5 Ways to Get New Dental Patients Online with Internet Marketing

The Internet is THE best place to market your dental practice. If you’re not utilizing it to its full potential, you’re missing out on patients, and that of course, means you’re losing money.

How to Know You Need to Market Online

Running a successful dental practice can be very difficult and stressful, especially when you consider a full-time dental practice should have at least 1600 active patients. Active practices have more than 2,300 patients, so if you’re not approaching that number, it’s time to make some changes with how you’re marketing your dental practice.

Why Market Your Dental Practice Online

Online marketing can be an effective way to bring in new patients because that’s where your target audience is on a daily basis. Where do most people turn when they need a new dentist? If you answered the Internet, you’re right. It’s fast, easy, and people can learn a lot about a dentist online before calling to make an appointment.

Ways to Effectively Market for New Dental Patients Online

Marketing a dental practice is not hard. As a dentist, you can do it yourself, if you have the time. If not, you’ll have to hire a dental marketing agency. In either case, you should at least know the ways you can market for new patients online.

#1: Make Sure Your Website Is Attractive, Informative, and Interactive

A website needs to make your dental practice look good. It’s usually the first impression people have about you. This means the colors and images must be clear, crisp, and beautiful. People will spend more time on a website if they enjoy looking at it.

The website needs to be informative. You should have all of your services listed on your website on one page with details about each one, and then there should be other pages linked from that main services page to each individual service. Each dental service page should have detailed content, including images, videos, and maybe even infographics and PDFs for downloading. The more information you can provide to people, the more likely they will want to come to you for their dental care needs.

The dental services pages are not the only places you should have high-quality content. Having a blog is also useful for attractive new patients and keeping current patients happy. It’s a great place to connect with your patients when they aren’t coming into the office, so they remember to call you when they need your dental services.

Publishing blog posts is another good way to deliver information, and it has a lot of search engine benefits. Every blog post you publish gets indexed on Google’s search engine results pages, and that means there’s more of a chance people will find you when they are searching for a dentist. Publishing blog posts regularly also shows Google you’re active on your website, which has been shown to help a website rank higher on search engine results pages.

Besides being attractive and informative, a dental practice’s website should be interactive. This means people should be able to use the website to book an appointment, complete patient forms, and contact the office with questions. Going to a website for customer service is easy for people, and they appreciate it when they can get in touch with you other than calling the office. It also means people can reach out outside of office hours, which is convenient for those who may be thinking of booking an appointment on a Sunday.

Your website should be the hub of your dental practice. Current and prospective patients should use the website to learn about your practice, manage their dental care, and obtain the information they need to improve and maintain their oral health.

#2: Google My Business

Google My Business is for local businesses. It’s a directory created by Google to help local business owners promote their products and services on Google. Every dentist should have a Google My Business listing, and the profile should be up to date and complete. This includes having your dental practice’s name, address, phone number, office hours, business description, categories selected, and a list of services with images. All of this information is displayed on Google’s search engine results and will attract new patients to your practice if it looks good.

In addition to completing the profile, Google My Business is also where patients can leave reviews. Consumers trust other consumers’ reviews when they are shopping for a dentist, so it’s important to encourage current patients to leave reviews. You can never have too many reviews, so asking patients to leave a review on Google should be a continuous effort. The more you have, the better you’ll look to prospective patients AND to Google. Marketing experts report that a high number of positive reviews can have an effect on local search engine rankings.

Publishing posts, offers, and events on Google My Business is another way to market your dental practice on the platform. Google wants its local business directory to have a social element to it, and that is why they have included the ability for local businesses to publish posts on it. Offers and events can have starting and ending times attached to them, but regular posts expire after seven days. This means you should post at least one new post each week. These posts are visible in your Google My Business profile on the right side of the first page of search results.

To tie Google My Business to your website, you should have a link to your website on it. This is what people will click when they are interested in learning more about your business. Google will also follow this link to your site to confirm the information in your listing is accurate, which means you should have your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) on every page of your site. Most people put it in the footer, so it’s always visible on the bottom of each page.

#3: Social Media

Social media is an undervalued and underutilized marketing tool for dentists, but it can be highly effective in bringing in new patients. Millions of people in the United States use social media every day, and they are looking at the posts their Friends are posting. When someone posts a positive review or recommendation about a dentist, all of their local Friends will see it. Those looking for a new dentist will be more likely to call the person that was recommended by their Friend, and that’s before even searching Google.

Having an active social media account is essential. Many people who are looking for a new dentist will look at the page or feed of the dentist to learn about him and his practice. If the page is empty, inactive, or has negative reviews, they won’t be as motivated to call that dentist. However, when a dentist’s page is lively with daily posts that are engaging, informative and attractive and they have a lot of positive reviews, people will feel much more comfortable making an appointment.

