Like any business, a dental practice needs to be marketed to attract more patients. While traditional methods such as advertising or direct mail still work today, your chances of success become so much better with Internet marketing. With an awareness of this, many dentists have decided to take to the Internet to market their dental practice.
Having your own website per se, however, is no guarantee that new patients will be immediately lining up down the block to your dental practice. To get new patients for your dental practice, you will need to implement several marketing strategies for your website, with the aim of providing them value and making doing business with you a lot easier. Here are the 5 best ways to get more new patients to your dental practice.
1. Provide Great Content
We’ve all heard it – content is king. For a dental website it also establishes authority and trust. This goes beyond catchy headlines and a list of services provided.
The key is to publish articles and resources that are useful to your target clientele. Articles that educate and inform are very powerful in building relationships and trust with your potential new dental patients. Of course, all content must be relevant to dentistry and your chosen demographic.
Create and publish this content regularly and on-goingly. Over time you will reap substantial rewards.
2. Improve your dental website loading speed
One of the most important features of your website is website loading speed. You need to establish trust with potential customers for your dental practice by showing them what you have to offer as well as your contact details within the first seven seconds. That means your site has to load fast, plain and simple.
You will stand to lose potential patients if your website takes an eternity to load. To improve website loading speed, you may have to take another look at your site’s design. It’s possible that bulky images and loads of Java and Flash scripts are bogging your site down. If this is the case, they need to be taken out. You may also need to check with your site hosting company and make sure that the servers they provide are fast enough for your site.
3. Implement SEO strategies
Every website that aims to attract more readers needs to be visible in a search engine’s organic search results. One of the best ways to do just that is to do search engine optimisation or SEO. Regular SEO tactics such as increasing inbound links, keyword research and targeted content all work for any website, but for a local dental practice like yours, local SEO strategies are called for. Local SEO is basically all about optimising your online presence so your business will show up in search results on a local level. It requires a mixture of SEO principles, localisation, and patient reviews at sites like Yelp and Google+ local.
4. Social media marketing for dentists
The rise of social media sites has given business owners another powerful tool to market their products or services. However, for the social media marketing strategy for your dental website to work, you need to do it properly.
Instead of just automating posts on Facebook, Twitter or Google+, you have to be really active on your accounts there. A great part of social media marketing is interacting with commenters, but posting personable background images and using tabs on your page that leads to photos, links and more are also essential.
4. Quality dental patient management
Few marketing methods are as effective at getting the best customers as word-of-mouth marketing. Provide quality patient management, and your patients will be so satisfied that they will tell their friends and family about you and your dental practice. With quality patient management, you won’t have any problems asking your patients to write reviews on your Google+ and Yelp listings. It would also be great to get testimonials from them that you can put on your website and social media accounts.
5. Track website performance
Tracking website performance is probably the most important aspect of managing one. It is just no good to do everything right and not do any tracking at all. Everything about your website is measurable, and the data you get from tracking website performance can help you analyse and determine what needs to be done to get optimal performance.
There are many tools available these days, but Google Analytics is heads and shoulders above anyone else in the field of website performance tracking. It has a wide array of features such as e-commerce tracking, funnel, traffic sources and visitor analysis, all of which measure any identifiable factor that influences the performance of your website.
Are you ready for your dental website to grow your business?
It takes some time and effort for SEO, social media marketing and other Internet marketing methods to work, so be a little patient if you don’t see your dental practice get a significant rise in patients in the first few weeks and even months. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was amazon.com.
If you have the time and the skills to do all the website stuff yourself, then do so. But you probably spend your time much more wisely by looking after your patients. Instead, let us help you. We specialise in dental website design and marketing, and you’ll be surprised at our affordable pricing for the comprehensive service.