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Dental Marketing
Dental care providers are struggling their way out in the highly-competitive marketplace. With innovative dental marketing strategies, they can distinguish their practice with a unique value proposition and stand ahead of their competitors.
Blog By:
Ajay Prasad
Ajay Prasad

Benefits of Digital Marketing for Dentists That Traditional Marketing Can’t Provide

Benefits of Digital Marketing for Dentists That Traditional Marketing Can’t Provide

7/30/2018 6:16:22 AM   |   Comments: 0   |   Views: 624
Most of the people, almost 90% of those who are between 18 to 24 years and 56% of those who are between 45 to 64 years, would trust healthcare information found via social media and shared with friends. This also includes the online reviews, and the word of mouth advertisements which still remain of major value among people when it's about availing a healthcare service like dentistry.

This kind of information grievance by the prospective patients can be fulfilled through only the digital media marketing which offers all types of content on all the channels and platforms that are already available to the people. Traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, billboards, flyers, radio and televisions, still have a wide reach but they are rapidly losing their popularity among the masses, mostly because they more often care about promotion and selling, instead of educating and informing.

Also, with adults spending on an average 5.6 hours a day on digital media, it's certainly the space that needs to be harnessed through right marketing efforts for grabbing the attention of its users and converting them for providing growth to your dental practice.

Limitations with traditional marketing

The limitations with traditional or offline marketing is as follows:

Fails to give quick results: Advertisements in a local newspaper, radio and Television are good for building brand reputation locally, but they aren't able to provide immediate positive results to the revenue of your dental practice. At any given time in a locality, only a few people are actually searching for a dentist, and if fortunately some of them get acquainted with your service through a local newspaper or radio advertisement, they will still search the web to know about your quality of service and your reputation among the existing patients.

No customization option: Traditional marketing isn't able to focus on the different stages of the buyer's journey that its buyers should be going through at any given time when they hear about your advertisements. There are people who may not have a problem yet looking for a dentist when they notice your advertisement, while some may have a problem but don't want the service right away. Traditional or offline advertising doesn't give you the ability to alter your message based on the actual needs and wants of the person hearing or seeing it.

Pays back small for a huge spend: You pay a huge sum for buying a space on the newspaper, or buying a time slot on radio or Television for getting your ads appear there, but as these ads do not communicate so well with the audience because of their often generalized content and their inability to reach patients when it matters, they don't tend to pay back as quickly as what can be achieved through digital methods of marketing.

What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing or online marketing is an umbrella term for all your inbound as well as outbound marketing efforts online, that includes SEO & SEM, content marketing, influencer marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, online reputation management, etc.

The digital marketing platforms for dental practices include:

1. Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
2. Business networking sites like LinkedIn
3. Promotional mails via emails
4. Paid pop-up ads and search ads
5. Text, image, graphics, and video based content like blogs, articles, infographics, motion graphics, etc.
6. Click bait links for viral contents
7. Marketing automation tasks for emails, social media, and other website actions, etc.

Digital marketing is way more versatile and user-centric, and it is also more focused, result oriented, and cheaper than traditional marketing.

Latest trends in digital marketing and the benefits it can provide to dentists
By understanding how digital experience has changed for the users and other latest digital marketing trends for dentists, we can better analyze how it can help and what actual benefits it can provide to your dental practice.

Here are some of the latest trends in digital marketing for healthcare services in 2017:

1. More than 60% of total searches are already coming from smartphones. On top of that, 41% of all Google searches from mobile devices are healthcare related.
2. Audiences are now looking at health related consumer reviews on major websites like Google+, Facebook, Yelp, HealthGrades, etc. They no longer trust great reviews from sites that they have never heard of. That's why it's necessary to source organic positive reviews that show incredible customer service from the major review websites.
3. Consumers have now shifted their focus towards the video content for acquiring information. The reason for the popularity of videos is that they are informative, educative, and entertaining.
4. There is a rise in the trend of 'expired' content. If the content isn't new, current, and relevant to the topic, and if it's not centered on recent activities and upcoming events and not posted frequently on social media channels, it will very soon be considered as expired.

Here are the benefits of digital marketing over what traditional marketing cannot provide:

1. Allows you to follow and track your users: The biggest benefit that digital marketing, unlike the traditional marketing, can provide to your dental care is that it allows you to follow your patients or prospects wherever they go.

You don't just follow them but also track their thoughts, actions, and behaviors (through the help of data and analytics and various marketing tools) on a continuous basis, based on which you show them the most appropriate user-specific marketing materials that can engage them and lure them for availing the services you have to offer.

2. Reaches its most relevant audience right when they need your service: Various SEO and SEM tools and techniques ensure that you can reach to your prospective patients just when it matters to them. Suppose your prospective patient in your locality has sensitivity issues with his teeth and he searches on his smartphone for “best tooth sensitivity dentist near me” on the Google. If optimized properly, your dental practice will appear on top of the rankings (for that typical search, and locally) along with user reviews of your existing patients who had a session for tooth sensitivity recently. By following those users and chatting with them, your user can know more in detail about your practice and results. Can you imagine this kind of user-friendly marketing in traditional methods of marketing?

3. Provides analytical data about your users, their needs, and their actions: With digital marketing, you have access to accurate data about your users, their demography, their needs and wants, and their actions which you can access through tools such as Google's Analytics, Keyword Planner, Bing's Webmaster, and many other third party tools available for free or by paying. 

It also makes it easy to run your website by giving you in-depth data about the number of page visits, conversion rates, bounce rates, profit, and the general trend of interested audience, all in real time. This helps you in developing your marketing strategy by understanding what your users like or dislike about you and your service, what are their expectations, and how you can improve your service to increase your conversion.

4. Social media makes it an interactive marketing campaign: The inclusion of social media makes digital marketing an interactive marketing campaign. You can select your desired platform (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.) where you can find your prospective patients, existing patients, and patients of your competitors, and start interacting with them on a frequent basis and keep providing useful content to them for a better awareness on the related topic.

Interacting with your patients regularly is a show of good faith for other prospective patients. It helps in building your brand recognition, reputation and authority, and increases your conversion rate by improving your search engine ranking and increased inbound traffic. Other ways that it helps are: 

- Remaining on top-of-mind of your patients and prospective patients
- Increasing visibility and discoverability
- Adding credibility and a loyal following

In contrast, traditional marketing is a one-way approach that does not involve or indulge its audience in a mutually beneficial conversation.

5. Let’s you build and manage your brand's online reputation: A healthcare business is all about its reputation among its patients. No matter how good a dentist you are, if some patients get negatively vocal about you and your practice, it can cause severe damage to your reputation and your practice. And, with 84% of people trusting online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, it's imperative to take care of the negative reviews about your dental practice on the internet.

Online reputation management (ORM) is about taking control of what people talk about your practice online. It ensures that people find only the right materials when they search about you on the internet. The most important task of ORM are:

- Real-time notification of the new review; positive as well as negative ones
- Tracking negative notifications before they get posted online 
- Resolving the issues and grievances of the unhappy patients as they review negatively
- Robust reporting and data analysis for further service improvements

Conclusion:
In my opinion, you can keep investing a certain portion of your marketing budget in local offline advertisements as they sure have their effects on masses, but you should focus majorly on digital space as that's where your prospects are spending most of their time searching and knowing about the best dental healthcare service near their location.

According to a study, customers going online for finding the most suitable product or service are reported to being nearly 60% through the sales process before engaging a sales representative. This calls for a full-fledged digital marketing campaign to grab your prospects' attention before they are contacted by your competitors.

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