Digital marketing plan for dentists

Are you running a dental practice and still relying on Yellowbook entries, billboards, and radio or TV advertising? Then, it’s time to bid adieu to traditional marketing and sat hello to digital marketing for dentists.  

Today, an average American spends nearly 24 hours per week online, and 85 percent of consumers use the Internet to find local businesses. This means that reaching patients through digital presence has become inevitable more than ever before.

Recent research reports suggest that dentists who employ the right digital marketing strategies can increase their brand awareness and recruit potential patients. It is undeniable that a vast majority of patients are relying on online as their primary resource for gathering dental care information. So, keeping up to date with the latest digital trends has become crucial for the dentists to remain competitive and acquire a steady stream of new patients.

Well, just imagine what transformation it would make if your targeted audience is seeing ads on Youtube and Instagram instead of television, or listening to ads on Spotify and Pandora instead of hearing your ads on the radio. If you are still investing your money on traditional marketing or advertising methods, then you are missing out on a lot of opportunities to reach your target audience by holding onto tradition. 

In this digital era, only an effective dental marketing plan for dentists is the way your dental practice will succeed moving forward.

Why Digital Marketing for Dentists?

The ultimate goal of dental marketing is to achieve new patients and increase revenue. As a dentist who is investing in traditional marketing, you increase general awareness for your practice but do not have direct revenue associated with the people you truly want to reach. You are only wasting money on people who are not actively looking for a dental practice. So, why not spend your money one marketing plans that really work and pull your revenue up?

Here we’ve compiled a few digital marketing statistics for a dental practice that help you frame and effective dental marketing strategy.

• 62% of smartphone owners have used their phone to look up information about their dental health condition in the past year.
• 44% of patients who found dental practices on their mobile device have scheduled an appointment.
• 62% of patients use online reviews as the first step to find a new dentist.
• 41% of people agree that social media has a great impact on their dentist choice.
• 90% of millennials agree that they would trust medical information shared by others on social media networks.
• 93% of dental practices believe scripting is beneficial, yet only 52% use it.

How to Create a Dental Marketing Plan that Brings in More Patients?

Branding Works

The word ‘brand’ is the most confusing marketing term and is often misconceived and mysterious. Often, dentists confuse their business with the brand. For dentists, their brand is the experience patients have with your dental practice. From scheduling an appointment to interacting on social media, your brand must make the right impression on your patients.

To create a memorable brand,

• Establish brand goals that you want to achieve.
• When creating a memorable brand, maintain a clear visual identity that is clear, uncluttered, and unique.
• Create a great logo that reflects your services and spend significant time to consider how it represents your dental practice.
• Practice meaningful engagement and maintain consistency across all platforms.

Determine Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is the most significant step you should consider after setting up your brand. Dentists specializing in high-priced cosmetic services may want to target people with higher amounts of disposable income, or higher income threshold levels. In dentistry, there are different niches, and it’s important to note them all down to keep them straight. Take the following criteria into account when choosing your target audience,

• Age
• Gender
• Background
• Location

Also, perform some marketing research to understand where your audience spends time, interact with them and deliver the content they are looking for.

Competitor Analysis

As a dentist, it is important for you to understand your local competitive landscape to determine where and when to allocate your marketing resources. Performing a competitor analysis helps you to,

• Identify barriers and areas that are densely competitive
• Determine which market areas you can most easily dominate
• Decide which prospective patients to target
• Avoid waste of marketing dollars
• Focus marketing investments for maximum ROI.

How to Perform a Competitor Analysis?

• Collect marketing materials such as flyers from your competitors and use this information to fortify your dental marketing strategy.
• Survey your patients to figure out what services they want and what they don’t
• Go through the competitor reviews, especially the ones with the one and two stars. This helps you to find out what people dislike about your competitor and provides you an opportunity to stand out from the rest of the community.
• Brainstorm ways to improve practice operations.

Unique Value Proposition

Create a unique value proposition to stand out from the huge competition and serve it in a way that is memorable to your target audience. A unique value proposition defines why the people in the market area surrounding your dental practice should use your service. This ensures that you deliver a quality service and solve the problems of your patients better than your competitors.

• Solve a patient problem
• Communicate specific value different from your competitor
• Easy to understand
• Convey the primary reason why your dental practice is better than other alternative practices

Set the Budget

Before creating a dental marketing plan, you should decide on the amount of money you will be spending on your digital marketing campaign. This is crucial because it affects how much you can make through a paid channel.

You must have enough funds in your marketing budget to maintain superior patient and prospect communications and prevent lapsing visits and revenue decline. Many dentists fail in this part of their marketing strategy as they fail to allocate enough focus, budget, resources or more. Also, rate your competition in a scale of one to ten, and use this number to decide on your marketing percentage.

Marketing Platforms

Once you decide on the audience, value proposition and budget, choose the right marketing platform and methods for your dental marketing.  

Paid Dental Marketing Options:

• Get in touch with your local community by creating flyers and distributing them locally.
• Introduce PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Facebook Ads to get you in from of your target audience who are actively looking for your dental services. PPC ads are more convenient and low costs, and bring in more clicks to your website.

Free Dental Marketing Options:

• Shift your focus on content marketing to create unique content that reflects the quality of your service. This can help increase SEO and build patient relationships while showcasing your expertise.
• Concentrate on local SEO to help you rank high in search engine results and deliver the best results.
• Social media marketing strategies.

Run Campaigns

Run effective social media campaigns to stand out from the competition and increase ROI. If you are doing it up by yourself, improve your copywriting skills, and learn how to use call to actions effectively. Today, most of the dental practices plan to outsource these tasks to copywriters, individual marketers, or PPC/marketing specialists to save a significant amount of time and money.

Track the Results

Once you begin to run a campaign, track it closely and monitor the results. Running online campaigns and tracking them is easier with Google analytics and Facebook insights. You can find out which posts have got a lot of clicks and impressions and what posts made your practice look up front. You can also keep track of the number of people who have scheduled an appointment via the online resources they have found.

In addition to these, you can also introduce referral programs to bring in more leads and profit to your dental practice.

So, if you want to outperform your competition and attract more patients, you should focus on creating a strong, well-researched dental marketing plan to succeed. It also provides you with a long-term dental marketing plan that you can adjust, maximizing results, without switching over one campaign to another.

Digital marketing plan for dentists also encourages your past patients to revisit your office with a few small, well-timed gestures. The right digital marketing plan for your dental practice can make a huge difference when it comes to finding new patients and improving the satisfaction of your existing patients. The real concern and love for your patients and your intention to improve their well-being helps you to establish a strong relationship with your existing patients and attract new patients.

From social media marketing to personalized content, our unique digital marketing strategies designed exclusively for dentists will help you gain high-quality leads, reach more patients, maximize patient engagement, and expand your practice.