Marketing your dental practice can be a bit overwhelming, even when you are using a third-party provider. There are so many different strategies and inside each strategy are numerous tactics that can be applied.

Instead of giving you an exhaustive list of options, I have included a few here that when focused on will work well for your practice and provide benefits long after they have been executed.

1. Optimize Your Google My Business Page

Google’s version of the now outdated Yellow Pages directories is their Google My Business platform. With GMB you are able to add your dental practice’s information. This includes things like your:

  • Business name
  • Business address
  • Phone number
  • Photos

This information that you enter contributes to Google deciding how to rank your business for the search results that it is relevant to. Optimizing your GMB listing information helps improve your rankings.

GMB Resources:

2. Create a Blog on Your Dental Website

Content is going to be the driving force for your website to gain more targeted users. The more meaningful content, your site houses, the more keywords it will rank for and the higher the chance that it will rank well.

Lots of sites publish dental content in hopes of gaining more customers. The thing is thought, most of them don’t put in the effort to make it more than just average content. What type of results do you expect to get from average content? Bingo… average results.

In order to produce above average content its important to have an idea of what average looks like. For example the answers below give you an idea of how much time you should put into your posts, what your content length needs to be higher than and what post frequency range you should be in.

  • How long does it take to create a blog post?

    On average, it takes about 3.5 hours to write a blog post with the average blog post length being 1,151 words.

  • How many times a month should you publish content?

    66% of bloggers today are publishing a few times per month, rather than a few times per week back in 2014.

Put yourself in the place of your target audience, what information would they be online searching for? Once you answer this question, create content that helps them to solve their problems without them needing to visit another site.

3. Invite Your Patients to Leave You a Review

Online reviews are a powerful tool when it comes to:

  1. Increasing your credibility
  2. Increasing your Google rankings

At times practitioners resist being proactive with getting reviews for fear of getting bad reviews. Truth be told though, having a few negative reviews, that you have addressed appropriately can actually work in your favor. They make your star rating more believable.

The best way to get more reviews is by using automation. With automated review systems all patients get an invitation via email or text asking them to leave your dental office a review.

Quick Online Review Tips:

  • Request reviews consistently
  • Follow-up with patients who haven’t responded to your review invitation
  • Limit the number of follow-ups so you don’t annoy your patients
  • Guide the user to your preferred review destination to leave their review, eg. Google, Facebook, Yelp etc.

4. Stay in Touch with Email Marketing

Email is a low-cost and still very effective way to stay in touch with your patients and to nurture your leads towards becoming patients.

Through effective email communications you can:

  • Remind patients about upcoming appointments or to schedule them.
  • Inform leads and patients about special offers your practice is running.
  • Celebrate your staff members birthdays, pregnancy’s, anniversaries etc.
  • Provide insightful information regarding oral healthcare and industry news.
  • Share your practices accomplishments like awards, expansions, new hires etc.
  • Include a joke every now and again or even have a dedicated “Humor Corner” in your email template.
  • Get feedback from your patients on their previous visit and invite them to leave an online review

The Power of the Email Subject Line

One of the most important areas of your emails is your subject line. It is unfortunate but people will spend the majority of their time creating the email’s content and then throw together a subject that fails to entice users to read.

Time and effort should be put into sculpting your email subject as 35% of people open their emails based on the subject alone.

If at all possible consider adding your recipient’s first name in your subject line. Studies show that more people open emails when it includes their first name.

Quick Email Tips:

  • Make your emails mobile friendly. 53% of emails are opened more on mobile than desktop.
  • Keep subject lines to 45 characters or shorter for optimum performance.
  • Best send day and times are typically Tuesday in the morning, however, feel free to use this as a base and test other days and times.
  • Ideally your emails should come from the same domain as your practice’s website eg. [email protected] and not a free service such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com
  • Segment your email lists so that your emails have a better chance of connecting with the recipient. Eg. if your email is about maintaining porcelain veneers then the people receiving it should already have them then or at a minimum be interested in them.
  • Include images and videos in your emails for increased engagement.
  • Make your email content readable with short paragraphs, lists, quotes etc.