As a medical professional, marketing just isn’t within your purview. And it shouldn’t be! You have other things to focus on. Your patients’ well-being is your natural top priority.

The catch-22 is that without practice marketing, you won’t have patients to treat. For this reason, many dentists and doctors choose to hire outside forces to take care of their marketing. Even if you have hired a marketing firm, it’s important that you be a part of the process. No one can ever hope to understand your practice the way you and your office manager do, or decide how your practice should be presented to the world. So how do you place a few toes in the web marketing waters?

Easy Comprehension of Dental Marketing Basics

This blog post acts as a promotion primer to help you consider the basic factors of dental marketing as they apply to your office. Consider the factors detailed below to get a better idea of how to proceed, and what to emphasize in your marketing efforts. If you have any questions, our team can offer some pointers. Just get in touch.

Taking Your First Dental Marketing Steps

• Determine what should be promoted – This is based on a number of factors. Spend some time with your office’s invoices to get a better idea of your top earners (within your services). Which ones typically aren’t covered by insurance? Which are more popular? Which treatments yield the highest net income? You’ll also need to consider the treatments that will appeal most to your patients. Your marketing needs to be a balance of what you want to promote and what patients are trying to find in order to be successful. If your entire website talks about root canals, but fails to mention cosmetic services, it’s not going to bring in new patients (endodontic therapy isn’t the most inviting treatment).
• Establish your target demographics – Your target demographics are determined by patients’ traits and their locations. You’ll want to appeal to different patients for different services, and tweak your marketing to correspond with whomever is likely to find that service appealing. You’ll also want to choose which neighboring cities, suburbs, or counties you’re interested in using as patient sources. These decisions will inform the Google pay per click and Facebook ad campaigns that your marketers implement.
• Decide on your web presence – This is a HUGE decision. Your “web presence” encompasses so much – the design of your website; your social media personalities; your ad campaigns; your practice’s branding and logo. You’ll want to work with a professional web designer to make sure that your choices are incorporated in an attractive, functional, and SEO-friendly manner.
• Build points of connection – These points of connection deepen relationships with existing patients, and bring in new patients in the process. Your web connections will be formed on social media, on your website, and through email. You’ll need to move your existing patient relationships to the web by encouraging individuals to connect with the practice. From those initial connections, new ones will grow, and your practice will flourish.
• Continue to develop your online presence – Your web marketing needs to evolve and endure to stay relevant. While your SEO consultant will take care of the necessary search engine-related changes, you will need to provide fresh content and office news yourself. Prospective patients are turned off when they see that your blog hasn’t been updated in 6 months, or that your Facebook page hasn’t seen activity in weeks. The web presence you build will require ongoing additions – it’s never “all set,” or ready to be left alone. Remain important to patients by remaining active.

These tips scratch the surface of your introduction to web marketing. Interested in learning more? Get in touch with Boxtop Marketing for dental marketing expertise.