For dental practices, advertising and promotion is not an all or nothing proposition. There are a number of fundamental activities that even the most resource constrained practices can initiate and maintain.
Further we would counsel to think about these building blocks as the equivalent of laying tracks for a larger marketing program that can be conducted in-house or with an agency at some point in the future or as an end in themselves. Remember, the more developed your marketing, the less time effort and money a third party will have to spend putting these building blocks in place for you.
Before suggesting what a dental practice might do as part of a basic program, first, here’s one thing you don’t have to do: write a blog. In some respects, this should be a relief. Blogs are hard to do. Many practices start off with enthusiasm for a blog that ultimately fades into an abandoned effort. But blogs are most effective for search engine optimization (SEO), which is not a high priority for more basic marketing programs, and accordingly, you can avoid blogging and not feel guilty about it.
Use live chat. Live chat is a secret weapon. We’ve seen the use of live chat double the conversion rate of incoming calls to patient appointments. The company Live Chat Inc. makes it easy to add this functionality to your website and advertises subscriptions for less than $20 per month, though undoubtedly you can spend more. Do you have the bandwidth for live chat? Maybe. For a toe in the water effort, I’d suggest a receptionist who spends most of his/her time anchored at the reception desk and who’s enthusiastic about being the live chatter is all that’s needed to get started with live chat.
Social media. For the most part there’s a limited number of missteps you can make with social media — facebook, Instagram, Reddit among others — and a whole lot of things you might do that will deliver outsized attention to your practice. To underscore this point, I would point to the dancing dentist, who has earned more than 120,000 views with a video that probably took just minutes to create and post.
The key concept to keep in mind with social media is that it’s primarily a visual medium and progress is more likely with what you show versus what you write. Accordingly you need only post photos of staff, doctors, family vacations, continuing education, dental conventions, team training and birthdays, and perhaps other personal photos assuming the subject — presumably a member of staff — is on board and these photos don't cross any lines. Finally, if you want to develop a genuine presence on social media and become a part of the searches prospects might make, plan for positing daily. While that might be a stretch, it’s considered a best practice and at the very least should represent a long term objective.
Your website. If you’re going to invest time and money, this is where to do it. Remember, you want to support your marketing initiatives now, today, but also put in place the foundation for a more intensive marketing that you might do into the future. What constitutes a good site is the stuff of books, but I can offer one piece of defining advice. Specifically, build your site with Wordpress and not GoDaddy or Wix. WordPress is favored because it’s “cleanly coded” and more compatible with Google algorithms, creating a greater likelihood of a high ranking in search when SEO programs are initiated. Further, if you use Google advertising in the future, neither of these two platforms will enable you to create landing pages, which are part an parcel of digital advertising.
Marketing can be complicated. Further, some of the professionals who practice marketing make it seem even more complicated. But it doesn't have to be. These core marketing initiative can be the basis of a larger program, or represent a viable end in and of themselves.