Dentists Marketing Basics

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Dental Marketing Expert

An Introduction to Today’s Marketing for Dentists

Dentists Marketing can be referred to many different tactics, campaigns or activities that are used by dentists to attract new patients to their dental practices or sometimes make more money from existent patients by having them in the dental practice on a regular basis. By effective Marketing, Dentists not only can fill the empty chairs by patient acquisition but also can increase their revenue by patient retention. So in essence, Dentists Marketing can be categorized to Internal Dentist Marketing and External Dentist Marketing.

Regular visits are an essential part of dental hygiene which are often ignored by patients and one of the goals of internal dentist marketing is to assure patients are present at the dental office when they should be. The other goal of internal dental marketing is to ensure staff is well-trained to handle the day-by-day tasks properly. One of the important implications of internal dental marketing is making sure any incoming call is handled properly. It may not seem significant at first, but we have had many clients that used to lose many prospective patients to their competitors by ignoring basic principles before we trained their staff.

When it comes to external dentists marketing, the environment has become more complex than it has ever been. You may have gotten confused by dental marketing companies about what works and what doesn’t. Typically what a dental marketing company presents to you represents their interest based on their expertise and not your benefit as a dentist based a holistic view. The truth of the matter is there are new mediums out there such as social media that have taken a significant market share in marketing and the same goes for dental practice marketing, however our experience shows that even the recently hated dental practice marketing campaigns such as Yellow Pages Ads still work pretty well depending on the area and the right conduct.

Dentists marketing campaigns can be categorized based on the marketing mediums as follows:

1- Print Dental Marketing

One of the most common forms of print dental marketing is mail marketing. Effective mail marketing, depending on the neighborhood can bring many prospective patients to a dental practice. Yellow Pages Ads and Flyer Marketing are some of the other popular forms of Print Dental Marketing. As explained earlier, if conducted under the right circumstances, Yellow Pages Ads still can be effective but the right conditions should be met, otherwise they can be a huge waste of money.

2- Online Dental Marketing

Online or Internet Dental Marketing forms a large part of dental practice marketing campaigns. It has many different forms that each one if implemented correctly can be very effective. Owning a dental website is the very first step for many of the dentist marketing campaigns. So, dental website development is one of initial steps of putting your foot in the door of internet dental marketing. Some of the most common forms of online dental marketing tactics are as follows:

  • Dental SEO:

Dental SEO or Dental Search Engine Optimization makes your dental website visible on search engines. I am sure you have heard of “be on first page of Google”. Dental SEO is the key to that.

  • Social Media Marketing for Dental Practice:

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube are just some of the emerging social media that shape today’s marketing for dentists. Why Social Media mediums are important? Because people are there. Facebook has passed 700 Million users, Twitter has over 200 million users and LinkedIn is being used by more than 100 million professionals. YouTube videos are being watched over 2 Billion Times/day! Because your patients are on Social Media, you should be there too and as much as it may seem annoying, having a presence is just the first step of many others.

  • Dental Online Reputation Management:

Online Reviews are becoming more important almost on a day by day basis and the worst part: they are highly sticky. It means if you get good reviews you may benefit from them for years and the same goes for bad reviews. Yelp and Google Reviews are just some of many local review websites that are being highly trusted by an average user and hence, not paying attention to them on-time may literally take you out of business in a few years.

3- Mobile Dental Marketing

If you have your print and online dental marketing campaigns all figured out, then it is time to go mobile. Smart phones are the next big thing and lots of your prospective or existing patients check the dental practices while they are on the go. Having a dental mobile website or a dental app such as DentiApp for iPhone and Android smart phones is just the beginning.

So, there are many marketing options for a dentist to benefit from and there is limited marketing budget. The question then goes to who to work with and what campaign to choose. The answer is you should select a dental marketing company that explores different options based on the real characteristics of your dental practice and your neighborhood and tells you which ones are working the best for you based on ROI (Return on Investment). That means they should have the knowledge and experience of implementing different types of campaigns for dentists to be able to strategically advice you on the campaigns that suit your dental practice the best based on your practice and local factors. That is called strategic dental marketing approach. The ultimate goal of strategic dental marketing also referred to as smart dental marketing or intelligent dental marketing is to identify the campaigns that bring the most patients with the least investment, initiate the implementation there and move toward less effective campaigns based on the dentist’s marketing budget.

At DDS Strategy, we conduct Print, Online and Mobile Marketing for Dentists with a heavy focus on ROI and from a strategic viewpoint. Dentists Marketing is what we are experienced in and passionate about. Contact Us today for more information.

 

Posted in Internet Dental Marketing, Online Dental Marketing, Online Reputation Management (Dental ORM), Search Engine Optimization (Dental SEO), Social Media Dentist Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yelp Marketing for Dentists

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Dental Marketing Consultant

Dental Marketing on Yelp and what a dentist should know

Dental Online Reputation Management is changing the context of marketing for dental practices similar to what ORM does for other small businesses. When it comes to dentists, managing online reviews on websites such as Yelp (Known as Yelp marketing for dentists) and utilizing their capacity are getting more and more buzz every day and play a vital role in success of a dental practice and attracting new patients. Specifically talking, Yelp review management has turned to an essential part of dental practices’ reputation management efforts and consequently, it has become increasingly important for dentists to understand what role Yelp plays in today’s dental practice marketing. But first, what is Yelp and how one can conduct dental marketing on Yelp? To explain that I review some history:

Birth of online Reviews

Long before the emergence of online reputation management systems, online review was born. Online review started as early as the Internet emerged. Amazon.com started allowing its customers to leave reviews on books from 1995. As per Los Angeles Times (1999), a study performed by Forrester Research suggested that half of the retailers’ websites reported that customer reviews had important or extremely important role on the perception of their customers back then. This trend was a continuous trend and based on the report of ComScore.com (2007), one of the major companies in measuring internet’s data and trends, almost one out of every four internet users read reviews on services delivered off-line, prior to their purchase. In the same report, they suggested that buyers were willing to spend around twenty percent more for services or products that had five star rating in scale of zero to five.

