Once upon time word of mouth was a successful marketing tactic, people would ask their friends to recommend a good dentist but times have changed.
The average consumer has access to an unlimited supply of knowledge at the end of their fingertips, with a click of a button potential customers can find everything they need to know about your practice, the services you offer and the dentists you have on your team.
If they aren’t happy with your online presence or read poor views about you then they will pop along to your competitor: therefore, it is more important than ever to use every marketing technique that you can.
Here are a few points to keep in mind when it comes to deciding how and what to do when it comes to marketing your practice:
Plan Ahead
You know when the main character of a film turns around and says the immortal lines “Don’t worry I have a plan” you feel rest assured things are going to work out. This is very true when it comes to your marketing plan, you need to decide what you wish to achieve with marketing, is it:
To promote your practice
To increase traffic to your website
To attract new patients
To increase sales of your treatments
Whatever it is, you need to have an achievable goal to work towards, a plan of action. Once you know what you want to achieve it will make your marketing a lot easier.
Website
A website should be the main source of your practices information, on your site you should have:
Information about your practice
Services or treatments you offer
Pictures of your practice
A page dedicated to your staff
Location info, street address and a map
Contact details
A booking system
This is a very good starting point for your website, if you can answer the patients’ queries on your website this will reassure them to visit your practice. Even having an online booking system on your site should be a must as patients can book at their convenience.
Social Media
Social media is the modern-day word of mouth, being on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter will get your practice’s name out there. This is where your audience is going to be, they are engaging with all types of content: this could be videos, posts, blogs or images.
Regularly posting to social media will increase your engagement with your audience – post competitions, treatments like teeth whitening, share photos of your staff in your practice.
Emails
Email marketing is a tried and tested form of marketing and sending a message direct to your patient is a great way to target them with content.
Things have become difficult thanks to GDPR but as long as you are compliant it is still a worthwhile marketing practice. Make your subject line stand out and hook your reader in with a well-structured, written email. Making this process automated will free your time and make your email marketing consistent.
Reviews
The consumer market runs on reviews, a collection of positive reviews can do wonders for your practice. When your potential customer is researching their next dental practice, their decision is based on the kind of reviews you have on your Facebook or Google.
Encourage your current patients to leave reviews, make the process as easy as possible for them. One way to do this is using Software of Excellence’s Online Reputation Manager which helps with building up your online reviews.
Track and Measure
It’s all well and good trying these different marketing tactics but how do you know if they are working, how do you know if you are hitting your goals? The best way to find out is to measure and track your performance.
Setup and use tools like Google Analytics: this will show you the traffic to your website, which page and where it’s coming from and is a good starting point to see how people are finding your website.
If you are using social media, then you can use Facebook insights, which will give you all the information you need to know about what is going on your Facebook page.
Get Help with Your Marketing
Hopefully you have now realised the importance of digital marketing for your dental practice. It is a time-consuming process but it is a worthwhile cause to help increase awareness for your dental practice.
Finding a way to automate as much of your marketing as possible will take the time and stress out of keeping up to date with your marketing. Software of Excellence has a selection of services that can increase your marketing activity, this is done via Campaign Plus. Software of Excellence have the tools to help you automate your digital marketing and achieve your goals. Talk to an expert today to find out how Software of Excellence can help you with your digital marketing.