In the ever-competitive landscape of dental marketing, any improvement can be a game-changer. But who said it has to be labor-intensive? Here are 24 effortless ways to boost your dental marketing in 2024.

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Social Media Magic

  1. Use a dental social media content calendar. You can buy this one here and then use a scheduling tool or social media service to schedule posts according to the content. It even includes templates that make professional-looking posts easy work for your team.
  2. Delegate personalized social media posts. Have a team member follow the calendar religiously and set specific goals for when they will post and how often each month. For example, “Cheryl, I want you to take a photo of the team or a patient according to the content calendar once per week and post those in addition to the scheduled dental content.”

Level-Up Your Website Results

  1. Secret shop your website. Borrow a friend’s phone while you’re away from the office, or purchase a pre-paid cell phone. Set it up with a prefix in your practice area. Use the phone to call your office a few times to see if the phone is answered and how quickly. Make the first couple of calls in the afternoon on Monday and Tuesday. These are sometimes problem spots for dental offices that struggle to answer the phone. Your team will eventually catch on, and if you find that secret shopping by phone is tough, you can try analyzing your call patterns with your marketing company’s call-tracking system.

Just by analyzing the results and periodically tracking your numbers, you’ll find that you can increase your new patient opportunities. You and the team may be unaware of scheduling challenges, meaning calls go to voicemail when they shouldn’t.

Secret shop your website’s forms by using a freshly created Gmail account. Use your account to:

  • See how long it takes for you to get a call from a message you send
  • See how long it takes before you get a response from a human
  • Whether or not you can honestly say that the answer you received would make you want to call the office
  • Whether or not you receive multiple follow-up emails. Did you get at least three in the first seven days?
  1. Make sure your Google Analytics is set up and upgraded. Google allows you to track user behavior and adjust strategies using the data you find. This assumes that your dental marketing company has set your site up on Google Analytics. This is a SUPER basic marketing strategy, but it’s often not done automatically if you only engaged your current website company for designing a dental website but not to provide ongoing marketing services.

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Automated Email Efficiency

  1. Schedule monthly newsletters. Pre-schedule monthly newsletters with updates, dental tips, and promotions.

Implement Drip Campaigns: Have an automated series of emails for new patients.

Automated Email Efficiency

  1. Implement drip campaigns. Have an automated series of emails for new patients in specific treatment categories who have yet to become patients. Some patients are ready to go with treatment, and those slam dunks are great. But what about the other leads that you worked so hard to create? Are you just going to let those fizzle? Recapture them with an email marketing campaign. You can often send the same or similar content that you would to your existing patients. You may want to tweak the text to include a call to action and welcome them back to your office to pick up where they left off.

Elevate Your Online Reputation

  1. Systematized review solicitation. Yelp can scream, “Stop asking for reviews!” until they are blue in the face, but the rest of the world knows you’ll get more reviews when you ask for them. Many offices use software to send out review requests post-appointment automatically. How to Win at Social and Reviews in Two Words: it needs the dentist’s personal touch.

Build a review solicitation system that:

  • Identifies who you should ask for reviews
  • Specifies and track how many review requests you will make each week.
  • Tracks how many reviews come in each week.

Then…

  1. Share your wins and celebrate them. Automatically share positive reviews on your social media platforms. There’s minimal downside. If your social media marketing budget allows for it and you want to make these wins sing, craft a post around them with more patient participation. Send them a thank-you gift, then approach them to do a photo shoot or even be part of a video shoot where they tell their story. Photos and video are clear wins, but many offices make excuses for not having them. Digital Marketing E-Book for Dentists!

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Content Without The Hassle

  1. Create quarterly content plans. If you’re building your digital dental marketing plan, then be sure that part of that plan is to create a quarterly content schedule for your blog and video creation. Schedule the content creation and publication of the posts in advance and be clear about who is responsible for the writing, recording, posting, and engaging.
  2. Outsourcing to dental marketing experts. This is sort of a shameless plug, but at the same time, we’re not the only dental marketing company out there, and indeed, there are a lot of competitors that I would highly recommend before you sign up with a local marketing outfit or a market-all agency. Use dental-specific content writing services to maintain your website’s content. They should be knowledgeable enough about dentistry to understand that different offices have different areas of expertise and focus and that they shouldn’t assume that you’re ‘just another dentist.’ What is that?!

At Pro Impressions, we are all about improving lives through learning and connection. We know enough about dentistry to know that we need to learn YOU, and then we can run with your website’s content from there. Steer clear of marketing companies that promote you with cookie-cutter content or who market all sorts of businesses. Being local has very little advantage in marketing because everything is done online anyway, and even if they are in the same city, they are unlikely to be at your beck and call genuinely. Just focus on getting someone who is dedicated to dentistry. That will help with everything, including your SEO results.

