Digital Marketing for Dentists – Guide to Attracting New Patients

Photo by Peter Kasprzyk

Originally Posted On: https://www.leadstream.online/digital-marketing-for-dentists-guide-to-attracting-new-patients/

Digital marketing for dentists is one of the most effective ways to attract new patients to your practice. This is due to the inbound nature of the online channels – as those in your local market search for dental services & solutions, you put your practice in position to be found and convert searches into new patients.

A well planned and executed digital strategy can consistently send new patients to your practice each month, enabling you to predictably grow your business.

This may sound simple, but it’s an important building block for all your marketing channels. Ask yourself the following:

• What types of services do you wish to promote and grow?
• What types of patients do you want to attract?

The answers to these simple questions will dictate how you approach the digital marketing strategies outlined in this article. For example, is General Dentistry for families your bread and butter? Or, do you wish to grow more premium services such as Cosmetic Dentistry or Dental Implants?

Piggybacking off of the patients you wish to attract, you’ll convert much more prospects to patients if you have a strong offer for your services such as discounted cleanings for new patients, free teeth whitening etc. These are your hooks, or foot-in-the-door offers that help attract and convert prospects to new patients.

Having a website in todays times is pretty obvious, but make sure your website includes the following items to increase your chances of converting visitors to new opportunities:

• Responsive design/optimized for mobile devices
• Phone number clearly visible on all pages and placed near the top of the page (above the fold)
• Contact form on each page
• Make it easy to find your address
• Include your foot-in-the-door offer on relevant pages
• Current design (if your website was designed 5-10 years ago, it’s time for a new one!)
• List of all core services
• Driving directions
• Pictures of Dentists and team
• Relevant videos
• Trust factors such as certifications, associations and testimonials
• SSL certificate (https)
• Way for patients to schedule appointments

Obviously, this is not an all inclusive list of website must-haves, but it covers the main elements that will increase your website’s engagement. If your dentists website is missing most of the items above, it could be time for a new website.

The fastest digital marketing strategy for dentists to drive new patient growth is paid search advertising, like Google Ads. If setup and managed properly, it can be a powerful engine to keep new patient inquires coming-in regularly and consistently.

Search ads work by showing your ad when a prospect searches on Google (or Bing) for dental services. We highly recommend you use a dedicated landing page for your campaigns to increase your conversion rate and make the most of your advertising budget. You can also promote your foot-in-the-door offers to drive new business.

You can run campaigns that accomplish different goals such as:

• Promoting low-cost, foot-in-the-door offers and services
• Promote profitable services that people could be searching for like Invisalign, Veneers etc.

Be found where your market is

There are different platforms and options within each platform you should take into consideration when deciding your ad campaign strategy. For example, the majority of your target audience will likely be using Google when searching for dental services. However, older audiences (ages 45+) often use Bing to search online. Bing Ads have much lower cost-per-click prices and can be an excellent option to add an additional traffic source without breaking the bank.

If you have a Google My Business page, you can link it to your Google Ads account so you can show ads on Google Maps as well, which can be highly effective.

Not every website visitor will convert into a new patient inquiry, because of this, retargeting can be a great way to bring visitors back to your website to convert on a different or similar offer.

For example, if someone visited your website, exploring your new patient services pages, you could retarget them (show ads) on Facebook promoting your foot-in-the-door offer.

When someone searches for a Dentist in your area, do you show-up? Ideally, you want to show-up in the “map pack” and the organic search results so you can earn more “free” traffic and not lose potential new patients to your competitors.

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic and new patient growth. Be sure to optimize your website and build authoritative inbound links as well.

Is your website properly optimized? Find out here.

Having a Google My Business listing is almost as important as having a website. It’s free and can help drive traffic, inquiries and help patients find your practice. It is also great for your SEO and can help you appear in the map pack.

Be sure to completely setup your listing and get it verified. Also, make sure to send your happy patients to your GMB listing so they can leave you a review. Reviews are a big piece in your dentist digital marketing strategy so make sure you keep tabs on them.

Google My Business is going to be one of your most important listings, but there are 70 or so other listings you want to get setup with as well such as the Better Business Bureau, SuperPages etc. This is often included in an SEO campaign.

The beauty of digital marketing for dentists is the fact that everything can be closely tracked and measured. This is important because it gives you the opportunity to try different marketing channels and find those that successfully send new patients at a cost-per-acquisition that is healthy for the business. Those that don’t provide a healthy ROI can be cut.

Be sure to build a way to track conversions and give each marketing channel enough time to produce. A good rule of thumb when testing most marketing channels is 3-6 months. If you run a marketing campaign for that long, you should have a decent idea if it will work out over the long term.

After you try out different digital marketing strategies and find those that are effective, turn them into repeatable systems. For example, a well optimized Google Ads campaign can be like a new patient faucet that you can dial-up and down as you want to scale.

You can make sure there is a process for having your campaigns managed and optimized, as well as your front desk team knowing the most effective way to convert phone calls into appointments.

While this is not an all-inclusive list of digital marketing strategies for Dentists, it does cover most of the crucial elements. We’ll add more to this article so make sure you check back for updates.

Do you need help executing any of these digital marketing strategies? If so, reach out and let’s chat!