There are many ways to market your dental practice and in this blog post we will look at some of the most popular dental marketing strategies and weigh up the pros & cons.
When it comes to dental marketing and promoting your dental practice the goal is to generate leads & convert those enquiries into new clients and there are many ways of doing this.
Offline Marketing For Dentists
You can try traditional methods such as advertising in newspapers or local magazines, distributing flyers or advertising on radio. These offline methods have their place and can generate results but it is very difficult to measure these results. You may see, or feel, an increase in enquiries and new patient sign ups but you can’t measure the actual return on your investment.
With digital marketing you can measure your ROI much more clearly so many dentists are opting to market their practice online. With digital marketing however there are even more choices.
Social Media for Dentists
Firstly there is social media. Your potential clients are very likely to be on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter so it makes sense to try and reach them here. With all social media platforms you have 2 ways to promote your practice, you can post content and promote it organically and you can pay to promote your posts.
If you post some content on social media it will only really be seen by people who follow you. This is a great way to communicate with your existing patients but won’t reach any new customers. You can distribute your posts more widely by doing things like adding hashtags but it is unlikely that potential clients will be following hashtags such as #emergencydentist, #dentalimplants or #compositeveneers.
Social Media Advertising For Dentists
So then we have social media advertising. The obvious platforms here are Facebook & Instagram which are both owned by Meta so you can advertise on both using the same tools. The way Facebook & Instagram advertising works is you target specific audiences and then pay to show them your posts. These posts can come in many forms such as images with text and links to your website or videos or even lead capture forms. You ‘build’ an audience to target based on what Meta knows about people- their location, interests, demographics etc.
The problem with advertising on Meta platforms is that you build an audience that you think may be interested in your services and then you pay for them to be exposed to your posts and this a very much a scatter gun approach and requires a lot of testing to see if you can get results. You may generate leads from this form of dental marketing but really it is only a good way to raise brand awareness.
SEO For Dentists
Another dental marketing strategy is to try and drive more traffic to your website organically through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This works by adding quality content to your website and waiting for the search engines to index this content and start showing it when people carry out relevant searches. SEO can work very well for dental practices as you can create educational content around the services and treatments you offer and over time this will attract potential clients who are researching these treatments online.
The problem with SEO for dentists is that it takes time and expertise and the results can be mixed. Firstly someone who knows about the subject matter in depth needs to take the time to create the content. This is likely to be time that they can easily afford and they may not be skilled in creating content such as blog posts, infographics or video. Then it can take months and months for search engines to index content and start sending traffic to it in any quantities.
Another problem with SEO is that you have no control over the audience you target. The people who find your content may not be looking for your services or treatments anytime soon, they may just be doing some research, and they can be form anywhere geographically. You can’t target a geographic area with SEO so you will be attracting people from across the world that you cant possibly treat to your website.
PPC For Dentists
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising allows dentists to display a text ad in front of potential clients when they are searching for treatments & services they offer on search engines. Of all the dental marketing strategies we believe PPC is the most effective.
By far the biggest platform is Google Ads, because such a huge proportion of all searches are carried out on Google, but there is also Microsoft Ads which allows you to show ads on the Bing search engine and some other search engines such as Yahoo & DuckDuckGo.
Unlike SEO with PPC you can specify the exact searches that you would like your ads to show up on and you can target audiences my more specifically. For example you can only show ads within a radius of 20 miles of your clinic, or just within certain postcodes.
Because you can target the specific searches your ads show for you can choose phrases where the intent of the searcher is very clear and you can get your ad in front of those people in the moment they are carrying out those searches. For example “emergency dentist near me”, “best dental implant clinic london” or “sedation dentist for nervous patient”.
The downside of PPC for dentists is that campaigns must be set up and managed correctly or you can waste a lot of money. If done correctly however PPC can show an outstanding return on investment for dentists.
Profitable Digital
Profitable Digital specialises in generating leads for dentists through advertising on Google Ads. Find out more about how we can help your practice generate quality enquiries and sign up new patients:
Find Out More
Subscribe to our blog: