Six Strategies for Practice Growth
Inbound and outbound marketing strategies are both ways to get more potential patients. This includes search engine, content and social media marketing. A solid strategy and knowledge of the competitive landscape is a must before spending any money.
Whether you are a dentist or practice manager, one thing is certain: high quality patients can lead to increased revenue.
Most of these strategies to get more patients to your dental practice utilize the web. Unlike traditional marketing, such as direct-mail and TV, online marketing can produce a very clear ROI.
There are many variables involved in crafting campaigns that perform well. It is important to understand that your website can help or harm a marketing campaign.
Like your physical office, a website needs to be aesthetic and easy to use.
Advertising or optimizing content for search engines is pointless with a bad website. If site visitors do not feel confident and are not compelled to learn more, you will not see increased leads
1. Search Engine Optimization
The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve the visibility of your website in the organic search engine results. Organic listings appear below ad listings, answer boxes and the business map pack.
For example, if you have a dental office in Cleveland, you would want to appear at the top of Google when a local resident searches “dentists in Cleveland.” Appearing in the local map pack is also very beneficial.
The image below showcases a local practice website that implemented fresh content and SEO. Organic traffic growth drastically improved.
Search engine optimization in 2020 and beyond is complex compared to what it was five years ago. As a dentist looking for an agency, your primary concern will be to ask if they are using whitehat tactics.
Types of SEO
SEO is usually broken down into several categories:
- Onpage
- Offpage
- Technical
- Local
All categories are required for any decent dental SEO campaign to perform well.
Quality content is a must for long-term SEO. This is why there is overlap between content marketing and SEO.
Additionally, optimizing a business for local searches is a bit more nuanced. Google factors many different variables into its algorithms. These in turn determine which websites are most likely to satisfy the searchers query.
Local SEO includes: propagating accurate business information on the web, positive reviews and geo-optimized website pages.
2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click ads appear above and below organic search results listings (in most cases). While SEO is a long-term endeavor, PPC advertising can boost your practice’s website visibility immediately.
Over the years Google has slowly increased the real estate given to ads in the search results. Local and national businesses can bid on keywords to target users based on their specific searches.
If your ad appears but is not clicked, your account is not charged.
Successful healthcare PPC campaigns use proper targeting, include an offer and funnel the prospect to a highly optimized landing page to help convince and convert.
It is typical for cosmetic procedures to have much longer research and informational gathering phases. Staying top-if-mind can be beneficial for when users are ready to take action. (This is why TV and radio ads are still effective!)
Advertising for Dental Practices
There are right and wrong ways to implement a PPC campaign. The best agencies understand the differences between cosmetic and general procedures. Running PPC ads relies heavily on the website to educate, convince and close any relevant traffic referred by the ads.
We have seen dentists waste thousands of dollars per month on PPC ads due to poor targeting, or a badly designed website.
To avoid this, make sure to find an agency that understands the procedures you offer, and how to use Google Ads and Microsoft Ads effectively.
Challenges
Advertising in cosmetic or general dentistry can be a little bit more nuanced and challenging. In other verticals, complex strategies, such as retargeting, can be used to bring previous visitors back to the website
Most publishing companies and ad platforms do not allow retargeting or list-based targeting in the healthcare vertical. This is due to potential HIPAA or personally-identifiable information (PII) issues.
The correct account structure, targeting, messaging and offer can mitigate many challenges.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing focuses on publishing relevant articles or blog posts around topics important to your target audience. In the ideal scenario, your website visibility improves as these new pieces of content begin to rank.
A secondary benefit of writing high quality, authoritative content is the potential to earn links from other websites. These backlinks act as “votes” and can be beneficial to your organic rankings on Google.
Ideally, your marketing company will have a keyword research document and editorial calendar in place. Your involvement may be proofing technical details of procedural info, or approving content.
Video is a great way to build authority in the local and national community. Take a look at what some dentists are doing on YouTube. I have no doubt this brought them business from far reaching places.
4. Social Media Marketing
Promoting your practice or services on social media is very important. We don’t mean making self-serving posts on your page that no one will see or read!
A huge number of the world’s population engages with some sort of social media platform. This includes Facebook, Instagram, TickTok or LinkedIn. Your practice can run ads targeting the characteristics of your target patient. (In a non-discriminatory fashion.)
For example, we ran a highly successful Facebook ad campaign to drive new patient inquiries at a low cost. We targeted specific geographic areas, education levels and genders with different messaging to improve response rates. (For example, we did find that females respond better to ads for cosmetic dentistry.)
If you offer cosmetic or restorative dentistry, Instagram is a highly visual platform great for showcasing your work.
Facebook and Instagram have strict guidelines when it comes to healthcare targeting and ad images.
5. Online Reputation Management
Let’s face it. It doesn’t matter how good you think you are. It only matters what your patients think of you. Their decision to leave a positive or negative review online can directly impact your bottom line.
Dentists are catching on to the importance of having a stellar reputation on the web.
No one wants to put their smile makeover in the hands of a dentist with complaints and poor work results. Numerous studies show that online reviews are almost as important as a recommendation from a family member.
Just think, when was the last time you ate at a restaurant with reviews claiming there were roaches in the kitchen!
It is extremely important to get ahead of the review curve. One bad review can decimate your ratings on Google, Healthgrades, Vitals or a number of other platforms.
Gathering great reviews is generally not difficult if you remind and follow up with happy patients.
We have an online reputation management system for dentists that automates the process and ensures unhappy patients first get in touch prior to leaving a negative review.
ORM should be implemented as an ongoing program that is always running alongside any other campaigns. A pretty website or stellar marketing campaign will never make an impact if you have 1.5 stars on review websites.
6. Referral Network Strategy
Building a referral network for your practice can be time consuming, yet rewarding. Hiring or promoting an internal employee to be a physicians liaison can help in a few ways:
- Build relationships in the local community and physicians as a practice ambassador
- Conduct general marketing tasks, such as in-person networking or cold outreach programs
- Schedule and follow up with other medical professionals
Actively reaching out to other dental or medical professionals for referrals is both a good way to establish a network.
Conclusion
There are right and wrong ways to market your dental practice in order to get more patients. Online marketing is a great way to narrow down your targeting, while also being able to track results. This is unlike TV and radio, which blasts out to specific ZIPs and may or my not produce direct leads.
A combination of marketing channels, a strong reputation and a high performing dental marketing agency will help your practice obtain new patients.