Just remember that when you’re marketing your dental practice on social media, you have to be social. People don’t want to see promotional posts all the time. They want to see fun, entertaining, and informative posts, so they smile, laugh, or learn. That’s what social media is mostly about, and when you’re able to fulfill that need, those people will be more likely to seek your page out more often, especially when they need dental services.

When marketing on social media, make sure you are able to keep up with the activities involved in doing it effectively or you won’t see the worth in it. This means posting daily or at least several times a week. You should also publish various types of posts, such as text-based ones, images, videos, and a mixture of text and images or videos. As you publish different types of posts, you’ll start to notice which ones perform better than others, and then you can base future ones off those results.

Social media advertising is another option to market for new patients online. With audience targeting on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can choose to only show your ads to people who have recently searched for dentists in your area. Since you are targeting one area and one population, the cost is not as high as you may believe, and the return on investment can be quite good because those people are already interested in finding a dentist.

When creating ads, remember that it’s the image that makes someone look at it, so it should be one that grabs their attention. Try to choose an image that surprises people, but is still professional. The text should be engaging and short. Something as simple as, “Looking for a dentist in <city>? We’re the #1 preferred dentist in the area, and we’d love to meet you.” The link should go to your website or a landing page.

#4: Google Ads

Google Ads is another form of marketing that every dentist should consider. It can be expensive and ineffective IF the ads aren’t managed properly, so make sure to learn all about them before jumping into it. Once you know how to run Google Ads, you should see leads come in regularly because the ads are only shown to people who are actively searching for a new dentist. They are the ones that are ready to call and make an appointment, and when they see your dental practice at the top of the results pages for their search of “dentist in <city>” they are much more likely to convert.

Google Ads should have an image, a short title, and a description. The goal of Google Ads is to present your dental practice to Google users quickly and succinctly, so they act quickly. The copy should be attractive and make people want to click on it as soon as they see it.

Keywords are important in Google Ads because if you optimize for the wrong keywords, you end up paying for clicks from people who aren’t quite ready to make an appointment.

Google Ads also allows you to set the times and days the ad will show. As you use the advertising platform and see the results, you’ll start to see when the best times are for your ads to appear to your target audience.

Google Ads should have a link to a landing page. A landing page is just one page that has no link to another page so that people don’t get distracted. The goal is for people to land on the page, browse the content, and then convert by entering their information, booking an appointment, or calling the office. The landing page images, videos, and copy should be just as attractive, informative, and engaging as the website so that it is effective in converting people.

#5: Contributing to the Online Community

Marketing experts will call this backlinking, but it can also be known as contributing your knowledge online to improve your authority, credibility, and trustworthiness online. The way this works is having content published on other sites you’ve written with a link in it that directs people to your website. This is effective in bringing new patients to your dental practice in a couple of ways.

When you are a guest publisher on a local website, you put yourself in front of people who may have never seen you otherwise. As you contribute articles to more websites in your local community, more people will see your name and recognize you. While they may not need a dentist at the time they read your oral care tips, they will be more likely to remember you when they do or tell others about you when they know someone who needs a dentist.

Google also pays attention to your contributions. Many marketing experts believe that Google will increase your website’s ranking in its search results when they see your link on other websites. They figure if other sites are willing to link to yours, you must have something of high value on it. Since Google wants to present their users with the best information online, they are more likely to show your website to people if they believe you have what they need.

Dental Marketing Online Is Easy But Difficult

As a dentist, you are an intelligent individual who can learn about search engine optimization, social media marketing, and online advertising, but it’s not as easy as you may think. There’s a learning curve, and it takes time to implement all of the marketing efforts discussed above, plus many others that are not discussed here. In addition to starting online dental marketing campaigns, they also need to be managed. This means tracking results, making adjustments, tracking those results, and so on and so forth. Content generation is extremely important to the success of a dental marketing campaign, and it needs to be done on a regular basis. What this all means is if you’re running an active dental practice AND working to market it online, you’ll find yourself running out of time. It’s why many people decide to seek the help of a dental marketing agency.

ThePerfectPatient.com is run by me – Gary Adams DDS. A dentist who fired his dental marketing and advertising agency 15 years ago and never looked back. After learning the ins and outs of digital marketing for dentists, I decided I wanted to help other dentists market their dental practices online as well. I’ve put together a team, and here we are educating dentists all over the United States on how they can bring in new dental patients online.

Contact me for a free online dental marketing analysis and consultation. I would be happy to help you get started and learn everything you need to know to succeed in online dental marketing.