You've done it-you've created a truly brilliant website that contains all the pertinent information about the dental services you offer along with contact information so new patients know where to find your practice. You've even added a convenient map that will allow people to drive straight to your office with ease. So why aren't new patients flowing in to your office at a good enough rate to ensure that your days are full of appointments? Simply answered, it's because people who are using the Internet to search for the services you offer never see your information. Merely having a great website does not generate traffic. You have to have a good marketing tool or else your website just won't show up easily on Internet searches.
Your website may give you a new patient here or there but this is not getting the most out of your site. If you fail to choose a good marketing plan, your website will end up being only a way for existing patients to get your phone number or address. You have a well-designed website. Why not maximize the number of times it will be seen? If you do not, it will stagnate on the Internet and be overlooked by prospective patients who, instead see another competitively marketed dental website.
There are two kinds of marketing programs for dentists-the effective kind that doesn't cost much but rewards you with your goal of lots of new patients, and the other kind that costs lots of money and gives you limited to no results from your efforts. In-depth research of Internet marketing for dental practices has taught me the difference between the two, and I would like to tell you about both kinds, including the not-so-effective kind to save you the trouble of repeating the mistakes of others.
First, the marketing plans that pay off but take incredible amounts of time to implement. You may already be familiar with Yahoo! Answers, which is a forum designed specifically to answer the questions of the people who post there. As a member, you would have the opportunity to field questions concerning dental services via email. For a dentist, this is not an effective way to get the most out of your time marketing, because you will have to wait for the questions to come in and then wait again for a possible new patient from the contact at the forum.
One more method that has yielded some success to dentists is to start a dental blog. There are several drawbacks to marketing using a blog, however. The first drawback is the fact that each time you post to your blog it is a time consuming process. Even after you post, you need to continue posting constantly to keep new information flowing about the services you have performed and offer. Along with all that time spent writing; there is the problem of anonymity because you will not want to post your name or pertinent contact information on your blog. Some dentists choose to use a less time consuming method of advertising such as Google Adwords, however, this is extremely costly and you will still have to pick your own keywords and keyphrases, such as family dental, or teeth whitening, so that search engines have a way to find your practice.
Something you want to accomplish in any Internet marketing program for your dental practice is something that's low cost. If something winds up costing you $200.00 to $500.00 every month, that adds up to more than $2,000.00 to $5,000.00 a year. The other drawback with using click-through advertising is that you can have competitors click on your ads and wind up costing you significant amounts of money. Also, when people come and click on your ads, there's no guarantee they're going to wind up in your office. The actual conversion rate for click-through ads for many different services is less than one to two percent. Can you imagine paying $5.00 for a click-through, and then of those people that are clicking the actual cost of someone who walks through your door is more than $200.00? You barely break even on it.
There is a better time- and cost-effective way for a dental practice to advertize online. Some dentists have started asking the patients that are happy with their experiences to go to a third-party site like Yelp to post a review of their practice. This is extremely effective in getting good information in circulation on the Internet because when someone searches for a dentist they find favorable reviews about the dentist's practice. This works well to bring in new patients. Although these dentists are getting good reviews posted from their patients, there is the problem that not every patient is pleased with their experience with the dentist even though the dentist thinks they are. This patient then will go to the site and post a questionable, or a negative review that is damaging to the dentist's online reputation and does exactly the opposite of what the advertizing was supposed to do. Instead of finding purely favorable reviews during a search, a potential new patient could find something negative, and this is clearly not the goal.
Search engines index whatever information is available, be it a stellar review or a really bad one. The obvious best scenario here would be to have only favorable information available for the search engines to pull from. If a search turns up information on a third party site like Citisearch the dentist has no control over what reviews have been posted there, nor does that dentist have a way of collecting the reviews himself. This makes the dentist powerless to control his online reputation.
The absolute best way to harness this truly powerful dental marketing tool is to have your own site for the purpose of collecting the reviews of your dental practice; a site that is complete, displaying your logo, all of the contact information for your practice, a link to your main website, and tons of positive reviews to be easily found by the 80% of people who search using the Internet to find a good dentist. This will save you huge amounts of time because your patients will do all the content writing for your review site by posting both their positive and negative reviews for you to use as you see fit. You are bound to have at least a few negative reviews; but instead of publishing them, they can be used internally to address issues that will create a better experience for your patients. You will have lots of favorable review and you will be able to simply push a button to publish all of the great things your patients have to say about your practice right onto the Internet. This is truly the most cost effective, time saving way to market your dental practice online.
