Many dentists like to see content on their dental websites and blog posts that they’d like to read. Maybe it’s the latest dental technology for measuring a patient’s bite force or the intricate workings of how myofunctional therapy can reshape a patient’s airway. While interesting to a dentist, it isn’t what the typical patient is looking for. Your typical dental patient has a problem, and they want to know if and how you can solve it.
Your dental patients are searching Google, Bing, or whatever search engine they use to find answers to things like, “Why does my jaw hurt?”, “Should I get dental implants or a dental bridge?” and “Cosmetic dentist in Wilmington, DE.” Since these are the kinds of things your patients are searching for, these are the kinds of needs your dental website content must satisfy.
What Do Dental Patients Need?
Search engine optimization (SEO) starts with the user’s needs, not the search engine or your business offerings. What are your patients searching for? What kinds of questions do they have? What are their needs and wants? Find out your prospective patient’s needs and wants that align with your offerings and write your dental content accordingly. According to research by Kantar, a data and insights company, users are looking for one of six things.
- Surprise Me
- Inspire Me
- Impress Me
- Educated Me
- Reassure Me
- Help Me
For dentists, patients typically need to be reassured or helped.
Consumer Need Drives Behavior and Intent
Imagine that you are a patient who has tooth pain. You don’t know what kind of treatment you need or if you need it, but you know that Google has an answer. You type, “Why does my back tooth hurt?” into your search engine. Then, Google will generate websites that it thinks could answer that question.
Google says, “OK…this website looks like a dentist, this one looks like a dentist, and this one looks like technology for dentists. I’ll show them the first two.”
You want to be one of the first two, so your content should be about how you can help fix their toothache.
If your content is all about dental technology or too much like a textbook description of dental treatment, Google won’t think your content is relevant to patients looking to be reassured or helped. Instead, you’ll attract people who want to be impressed or educated, which isn’t the usual dental patient.
But, what about people looking for cosmetic dentistry? Surely, they’d like to be impressed!
It would seem that way, but no. The core of what cosmetic dental patients want is help. They want help making their teeth look beautiful, and that’s why they search for things like “cosmetic dentist near me” and “dental bonding vs. veneers.”
Need is the King of the Marketing Funnel
You may or may not have heard of the term “marketing funnel.” The marketing funnel is your patient’s process of deciding to purchase one of your services. It’s based on data from real-life people like you, who make purchase decisions every day. The marketing funnel is a tried and true concept that has been around for 100 years!
Beginning at the largest part of the funnel and moving to the smallest part we have:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Consideration
- Intent
- Evaluation
- Purchase.
But we still have one question, what drives awareness? Why would someone become aware of something? It’s because they have a need. If there were a zero in the above list, zero would be ‘Need.’
Here is the formula for getting more patients:
Patient needs +
Branding (awareness) +
Relevant content (interest, consideration) +
An easy call to action (intent, evaluation)
= New patients (purchase)
The bottom line is that if you base your content on consumer needs, you’ll end up solving more problems more often and experience growth faster than someone whose content satisfies their own interests.
Data Drives Marketing Decisions
Consumer needs that drive intent and behavior may be subjective, but the data from their behavior is not and marketing decisions are based on data.
That’s why at Pro Impressions, we use actual data to find out what dental patients in your target market need, search for, and use that knowledge to plan the content on your website and blog. So when your patients search “should I get dentures or dental implants?” you can be sure that your website will show up because Google will know that you’re a dentist, not a dental technology provider.
Pro Impressions Helps Dentists Like You Get New Patients
If you’re a dentist looking for a dental marketing company to do the heavy lifting that is your marketing and advertising efforts, schedule a consultation with Pro Impressions today. We help dentists like you plan and execute a dental marketing strategy that gets new patients with results that you can see. Schedule a consultation today.
