Attracting and converting new patients online is essential to sustaining and growing your practice. This is why you need to employ all the latest digital marketing techniques and tools to help you get found. These techniques can also help you retain your existing patients.
Here’s 10 tips for digital marketing techniques that you can use to help your practice grow and thrive.
- Leverage Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms can be a powerful tool to help you increase awareness and the services you provide. By posting the kind of information that people in your local area are searching for, you can generate great prospects who know nothing about your services.
2. Invest In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) uses keywords and other relevant techniques to help your content rank higher in Google search results and attract the types of patients whose conditions require your expert services. This way, when potential patients search for your practice around their vicinity, your name appears in a more visible position, which generates more traffic to your website and, ideally, more appointments.
3. Use Paid Advertising Strategies
Paid ads on platforms such as Google and Facebook go beyond merely creating online presence and awareness under digital marketing. As a paid strategy, it gets your practice to show on people’s screens.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a paid SEO option that gets you instantly to the top of local search results for contracted keywords. You negotiate a price for keywords you want to appear for and, when someone in your local area searches for that contracted keyword, you appear at the top of the results.
4. Create Videos
Because videos are a multisensory tool, they are highly engaging and memorable and should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. You can use videos to introduce and humanize yourself and your staff. Provide engaging content that will educate patients and put them at ease about your practice, certain procedures, and more.
5. Have a Fully Responsive Website Design
While having a website is an important part of your digital marketing for your practice, your website design needs to be built with your patient in mind by ensuring that all relevant information is easily accessible on any device.
As more and more people are using their mobile devices to access the web, your site needs to be accessible and fully functional on whatever device your potential patients are using. It should be coded to adapt to smaller screen sizes and still retain full functionality. Otherwise, you risk losing a large portion of people who do find your site.
6. Update Your Digital Content Regularly
To generate consistent traffic to your website, Facebook, Twitter, or other places where you’re online, you need to make sure that you update content regularly. By doing so, you will keep visitors coming back to see what is new. Those repeat visits not only engage the visitors themselves but also demonstrate relevance to search engines, who will then rank you higher in search results.
7. Contact Patients After Their Appointments
Contacting patients after their appointment can make a big difference. When you take the time to reach out to your patient, it demonstrates that you care. It’s a simple act that can help generate positive word-of-mouth and produce even more leads for your practice.
8. Study Successful Practices Near You
When you study good practices around your area, it will allow you to look into the digital marketing strategies that they use and help you gain the necessary information about your local market. Check out their website, ads, and PPC; their ranking on Google, and customer reviews. Doing so can help you identify gaps in your own marketing plan and focus your improvement efforts.
9. Encourage Your Patients To Write Reviews
Reviews go a long way in determining your credibility and expertise to your website visitors and can have a major effect on your online presence. Create and promote a platform where patients can review your practice, and encourage every patient to leave their reviews.
10. Build Your Email List
Email marketing is an essential aspect of digital marketing that can help take your practice to the next level. Consistently reaching out to patients in this way can help you keep your practice top of mind for when they need services.
BOTTOM LINE
As technology and the Internet have evolved, so has the way dentists must market their practice. If you want to be found and noticed, it’s important to evolve with the times and invest in building your online presence.
Where to Start
If your practice needs help with online marketing, visit Officite.
If your practice needs help with patient communication, visit Demandforce.
