As a business owner, you’re likely to be always thinking about new ways to market your business and gain new customers. But when your service is something that people typically don’t like, put off, or are even scared of, how do you effectively market to these people? In this article, the marketing experts at Wildcat Digital talk you through a number of both online and offline marketing strategies to help grow your dental practice.
So, how do you market a dental practice? There are a number of strategies you can take when marketing your dental practice. But, one of the most important things you can do is to literally put yourself on the map with Local SEO. PPC ads, referral schemes and customer experience are other great marketing techniques for dentists.
But, first things first, why should you care? Why is dental marketing so important?
In the UK dental market, many people simply register with the dental practice closest to their home that is currently accepting new patients. How do you compete with that? How are you supposed to gain new custom beyond new locals?
That’s why marketing is so important. A strong marketing strategy helps you to get your business out there so that people know you exist. Not only that, it helps you to target the right people – your ideal customers. Furthermore, marketing can help you to differentiate yourself from your competition – a key challenge in this industry.
In business, there’s a lot that you can’t control but with a good marketing strategy, you’re in the driving seat. You get to choose how you want potential customers to perceive you. You get to choose your brand, core values and mission statement. You get to choose who your ideal customers are and target only them (although that’s not to say others won’t slip though). In other words, the decisions are left down to you.
There are a hundred and one benefits of creating and implementing a strong marketing strategy (maybe more), but here are the top benefits of dental marketing:
Below are a number of marketing strategies suitable for dental practices.
One of the biggest benefits of SEO is brand visibility and an increase in traffic to your website. When done well, it can also help to generate more leads. But, it’s important to recognise that SEO is not a quick fix. SEO campaigns typically take at least 6 months to start showing significant results.
One of the best SEO techniques to use in dentistry is Local SEO. This helps to (literally) put you on the map and help you stand out from the competition in your area. Since the majority of your clients will be from your local area, this is an invaluable marketing technique. You can even implement this to promote different sites if you have more than one clinic – learn more about this in our recent blog.
But first, you’ll need to optimise your website with carefully chosen keywords. These should be a mix of high search volume, low competition keywords, localised keywords and long tail keywords. However, don’t get carried away. Google often penalised websites for overstuffing keywords into copy. Learn more about this in our blog, How to Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Keyword Best Practices.
A quicker way to get noticed is by using pay per click (PPC) advertising. This, theoretically, gets you in front of your target audience much faster than SEO but there’s a caveat or two:
As a service-based business, a good customer experience is paramount to success. This impacts your brand, your reputation, customer loyalty, retention and advocacy. This, ultimately, can influence word of mouth and referrals.
Unfortunately, building a good customer experience isn’t a quick and easy process, but it’s incredibly worth the effort. This is especially true when people typically don’t like going to the dentist!
You’ll need to work on the following:
Once you’ve optimised your customer experience, consider creating a referral scheme where existing customers are incentivised to refer you to friends and family. This could be in the form of discounted services, monetary incentives, or products your clients would like.
Even in the modern digital landscape, word of mouth is still considered to be one of the most effective forms of marketing. People generally trust their friends and family’s opinion more than the internet. A tick from your existing customers could be the difference between new customers choosing you and going with the company that comes up first on Google searches.
By now, you’ll hopefully have a better understanding of why marketing is so useful for dentists. But, don’t panic if you don’t know where to start or how to implement some of our suggestions. At Wildcat Digital, we can help with solid SEO and PPC campaigns that (literally) put you on the map.
Learn more about SEO for healthcare here, or read our recent blog on the topic.
Content Strategist & Team Leader
