Dental Marketing for Dentists to Grow Your Dental Practice
Greetings!
Are you interested in growing your dental practice using top dental marketing?
You’ve likely read countless blog articles and dental marketing guides on how to grow your dental practice, with mixed results.
You’ve likely also noticed that many digital agencies use similar marketing and advertising strategies, buy why do they produce vastly different results for their clients?
I’ll show you the step-by-step dental marketing methodology we used to grow Highmoor Dental from a small dental practice with one dentist, into an award-winning dental practice that eventually sold to a large dental organization for a generous multiple of earnings.
Problem
We met Dr. Justin Highmoor in early 2018 when he was operating a small dental practice in downtown Edmonton. Dr. Highmoor was working with a marketing agency that specialized in creating dental educational content, so he thought they were producing great business results, but he wasn’t sure how to confirm his assumptions.
Solution
First, we conducted a Practice Checkup to provide Dr. Highmoor with a second opinion on his existing business and marketing results. Then, we collected Patient Surveys to hear feedback on the patient experience; what patients like or dislike about their experience, how they first heard about the dental practice, what attracted them to the practice and more.
Results
We found several gaps in their marketing strategy and made small adjustments to improve the overall patient experience. We redeveloped their Dental Website Design and marketing strategy and focused on Local Dental SEO and organic content to attract new patients to their dental practice.
Combined with better focused Google Ads for dentists campaigns that were geo-targeted to their patients’ location, we increased their website traffic by over 350% in their first year. We also implemented Dental SEO to get their website ranked on the first page of Google for high volume keywords, like ‘dentist’ and ‘dentist near me’
Success
As a result of our marketing performance, Dr. Highmoor grew his team, renovated his office, and eventually sold his practice for a generous multiple of earnings. He remained a dentist in the practice and continues to enjoy the success of our marketing results.
Highmoor Dental Testimonial
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How to Grow Your Dental Practice
You can follow our steps above for your dental practice to achieve similar results. Here’s how:
First, based on the market research we’ve conducted (primary and secondary), we’ve discovered that most of your patients are likely going to come to your practice from two primary sources: referrals and Google. So, what can you do to increase patient referrals and improve your visibility on Google?
Patient Referrals
Many of your patients will voluntarily refer their friends and family to your practice because of the quality of care and overall patient experience. Keep in mind that during most patient visits, patients spend time not just with the dentist, but with an entire team of associates, hygienists, administrators, and more. Be mindful of optimizing the entire patient experience, from the time patients first interact with your brand online, to when they call and visit your front desk, as well as their dental appointment. One amazing experience with a team member could leave them singing your praises to their friends and family. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.
You can also create a digital patient referral program to better manage your patient referrals, including sending referral campaigns and providing incentives for referrals (if possible). Providing people with an incentive to refer their friends and family to your practice will strongly motivate your patients to send you more referrals. But, if you ask your patients for a referral on the spot, most can’t think of who to refer.
Instead, you can send your patients a referral link for them to share with their friends and family using digital channels, like SMS text, email, social media and more. Sending a digital referral link that’s easy to share increases the likelihood you’ll be able to find new patients from your patients’ existing online and social networks. Our Optiimus referral program provides a referral link for you to share with your patients.
Online Reputation
Many people (up to 90% in some surveys) make decisions to hire a new healthcare service provider, like a dentist, based on the reputation of the dentist and the practice. The more you can improve the reputation of your dentists and your dental practice, the easier it’ll be for you to attract more patients. Your online reputation is best captured in the form of patient reviews and testimonials. Even if a prospective patient is referred to your practice, many will still research your reputation by looking at online review platforms, including Google, Facebook, RateMDs, and more.
Asking each patient for a review can be time consuming or easy to forget for a busy dental practice. You can automate this process of collecting reviews using our Optiimus technology that automatically sends an email or SMS text message request, asking for feedback. This feedback can then be stored into your online review platforms, like Google or RateMDs. We can also respond to each review from one central hub, further increasing your local SEO rankings.
Different state and provincial colleges and regulators have different rules around patient reviews and referrals, if/when/how you can solicit them and advertise them. Check with your local regulators first, but if possible, it’s helpful to implement a reputation management and digital patient referral program.
Online Visibility
Next, once you’ve improved your online reputation and setup a digital referral program, you can evaluate your website’s online visibility. In other words, how easy or difficult is it for prospective patients to find your practice online?
