Whether you are a solo dental practice looking to grow your business or a large dental organization seeking to offload back-office work, a dental marketing company can be a smart choice. A digital agency with experience serving wellness and healthcare businesses can help dentists increase website traffic, generate more leads, and boost revenue. They can also keep a practice current with market expectations.
Practices are increasingly relying on online marketing to boost patient enrollment and target high-end dental services. Plus, in light of staffing shortages exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, more dental practices are also leveraging dental marketing companies to help them recruit hard-to-find dental hygienists. This article tries to lay out the strengths and weaknesses of the various services you can buy from digital agencies.
Website Design Is The Foundation For Dentists
Your website should be viewed as your most critical marketing asset. It is often a prospective patient’s first real experience interacting with your brand. It needs to tell a compelling story about not only the services you offer and your dental philosophy, but also about who you are and the values upon which you’ve built your practice. It is also the foundation of all digital marketing, since effective SEO, paid advertising, and social media efforts require a website that reinforces the look and feel of the rest of your brand and your messaging.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) For Organic Growth
Search engine optimization is a strategy dedicated to organically driving more relevant traffic to your business and website. The more quality traffic that you can generate, the more your brand will be discovered, with more leads and patients for your practice. An effective agency will start by setting up your business on Google. Your Google My Business Profile is an essential part of any business’s online presence and is often the place potential patients will go to look for updated, relevant information about your practice, such as hours, services, and directions. It’s critical to local marketing success.
From there, an SEO strategy looks to optimize the content and structure of your website (both on-page, and on the back-end). Take a look at your site’s current content and look for links to other relevant sites, information your audience can actually understand, popular keywords in your industry, and accessible links to your practice’s social media accounts. If you’re missing even one of these, you could be missing out on potential customers and losing your competitive advantage!
Integrating valuable keywords into your content so you can be found in search engines is the cornerstone of a strong SEO strategy. The higher your results show up on search queries in Google and other search engines, the more relevant traffic your practice will receive. An experienced dental marketing company knows which keywords can work for your business and help you show up in early results for important services.
Hiring A Dental Marketing Company For Social Media Marketing
Social media has become a popular and low-cost channel to help dental practices get in front of new patients. Almost all dental practices now use social media in some form and 1-in-3 patients now say that dentists cannot go without a Facebook presence. Moreover, with high turnover in dental hygienist and assistant positions, social media marketing can help a practice stay top-of-mind with potential future employees.
That said, not all posts are created equal. As the survey results above from Dentavox illustrate, the 2020s are about sharing multimedia content. Videos and pictures help personalize your practice and put patients more at ease. Educational materials can help assure prospects of your clinical expertise. And perhaps most importantly, a forum for patient testimonials and feedback and be the best sort of marketing available: earned marketing. Why tell your story if you have patients willing to do it for you? An effective dental marketing company will help you develop and implement a social media strategy that fosters more positive interactions for your dental business and turns patients into advocates.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click Advertising) To Boost Awareness & Leads
Pay-per-click advertising is a strategy used by many dentists. Unfortunately, many don’t work with agencies that carefully evaluate their return on investment. It’s easy with PPC to boost leads. The challenge is doing so efficiently so that you get a positive return from your ad spend. We typically only recommend PPC as part of a larger digital strategy when dental professionals want to target critical, high-value services such as emergency dentistry or when desired keywords are highly competitive.
PPC often needs to coordinate with your SEO efforts to ensure consistency of effort and minimize the cost you are paying for clicks. When “Orthodontist Near Me” costs $20 per click, a practice website needs to have landing pages that provide relevant information and a strong call to action. Your agency should stay up on the latest paid ads trends and constantly be A/B testing new ad copy and creative to ensure that ads continue to perform well (and remain cost-effective) in what is a highly dynamic marketplace.
DaBrian Marketing Group is a top dental marketing company that is capable and ready to help you grow your dental practice. Whether you’re new to dentistry or a seasoned veteran, we know that you’re passionate about your practice and about providing the highest level of clinical care to your patients. When you partner with us, you can know that we are passionate about your practice and patients, too. Our dental marketing services will take your business to the next level by creating beautiful website designs, attracting new customers to your business, and turning more patients into practice advocates.
If your practice is ready for a fresh approach to its digital marketing, contact us today!