Your website may give you a new patient here or there but this is not getting the most out of your site. If you fail to choose a good marketing plan, your website will end up being only a way for existing patients to get your phone number or address. You have a well-designed website. Why not maximize the number of times it will be seen? If you do not, it will stagnate on the Internet and be overlooked by prospective patients who, instead see another competitively marketed dental website.
There are two kinds of marketing programs for dentists-the effective kind that doesn't cost much but rewards you with your goal of lots of new patients, and the other kind that costs lots of money and gives you limited to no results from your efforts. In-depth research of Internet marketing for dental practices has taught me the difference between the two, and I would like to tell you about both kinds, including the not-so-effective kind to save you the trouble of repeating the mistakes of others.
First, the marketing plans that pay off but take incredible amounts of time to implement. You may already be familiar with Yahoo! Answers, which is a forum designed specifically to answer the questions of the people who post there. As a member, you would have the opportunity to field questions concerning dental services via email. For a dentist, this is not an effective way to get the most out of your time marketing, because you will have to wait for the questions to come in and then wait again for a possible new patient from the contact at the forum.
One more method that has yielded some success to dentists is to start a dental blog. There are several drawbacks to marketing using a blog, however. The first drawback is the fact that each time you post to your blog it is a time consuming process. Even after you post, you need to continue posting constantly to keep new information flowing about the services you have performed and offer. Along with all that time spent writing; there is the problem of anonymity because you will not want to post your name or pertinent contact information on your blog. Some dentists choose to use a less time consuming method of advertising such as Google Adwords, however, this is extremely costly and you will still have to pick your own keywords and keyphrases, such as family dental, or teeth whitening, so that search engines have a way to find your practice.
Something you want to accomplish in any Internet marketing program for your dental practice is something that's low cost. If something winds up costing you $200.00 to $500.00 every month, that adds up to more than $2,000.00 to $5,000.00 a year. The other drawback with using click-through advertising is that you can have competitors click on your ads and wind up costing you significant amounts of money. Also, when people come and click on your ads, there's no guarantee they're going to wind up in your office. The actual conversion rate for click-through ads for many different services is less than one to two percent. Can you imagine paying $5.00 for a click-through, and then of those people that are clicking the actual cost of someone who walks through your door is more than $200.00? You barely break even on it.
There is a better time- and cost-effective way for a dental practice to advertize online. Some dentists have started asking the patients that are happy with their experiences to go to a third-party site like Yelp to post a review of their practice. This is extremely effective in getting good information in circulation on the Internet because when someone searches for a dentist they find favorable reviews about the dentist's practice. This works well to bring in new patients. Although these dentists are getting good reviews posted from their patients, there is the problem that not every patient is pleased with their experience with the dentist even though the dentist thinks they are. This patient then will go to the site and post a questionable, or a negative review that is damaging to the dentist's online reputation and does exactly the opposite of what the advertizing was supposed to do. Instead of finding purely favorable reviews during a search, a potential new patient could find something negative, and this is clearly not the goal.
Search engines index whatever information is available, be it a stellar review or a really bad one. The obvious best scenario here would be to have only favorable information available for the search engines to pull from. If a search turns up information on a third party site like Citisearch the dentist has no control over what reviews have been posted there, nor does that dentist have a way of collecting the reviews himself. This makes the dentist powerless to control his online reputation.
The absolute best way to harness this truly powerful dental marketing tool is to have your own site for the purpose of collecting the reviews of your dental practice; a site that is complete, displaying your logo, all of the contact information for your practice, a link to your main website, and tons of positive reviews to be easily found by the 80% of people who search using the Internet to find a good dentist. This will save you huge amounts of time because your patients will do all the content writing for your review site by posting both their positive and negative reviews for you to use as you see fit. You are bound to have at least a few negative reviews; but instead of publishing them, they can be used internally to address issues that will create a better experience for your patients. You will have lots of favorable review and you will be able to simply push a button to publish all of the great things your patients have to say about your practice right onto the Internet. This is truly the most cost effective, time saving way to market your dental practice online.
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Do you want a proven dental marketing idea? Marcus Somani is leader in dental office marketing.
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