You can conduct a Practice Checkup to get a digital report card on your online visibility, including your website backlinks and key indicators, keywords rankings, local business listings, online review and reputation summary, as well as a Google Business profile audit.
This helps you determine your website’s areas of improvement for elevating your online visibility. If you’re unsure on how to interpret the report data, please contact us with any questions.
Dental Website
Your dental website is the online headquarters of your entire business. Even if your patients are referred to your practice, over 80% will still review your website and online reputation before they visit your practice in person.
Patients want to learn more about you, your team and your practice environment to ensure it’s the right fit for them and their families. The only way they can do this before visiting your practice in person is to see your practice online with professional photography showcasing your clean, inviting office and warm, friendly team.
Making improvements to your dental website through ‘on-page SEO’ is one of the biggest opportunities to improve your website’s online rankings in Google to attract more traffic and patients. Google’s algorithms scan your website to evaluate the relevancy of your website’s content to a user’s search query. The algorithms scan not just the body text, but also the H1-H6 headlines, media files, URL, page title and more.
Dental SEO
Once your website’s on-page SEO is fully optimized, you can then move on to creating SEO optimized content for your website, such as blog articles and guides. Over 80% of people search for health-related information online, including to learn about their oral health. Writing dental blog articles and oral health guides with high-volume keywords that your patients are searching for attracts them to your website searching for that information.
Next, once you’ve created a content strategy for your dental practice, you can start promoting your dental website online by building backlinks from other websites back to your own. The more you can build high-quality website links from other industry relevant websites and platforms, the more your website’s rankings will improve on search engines.
In addition to being visible on Google Search, you want to be visible on Google Maps using local SEO strategies. The core of local SEO is consistency in your business name, address and phone number across all online listing providers, business and healthcare directory platforms. Some of the most popular listing providers include Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Places, RateMDs, Healthgrades, and more.
Building and managing hundreds or thousands of listing providers can be time consuming and challenging, especially if you change any of your core business information (Name, Address, Phone, Hours, etc.). Using Optiimus listings management, we can build and manage listings from one central hub, allowing us to manage and update your listings at once.
Although dental SEO provides the best long-term value in digital marketing, it’s also the most time consuming to produce a return. On average, many businesses find that SEO produces a positive return in about 3-6 months. This may be fine for a dental practice with a steady stream of patients from other sources, such as referrals. But, for a new practice without any patients, or for a practice in desperate need of patients, waiting 3-6 months isn’t going to work.
Dental Ads
The best benefit of Google Ads is that you don’t have to wait 3-6 months to see a positive return. You can get your dental website listed at the top of Google using Google Ads campaigns on day 1, and likely see a positive return within the first week. In other words, Google Ads produces one of the most immediate returns on your marketing investment.
The other benefit of Google Ads is that you can be hyper focused on each campaign, creating a specific campaign to promote your most high profit services (e.g. Invisalign, dental implants, etc.) instead of lower profit services. This strategy yields an even higher return on your investment, as you’re attracting specific patients with a higher lifetime value (LTV).
Google Ads allows you to target your ads campaigns to a specific audience, focusing your message on a unique set of demographics of people most likely to be interested in that service. For example, if you want to promote Invisalign for kids and teens, it’s best to focus your message to parents and mothers of those kids and teens. You can also geo-target your campaigns to within a specific radius of your practice (e.g. 5-15 miles).
Improve Lead Capture
Each prospective patient that’s interested in your dental practice and services is often called a ‘lead’ in marketing lingo. You’re likely going to generate a lot of leads from various sources. The best dental practices often generate leads from the following sources:
· Patient referrals
· Google Maps (local SEO)
· Google Search (organic SEO)
· Google Ads (price-per-click, PPC)
· Social media, email newsletters, etc.
Ideally, these marketing channels are analyzed using data analytics tools to evaluate which sources are producing the most positive return on your investment. Then, you can adjust your budget and strategy based on these results.