Streamline Your SEO Tactics

  1. Investigate keyword auto-suggestions and categories. Many SEO companies who don’t know dentistry will utilize SEO tools that automatically suggest “relevant” keywords. Those quotation marks should scare you. These SEO tools don’t understand that just because a keyword is regularly associated with something you’re targeting doesn’t make it relevant to you and the keywords that work for you.

Your online profiles are the same way. There’s a strategy about categorizing your listings on Google Business Profile where SEO professionals, especially platform reps at companies like Yelp, suggest that you forgo “over-crowded” categories and instead list yourself in adjacent categories, assuming that they are relevant to you. This can have you, a general dentist, being listed as an orthodontist or denture clinic even if you have no interest in getting visibility in those areas of dentistry.

  1. Leverage backlink monitoring. Use automated tools to monitor your backlinks. Links from nasty websites, whether you know they exist or not, can hurt your reputation and your website’s ranking ability. Why would you have a link from a nasty website? They can pop up without warning because automated content robots are building websites every day for the sole purpose of housing online ads. The sites are garbage, and Google hates them because sometimes unethical SEO companies will leverage similar tactics to manipulate Google into ranking their clients better. It works…for a while.

But once Google catches wind of these manipulative linking tactics, these links turn toxic. They can have the opposite effect: your rankings can tank, and you can even be penalized or removed from Google’s index. The solution is to leverage systems that monitor your backlinks and either get toxic links removed or at least reported to Google, disclaiming any responsibility for the links’ existence.

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Advertise Smart, Not Hard

  1. Automate Google Ads conversion tracking. Use conversion tracking systems to feed conversion data into Google Ads. This allows Google’s machine learning system to adjust your bidding and ad targeting automatically to increase the likelihood of focusing your ad dollars on people like those who have already converted. 

The key is implementing (and using) a conversion tracking system that will accurately identify conversions and feed them back into the Google Ads system. This has to include a human element? Why? “Garbage in, garbage out” applies to this type of system. Someone has to listen to your calls and review your emails so legit conversions are adequately flagged and erroneous conversions are filtered out.

  1. Optimize your campaigns for search Intent. Refine your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns by focusing on keywords and phrases indicative of strong user intent to find dental services. It sounds like a no-brainer, but many ad agencies without a good understanding of the business of dentistry will waste your ad dollars on clicks from people who will never be a patient at your office. By targeting long-tail keywords specific to the services your practice offers and excluding keywords that will indicate anything other than a person looking for a dentist to help them, you can improve the quality of your ad traffic. 

This strategy helps you attract users actively searching for dental solutions, which can increase the likelihood of conversions. Additionally, by creating ad content that answers common questions and concerns, your ads will engage users more effectively, providing them with the information they seek and guiding them toward booking an appointment. This approach does not rely on prior user behavior or personal data, thereby maintaining compliance with privacy regulations while driving targeted ad performance. It is an excellent alternative to retargeting strategies that aren’t HIPAA-compliant and may be sabotaged by recent tech changes that eliminate cookie-powered tracking.

Engaging Dental Patients Made Easy

  1. Automate patient surveys. Use software to automatically send out post-visit surveys, streamlining feedback collection and leveraging insights for targeted marketing improvements. This efficient process saves staff time and enriches the patient experience by promptly addressing concerns, fostering positive reviews, and enhancing your online reputation. With data-driven strategies informed by consistent patient input, your practice can refine services and communications, leading to higher satisfaction rates and improved SEO—all by changing your approach to one that ensures a proactive, patient-centered marketing strategy, driving both retention and acquisition.
  2. Deploy AI-driven virtual assistants. Chatbots have been around for a while, and some dental offices use them significantly. The problem is that many dental offices haven’t had a great experience with chat messaging companies—even those specializing in dental chat. Being external to the office, the chat agencies couldn’t seem to communicate with their prospective patients as the office does with people. 

AI to the rescue! It may seem hard to believe you could trust a bot to manage appointments and follow-ups. You and the bot will have a period of learning and adjustment. Still, AI’s ability to learn allows you to train your chatbot on how to respond to prospective patient questions, what questions to ask of the chat user, and when to ask them.

Of course, innovations in AI are rolling out every day, and this is bleeding-edge tech. Still, one thing is (or will be in the near future) certain: chat AI is more predictably less expensive, more scalable, and less prone to errors than a poorly staffed human-powered chat service.

