5 Ways To Market Your Dental Clinic

Here are 5 proven marketing strategies to implement in your cosmetic dental clinic.

1. Publish And Repurpose Unique And Relevant Content On A Consistent Basis

Google rewards unique, timely and relevant content with higher rankings. This is the same kind of content your patients come to your website for. Thus the best way forward is to think of your dental clinic as a publishing house.

Today the best dental marketing come via the ones who put in the sheer hard work to generate the unique content required online to continually stay front of mind. The big companies have finally cottoned onto the fact they must regularly create educational and entertaining stories about their products and services. Likewise, your clinic must do the same.

We are all consuming content in micro-segments, usually, during any downtime, we have in our day. Your job as a clinic owner is to tell your story in smaller chunks, much like when you watch trailers before going to the cinema.

All too many dental clinics have no strategy for posting their website content. Too many times I see a dentist spend their precious time writing a blog post, but then fall at the last hurdle in terms of ranking well in the search engines.

So how do you become this figurative publishing house? Start by answering your customer’s top 50 questions. Once written, make sure the title, keywords, description and tags are optimised for the internet. Each question should have its own page, where there is no deviation from the topic in hand and typically be at least 500 words. Furthermore, when I advise a clinic owner on creating content for their website I say you might not like it, but I want to see EVERY person in your business writing content.

2. Give Your Dental Website Visitors A Clear Message To Act On

When you’re marketing your dental clinic online, don’t send your paid traffic to your homepage. The majority of homepages do not have a strong call to action. There is no clear message for the visitor to read and act on in pursuit of solving their exact problem. Homepages are on the whole designed with too many options due to the many links to different parts of the site. It’s an expensive business to invest in gaining more traffic only to see potential clients visit without leaving their contact details.

When you don’t lead your prospects down the path you want them to follow, they will run around your site without being captured and never return again. It’s worth checking your Google Analytics reports to see the paths people currently take to navigate your site; you can even see this in real time! You will definitely be surprised, I can guarantee that!

3. Learn To Write Compelling Copy For Your Potential New Patients

In the grand scheme of things, old school dentist marketing has turned a corner. We can no longer PUSH out our messages and expect prospects to stop in their tracks and take notice of us. It’s too noisy a world. The future is about setting up systems where PROSPECTS can PULL valuable information from you on their own terms.

In itself, this represents a massive wake up call for many clinics. Old technology like fax machines represented a time when businesses would PUSH their message out. New technology, like your YouTube channel, represents the present where clinics provide information their prospects can PULL towards them at their leisure on their own terms.

Your patients will only start listening to you the moment you use great copy to talk about their problems first.

Learning how to write great copy will always be highly relevant to YOU because it’s based on how humans are wired and act daily – that simply doesn’t change! So remember, spend your time studying how to craft compelling copy.

Write in the second person. In particular, go online and learn how to write an effective headline that really pulls the reader into the rest of your copy. It takes time to learn effective, copywriting! There are no shortcuts, so I recommend starting now.

Teaching yourself key copywriting principles means you can judge whether the copy someone has written for you will compel your reader to take the action YOU desire. The most important marketing skill any clinic owner can possess is the ability to write great copy. The reality is you will never stop learning and I personally kick myself that I never started early enough!

4. Utilise And Embrace The Power Of Video In Your Dental Marketing

I’m a strong advocate of using video in your dental clinic marketing. The video should definitely be part of your marketing strategy. Why … because it’s the most EFFECTIVE way to build trust online. And that’s not all … Video is now consuming the internet. In short, the future of the internet is video.

I urge you to place a far greater emphasis on YouTube than any of the other social media platforms. You need to perhaps forget the notion that it is just good for “dogs on skateboards” (hard for me as I own a bulldog that tries to skateboard!), YouTube is so much more than this. Billions of monthly video views are being driven by professionally produced content.

Mass adoption of internet video has already taken place.

Take a look at some of these YouTube stats:

• 1 billion monthly users

• 4 billion hours of video watched per month

• 72 hours of footage uploaded every minute

• 2nd largest search engine

• 3rd most visited website in the world

Staggering aren’t they? Successful clinic owners are seeing their prospects and clients stay in touch with them through a subscription to their YouTube channel.

To be perfectly honest, there really is NO excuse not to integrate your clinic’s YouTube channel into your marketing strategy. Now is the time, before your competitors do.

Start by listing key messages you can talk about in your videos. These would include for example: it’s better to be moving than lead a sedentary lifestyle, don’t put up with pain, seek expert advice, prevention is better than cure and the need for regular maintenance, etc. I’m sure you can think of many more. What an opportunity to REALLY develop a rapport with your prospects and clients! And here’s the clincher, there is no barrier to entry as it’s now possible to shoot and edit HD video on your smartphone.

5. Track All Of Your Dental Offline And Online Marketing

When was the last time you tracked a dental marketing campaign? Seriously, your credit card statement shows payments for a nice flashy magazine ad, a Yellow Pages ad, a large box of leaflets and a campaign on Google Adwords, but can you categorically tell me what, if anything, returned a profit!

US department store magnate John Wanamaker once famously said over 100 years ago: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. That was once a valid statement to make but today we have no such excuse! With the tools, we have available today you should know precisely which campaigns to ditch and which ones to maximise.

Fortunately, Google Adwords will allow you to fare far better than Mr Wanamaker ever did because they have built conversion tracking into their systems. You thus have the option to automatically track which phrases like “dental implants” convert into visits to your website. Furthermore, I use call tracking to tell me which phrases actually turn into phone calls to your clinic.

Running a marketing campaign without fully tracking it is foolhardy, yet many dental clinics still do it.

Don’t make this mistake!