Let’s review some of the most popular and effective lead capture and data analytics tools:
Live Chat
Once you’ve implemented an effective digital marketing campaign that generates more traffic to your website, you want to capture as many potential leads from this traffic as possible. Many website users have a quick question, but may be reluctant to call the front desk or to send an email. They may feel more comfortable communicating using live chat with your front desk team, and they’ll get a faster response. If your front desk is too busy to respond, let our Optiimus AI chatbot respond for your team, answering questions, providing customer service and booking appointments – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
Google Analytics
Considered the gold standard in website analytics, Google Analytics is installed in over 55% of all websites around the world. It provides you with data on your website’s performance, including where your users are coming from and how they’re interacting with your website. This data is helpful for making improvements to your website’s user experience, as many prospective patients will unconsciously evaluate the quality of your practice based on the quality of your website.
Google Search Console
The best way to determine how Google views your website on their search engine is by using Search Console. This free tool provides you with data about your website’s performance on their search engine, including what keywords or search queries are bringing the most traffic to your website, each web page’s indexing status, or if there’s an issue with a web page, the quantity of links you have from other websites, and more.
CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool or software is a database to manage your customers or patients. Many dental practice management software has some built-in CRM functionality, but this is only for your existing patients. What about your prospective patients or leads? How can you manage these people to make sure you don’t lose them as leads?
Harvard Business Review found that in large businesses, only 27% of leads get contacted as over 70% slip through the cracks.
Most dental practices receive dental leads from various sources – people call the front desk, send text messages, send emails, use a website’s live chat or contact form, send messages from Google, Facebook, Instagram and more. It’s easy to lose track of some of these messages, especially for a busy dental practice. By the time your front desk remembers to respond to the message, the lead may have already booked at another practice.
It’s an inefficient waste of your marketing budget to spend your ads dollars on generating leads, only to have them not book with your practice or book somewhere else instead.
The best solution to this problem is to organize all of your dental leads into one central database of information, or a CRM for patient leads. Our dental CRM captures all of your dental leads from every marketing source without any data entry from your team, allowing you to respond to each lead promptly. We can also analyze each phone call to provide analytics on your staff performance or why the caller did not book an appointment, providing coaching opportunities for your team.
Improve Patient Retention
Finally, now that you have a steady stream of patients coming into your practice from various sources, including patient referrals, improved reputation, better visibility on Google with SEO and Google Ads, you can focus on improving your patient retention. It’s generally less expensive to retain a patient than to find a new one. Bain & Company found that a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 20% increase in profits.
But, how do you improve patient retention? What are some of the most common reasons that patients are leaving your dental practice?
There’s always going to be a natural attrition of patients and customers in any business. Some surveys have found that businesses lose an average of 5% of customers each year from natural attrition that’s unavoidable.
But, not all attrition is natural or unavoidable. Some surveys have found that about 1 in 26 customers complain about a problem; the rest just leave without saying anything.
To avoid having patients leave without saying anything, it’s helpful to capture their feedback so you can identify the problem to resolve it before it escalates and drives further patients away. The easiest way to capture patient feedback is through patient surveys.
Patient Surveys
Although your dentists and associates likely already collect patient feedback verbally, many people are polite in person and may likely be more honest and candid in surveys. Also, it’s difficult to collect feedback from every patient while also completing their dental treatments, or to get a big picture perspective of your entire practice from verbal feedback.
Instead, you can send your patients a patient survey after their visits, either through SMS text or email, for them to complete from the comfort of their phones. Their responses can be saved and stored in a digital database, which we can then analyze using AI technology. Instead of reading each response manually (there could be hundreds or thousands), we can use our Optiimus AI technology to aggregate each response to provide sentiment analysis and look for trends. This can help us spot potential problems from patients to address before they escalate.
Conclusion
The best dental marketing strategies consider the entire patient journey, from beginning to end. Your new patients are most likely to be referred to your practice by your existing patients, or they found you online on Google.
Improving your patient experience and online reputation encourages your patients to send you more referrals, especially if you can provide incentives through a digital referral program. Elevating your online reputation with reviews also increases your online visibility on Google.
Increasing your online visibility on Google with geo-targeted ads campaigns and SEO optimized blog articles provides a steady stream of new patients to your dental website. You can then best capture that traffic using live chat tools integrated with your CRM to make efficient use of your marketing budget.
Finally, you can maximize your patient retention with patient surveys, to keep a close finger on the pulse of your practice, identify problems before they escalate and improve your profits.
If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to contact me directly. I read and respond to every email. All the best in growing your dental practice!
Sarkis Hakopdjanian
President | Optiimus
(587) 409 5990 | (833) 409 0979
sarkis@optiimius.ca