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Local Community Outreach

  1. Review specifics of your ads’ geo-targeting. Ad agencies use automated geo-fencing tools for local advertising. The problem is that while this makes their management job easier, it can lead to wasted clicks from individuals who are unlikely to visit your office. Review the targeting with your dental PPC team. You don’t want to assume too much and have your targeting so tightly positioned that your opportunities are few and far between, but you also don’t want to assume that the entire state or city will come to see you. Consider the realities of your market, the presence of competitors, and natural barriers that could make some clicks a waste of ad dollars.
  1. Leverage strategic local event sponsorship. Strategic event sponsorship elevates your dental practice’s community profile and amplifies your social media impact. By engaging with local events through sponsorship, you align your brand with the community’s pulse, gaining valuable exposure. Sponsorship can prompt social media mentions from event organizers and attendees, enhancing your online reach. They also provide authentic photo opportunities, which can populate your social feeds with vibrant content that resonates with your audience. When you sponsor events with causes or businesses you believe in, the resulting social media content boosts engagement and showcases your practice’s commitment to the community, strengthening your social narrative and fostering a relatable, trustworthy brand image.

Refine Your Referral Programs

  1. Invest more in cultivating referrals. Use your practice’s software to track referrals and send out thank-you emails or rewards. That’s basic but critical. You need to stay top of mind for your patients, and in a cosmetic, sleep, or TMJ-focus office, this can be a challenge unless you’re also trying to cultivate hygiene and general dentistry. In all these cases, being intentional about generating referrals will generate extremely lucrative results IF you make it part of your regular practice operations. Request referrals. Make those requests personal. 
  2. Showcase your work with professional photo shoots. Get creative by offering photoshoots with related patients and between referred friends. Imagine a post that says, “This is Sally and her friend, Amanda, whom Sally referred to us. Don’t their smiles look amazing?!” You’ve shown off your work in a stellar social media post that subliminally says, “Who should you refer to us?”

Get the process started by implementing a monthly newsletter and asking for volunteers for the next photoshoot. You say you don’t have a monthly email newsletter at your dental practice?

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Email Enlightenment

    1. Automate email newsletters. Don’t wait until you realize it has been a while since you’ve sent out an email newsletter or until your office manager frees up time to write something. Pre-schedule monthly updates to patients. Make it an annual effort to assemble newsletters and batch the work, then schedule them to go out via an email management system such as Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, or Keap. This does require extra marketing work, but you want more patient referrals and social media followers, right? Make your email content fun and personal—not just educational. Email content that is impersonal and merely educational won’t have the same impact. Think of your emails as long-form social media posts. Your face needs to be in the content!
    2. Create new patient onboarding email funnels. Do you send the same emails to new patients all the time? Turn them into marketing opportunities while improving your team’s productivity. Automate emails for new patient onboarding that invite them to complete new patient paperwork introduce them to key team members, ask for feedback, and invite them to become part of your practice’s online community via social media.

Beyond the Norm

  1. Schedule and share webinar videos. Scheduling and running seminars can be daunting, but if you’ve got a quiet place to record and a laptop or phone, you can run a webinar! Use your social media and newsletters to invite attendees, then record and share webinars for patient education. They don’t even have to be live necessarily. You can deliver pre-recorded content if you want to automate things. Webinars can be informal conversations or pre-planned content. It’s all about generating content you can harness in your other marketing. You can run these via Zoom, but you can go live on your favorite social media platform, like Instagram or YouTube. If you go live, the platform will assist you in getting your viewers but don’t rely on streaming numbers. You just want to amass video content proving you’re the expert. 

Innovative Dental in Springfield, Missouri, does a great job of this. We’re doing this for our clients through a podcast called Marketing Chairside. Subscribe for some ideas that you could dental-ize to create webinar topics.

  1. Leverage educational video content. Webinars and live social media can go a long way toward building a content library for your local community to learn from. Take it further and develop a series of educational videos that provide valuable information on dental health, procedures, and preventive care. These videos can be shared on your practice’s website, social media channels, and your office’s monitors. By offering informative content, you can engage with current and potential patients without compromising personal health information. The videos can range from simple tips on oral hygiene to explanations of standard dental procedures, helping to demystify the dental care process for patients. This approach positions your practice as a trustworthy source of information. It can help alleviate patients’ anxiety about visiting the dentist—bonus points for combining this strategy with an automated new patient email onboarding campaign.

Marketing your dental practice in 2024 doesn’t have to be a march around the same mountain you’ve hiked around for years. With the right tools and strategies, you can give your dental office’s marketing a much-needed lift. It’s all about smart work, not just hard work. So, go ahead and implement these marketing strategies and connect with the team at Pro Impressions Marketing for help. Watch your practice grow while you focus on what you do best: providing top-notch dental care.

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