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 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Google’s version of the now outdated Yellow Pages directories is their Google My Business platform.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 can 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 will 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 it will rank well.

Lots of sites publish dental content in hopes of gaining more customers. The thing is, 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.

To produce above-average content, it’s essential to have an idea of what the 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?

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

  • How many times a month should you publish content?

    66% of bloggers today publish 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 searching for online? Once you answer this question, create content that helps them solve their problems without 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. However, having a few negative reviews you have addressed appropriately can 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, e.g., Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.

4. Stay in Touch with Email Marketing

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

Through effective email communications, you can:

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

The Power of the Email Subject Line

One of the most critical areas of your emails is your subject line. Unfortunately, people will spend most 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 spent 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.
  • The best send day and times are typically Tuesday morning; 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, e.g., [email protected], and not a free service such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com.
  • Segment your email lists so your emails have a better chance of connecting with the recipient. For example, if your email is about maintaining porcelain veneers,s then the people receiving it should already have them or at least 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.