Looking for dental marketing services or next-level online marketing ideas for your office? Here are some lesser-known tactics that will help you promote your dental services better than your competitors are currently marketing themselves.
Prune Your Dental Website
You want your online marketing to build momentum over time, but as your website ages, it can turn into a cumbersome mess of old content that was important at one time, but not any more.
Once or twice a year, take an inventory of the content on your website. Be especially choosy about what you allow to take up space on your home page. Be careful. You’re not looking to gut your website. This strategy definitely requires coordination with your dental SEO company. Look for content that is not getting a lot of traffic and that doesn’t represent a high priority to your dental office. For example, if you’re not trying to attract pediatric patients and you have an old post about some early life intervention topic on your site that isn’t getting a lot of local traction, get rid of it!
On your home page, eliminate sections that represent (and likely link to) lower priority or outdated pages or topics on your website. Items on your home page must represent things that are highly important to the dentist AND the patients. Everything else can be introduced via secondary pages such as our main Dental Services page.
Get Published by Local Magazines
Local media outlets can provide some highly effective online marketing opportunities. To take advantage of these opportunities, it’ll require some extra effort. That’s why other dentists opt for easier online marketing strategies. You want to pull past them, so do the legwork that they aren’t willing to do. Besides, it’s not as hard as you might think.
To get published by local media outlets (and get some great, local, online marketing lift!), follow these steps:
- Look for local publications and websites that target the areas where your best patients live.
- Find the editorial guidelines of these media outlets. You may have to contact them to request them, but often they are posted on their websites.
- Brainstorm some topics that would help those magazines and websites inform their readers.
- Considering your skills, experience, and interests, narrow your list to topics that you can speak to with some authority.
- Write a great article that helps the target audience, careful to follow the editorial guidelines you found.
- Edit the piece after giving yourself a day or two away from it and get help if you need it.
- Send the piece, wait a couple weeks, then follow up with the publisher’s editor to find out if they intend to publish it. Don’t send the same article to multiple publishers at the same time.
You may be pleasantly surprised at your success. Get help writing if you need it, and keep at it. In the end, you’ll get some links that the people in charge of your online marketing services could never generate for you. Those links can make a huge difference!
Bonus tip: Even magazines and newspapers who don’t post their content online can provide a benefit if their distribution hits your target audience and your article helps the reader. Google likes it when people Google search your name and your practice name. It sends the message that you are in demand.
Implement a Review Request System That Works
If you’re a savvy dentist who has been following developments in online marketing, you’ll know that online reputation management is critical. The problem is that many dentists implement an automated system for acquiring reviews without bothering to see if it works. Or, they tell their employees to make getting reviews a priority and then, after amassing a number of reviews, forget to continue to keep it as a priority in their office.
There is no magic number of reviews that you can consider the ‘finish line’ of Google review generation. Google wants to know that you are a dental practice that they can confidently recommend, and they believe that a great dental office will get new positive reviews on a regular basis.
Implement a system for getting new reviews every week. This will require you and your team to:
- Listen for opportunities to ask patients for reviews.
- Make it easy for patients to create reviews through a review request text message.
- Track results
- Reward your team for success in achieving a monthly goal
About the Author
Jonathan Fashbaugh has been providing dental marketing services since 2004. He has written marketing content for Dental Sleep Professional magazine, UpCity.com, Inside Dentistry, Dental Economics, and more. Jonathan is also available for speaking engagements.
