So perhaps you’re a dentist who’s recently created a beautiful new web site. What you want to accomplish is a high flow of traffic to your new dental web site of patients within your vicinity who are interested in visiting your office for the dental services you provide, whether those dental services are orthodontics or teeth whitening or some form of cosmetic dentistry to even general dentistry.
Your website may give you a new patient here or there but this is not getting the most out of your site. If you fail to choose a good marketing plan, your website will end up being only a way for existing patients to get your phone number or address. You have a well-designed website. Why not maximize the number of times it will be seen? If you do not, it will stagnate on the Internet and be overlooked by prospective patients who, instead see another competitively marketed dental website.
I’ve been spending a lot of time researching Internet dental marketing and different online tactics and strategies which dentists have used successfully and which they have used with not such good results. And it’s the tactics that both work and the tactics that don’t work that I want to share with you so you don’t make the same mistakes that others have made, and then you could build on the work that other dentists have done to improve their online marketing program.
Let me start off by discussing things that may work but are extraordinarily time-consuming. Yahoo! Answers is an example of a channel that you can use to build traffic to your site. Yahoo! Answers is a forum that you can get to off of Yahoo.com where people randomly post questions about various topics. You can set yourself up so that you get notifications about people who have dental service-related questions, and once you see these, by email notification you can respond. You’ll quickly be recognized as a leader in that area, and eventually, that has the potential to generate traffic. This unfortunately has the problem of waiting around for other people to write questions that you’re going to answer and also has the drawback of requiring a significant time commitment, so that you respond to questions as soon as they are presented and think about them thoroughly. It’s a time-consuming process which certainly is not the ideal marketing strategy for most dentists.
Another moderately successful tactic some dentists are using is to keep up a dental blog. This is no time saver, because you will need to post new entries constantly to keep new information turning up on the Internet all the time. It takes large amounts of time to write about the dental services you’ve provided and these will need to be posted anonymously, as well. The blogs will need to be continuously written for a long time to achieve positive effects of this type of marketing. To get away from these time commitments, some may elect to purchase advertizing with a site like Google Adwords, where all that needs done is picking keywords to drive searches your way. This way of advertizing works; although, it is extremely costly.
It’s obvious that a less expensive marketing method would be a better choice. Paying for “click” ads can really add up, and the troubling fact about these ads is that anyone who feels that they are competing with your practice for business can click on your add and run up a large advertising bill for you practice. Underhanded, I know, but this has happened. Equally troubling is the fact that the percentage of advertising money spent is not always worth it when you consider that if one click-through ad to a new patient costs you $5 and the rest of the clicks are lost on people who don’t come to your office, that one new patient is all you get when you still have to pay close to $200 in advertising. As you can see, this is not an effective way of getting the biggest bang for your marketing buck.
There is one channel that has the potential to be tremendously successful and is not very time-consuming. Dentists are just starting to begin to use this channel, and I’ve spoken with several who use patient reviews as a mechanism to leverage their practice and increase the number of patients they have. What most of these dentists do is ask patients who are clearly impressed with the practice to go to some third-party web site, such as Citysearch or Yelp, and write a review about the practice there. This certainly is a good channel.
Search engines index whatever information is available, be it a stellar review or a really bad one. The obvious best scenario here would be to have only favorable information available for the search engines to pull from. If a search turns up information on a third party site like Citisearch the dentist has no control over what reviews have been posted there, nor does that dentist have a way of collecting the reviews himself. This makes the dentist powerless to control his online reputation.
There is now a way for dentists to have control over all their reviews and effectively market a practice online without breaking their advertizing budgets. Creating your own site for your patients to post their reviews will put you in control. Your review site will be complete with your contact information, your logo and large amounts of positive feedback written by your happy patients. This cuts out all the time it takes to write your own Web content, and it has a low cost compared to the other Internet advertizing tools I’ve discussed. Your patients will be happy knowing that you have created a place just for them to write their reviews of their experiences so you will have plenty of information to work with-both good and bad. You are bound to have at least a few unfavorable reviews and these can be used to make changes to create a better experience for your patients while at your office. The good review can easily be pushed out onto the Internet to be indexed by search engines, which will drive new patients to your practice. Planning a review site is clearly a great way to utilize your patients review to generate positive feedback for your practice on the Internet, something that translates into new patients easily finding nothing but good things about you when they look for a dentist in your community.