You know the dilemma well. Your entire education prepared you to provide your patients with the highest-quality dental care, but now that you have your own practice, you find that there is far more to running a dental practice than practising dentistry!
One of the many aspects of running a successful modern dental practice that may have taken you by surprise is the need for marketing expertise to attract patients to your practice. Now, you didn’t study marketing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t develop a strategic dental marketing plan yourself. You know the corporate dental giants use experts to create advanced marketing plans, but I’m here to tell you that you can still stay in the game and stay in budget with the right tools. Here are some expert tips to put in your tool belt to get you started.
1. Digital directories
Today, your patients are out there searching for a local dentist on the internet from their smartphones and other devices. In order to reach these patients, you need to have your up-to-date information (name, address, phone number) consistently available on multiple digital directories from Google to Yelp to hundreds more. If your information is not consistent across these sites or doesn’t show up on enough sites, your practice will show up lower in search results, making it harder for patients to find you.
2. Strategic paid search
If you don’t have the budget to hire marketing experts like corporate practices do, you can still make a good investment in dental marketing by making use of strategic paid search. In addition to making sure your results are consistent in digital directories, 20% of your dental marketing budget should ideally go toward paid search advertisements so that prospective patients will be able to find your practice.
3. Measuring marketing plan success
The best way to measure whether your marketing plan is successful is by making sure you’re getting the best return on your investment. I recommend that 3-5% of your budget should be allocated for digital marketing, and you’re going to measure the success of your digital marketing by making sure you’re getting more than that back in income. Specifically, you should see a 4-5 times return on your investment to consider a marketing plan a success.
You can find more details and expand your digital marketing tool belt by checking out the podcast episode where I talked to Jon Nelson about these and other strategic dental marketing strategies that can help any practice compete with corporate dental giants. Listen in for free here.
