

Let us help you decide which marketing strategy suits your dental practice today. 

Book a 30-minute discovery call consultation here.