No matter what services your dental practice offers, you want to be easily found on the Internet. Having a creatively designed website alone may not be enough to support a regular flow of traffic, which will not generate many new patients for your practice. Whether you specialize in cosmetic dentistry, complete family dentistry or offer only services for kids, those who are looking for a good dentist need to see your information first.
With so many sites offering dental services these days, you need to have a good Internet marketing plan to get the most out of your website. Lots of traffic to your site is key, if you don’t get much traffic, your site will only be good to remind people who need to find you of you’re office’s whereabouts. There is just too much competition out there to expect your website to be competitive without marketing online.
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.
Some marketing tools, Yahoo! Answers for example, are good ways to generate a flow of traffic to your website. On the other hand, maintaining this type of advertizing takes a monstrous amount of your time, which is time taken away from your practice and your family. To implement this type of marketing, you will need to sign up to use the forum, which in this case is a place where people can go and post questions about dental services. You will also need to sign up to get an email alert when one of these questions is asked. This answer will need to be given fairly quickly. After that, the person whose question you have then answered might come into your practice for their dental needs. This marketing tool is not the most time saving way to advertize online because you will have to wait for a question to come in, take the time to answer it thoughtfully and then hope you’ve earned a new patient.
Another channel which some dentists have used with moderate success is to create a dental blog. With a dental blog, you can make entries regarding the different kinds of experiences you’ve had creating certain dental conditions. Clearly, you want to make these anonymous. However, this also has the major drawback of requiring a significant amount of time, and the problem is is that that time commitment is an ongoing, a longstanding process. That takes time away from your family, and it takes time away from being a dentist which is what you want to focus on when you’re at work. Some dentists go with the channel that doesn’t require a lot of time, and that’s to pay for quick advertising on something like Google AdWords or on the Yahoo! network. That is certainly something that doesn’t require a lot of time, outside of picking the key word, such as dentist or dental, that you want to target for people who are searching online. However, that is an extraordinarily costly way to advertise.
It’s obvious that a less expensive marketing method would be a better choice. Paying for “click” ads can really add up, and the troubling fact about these ads is that anyone who feels that they are competing with your practice for business can click on your add and run up a large advertising bill for you practice. Underhanded, I know, but this has happened. Equally troubling is the fact that the percentage of advertising money spent is not always worth it when you consider that if one click-through ad to a new patient costs you $5 and the rest of the clicks are lost on people who don’t come to your office, that one new patient is all you get when you still have to pay close to $200 in advertising. As you can see, this is not an effective way of getting the biggest bang for your marketing buck.
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.
As you well could guess, if someone is looking online for a new dentist and they find a negative review of your practice they will not be walking in your office door anytime soon. The perfect tool for this situation would be a marketing tool that will let you sort the good and the bad feedback, and then let you publish what you choose on the Internet to advertize your dental practice. It is very important to have this kind of control over what prospective patients are reading about your practice because even an “okay” review is not as favorable for you as a “great” review.
The best way to address this is to have your own review site with your own brand, your own logo, with your own web address. With such a site, you can have patients go there and write reviews. You can collect reviews from virtually every patient who walks through your doors, whether it’s positive or negative. In a matter of no time, you’ll be able to collect more than 20 to 30 reviews, and the best thing about having your own review site is you control what gets published onto the Internet and pushed out to search engines like Google and Yahoo! That means that you will have the most favorable reviews in your community because you have complete control over what you publish online. What this ultimately translates into is a highly leveraged way to do Internet marketing which requires hardly any of your time and is extraordinarily cost effective. Essentially, what you’re doing is having your happy patients do all the work of typing in content for the promotion of your practice, and with one simple click of a button, you decide what gets pushed out on the Internet.
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