For dentistry specifically, researchers suggest that patient generated contents (such as dentist reviews on Yelp), are perceived more credible than dentist generated information (such as content of dentists’ websites). It is partly because reviews are more patient oriented and focused on performance of a dentist in comparison with the official content on dental practices’ websites, brochures, advertisements and essentially dentists’ claims. There is one exception here: dentists’ credentials. Because dentist credentials are seen as third party opinions, they tend to carry a higher weight in getting the trust of prospective patients. In general, because third party reviews carry a higher weight, it is essential for each practice to have a Yelp Dental Marketing Strategy.

History of Yelp

Yelp launched its website initially for San Francisco market in October 2004. Several years later, Yelp expanded from its San Francisco roots to open an east coast office in Manhattan in the first half of 2008 and introduced a Canadian-focused version of the site in 2008. Yelp now has international sites in Spain, France, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. As of 2008, Yelp’s page view count overtook its predecessor and early rival, Citysearch.

Yelp.com had over 58 million unique visitors as of September 2011 and is now one of the major online review sites and reputation channels. As a result, more and more patients check dentist reviews on Yelp and consequently, Yelp Marketing for dentists has become increasingly important.

How to take control of your dental practice’s page on Yelp?

Yelp provides online local search capabilities to its visitors. Each practice listing result contains a 5-point rating, reviews from other site visitors, and details such as address, hours of operation, accessibility, and parking availability of the practice. The ultimate goal of Yelp Marketing for Dentists is to drive more patients by leveraging positive reviews and other information people may find on their Yelp page.

For all businesses listed as well as dental practices, Yelp has a designated page (available through biz.yelp.com) that allows you to take partial control over your practice’s page in Yelp, which is the first step of your Yelp dental marketing campaign. After Yelp verifies that you are the actual owner of the practice, it allows you to add practice history, your profile and your practice photos. It will allow you to communicate with your reviewers and leave public comments about reviews. It is crucial for you Yelp Marketing Strategy to have a well-written and informative content on your practice page on Yelp.

If you advertise with Yelp as part of your Yelp dental marketing efforts, in dental practice’s page you can get reports about page visits and you will have the option to set up a slide show for your practice. Also as an advertiser you have the opportunity to add a video to your profile.

Some of the other powerful tools on Yelp that you can take advantage of are “offers” and “deals”. If a prospective patient searches for your practice on Yelp, they will see the offers on top of the search results. Deal is a new concept in Yelp dental marketing strategy. You can run a deal and patients will pay Yelp to get that deal. Yelp will collect 30% and will pay you the rest. Suppose that you post a coupon of “$100 for $200” for a given service. Yelp will collect $100 from the buyer, retains $30 for itself and pays you $70. As the seller you are then obligated to deliver equal to $200 of the designated service.

As a dentist or owner of a dental practice, whether if you have a strategy specifically for Yelp or not, patients look online for dentists and check your reputation to see what others express about your practice. It is very important to take control of your practice’s page and be informed about the reviews. If you find it complicated to deal with so many online marketing channels including but not limited to Yelp or simply you are very busy, we are there for you. At DDS Strategy, we consider Yelp an important medium and therefore we have a specific “Yelp Marketing Strategy for Dentists”. Contact Us today for more information.

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Biggest Mistake in Dental SEO

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Dental Marketing Expert

How to avoid paying a hefty amount to dental SEO consultants for nothing?

As you may have noticed, I am one of the search engine optimization experts for dentists and dental practices and that’s the reason I want to share with you one of the biggest mistakes SEO consultants make on a regular basis. If you have a dental SEO guy and you have been paying him for years without seeing enough patients through the door, there is a possibility that he is making the same mistake. Oh! And believe me! I know many dentists that are doing it, simply because they don’t know what to expect from dental search engine optimization.

Before I explain about the biggest mistake or better said biggest fatal error, I should explain that search engine optimization is not just anybody’s work. It needs expertise, years of practice, following Google and other search engines closely and regularly for changes they make in their search algorithms and the most important one: Dental SEO expert should be familiar with Dental and Dentistry industry and preferably have experience working in the industry. There are many aspects to SEO and there are many mistakes that can prevent you from having a successful SEO and enough patients through the door, but I will concentrate on the one that is specifically because of lack of knowledge about dentistry and dental practices.

O.K.! Here you go! The biggest fatal error is “wrong keyword search”. What does that mean? Search Engine Optimization is a pull marketing campaign. It means you make your site visible for specific searches and by that I mean specific keywords that people search. So when people enter specific search terms in Google, Yahoo and Bing they find your dental practice website as one of the top results. As an example, your website may be visible via search when people search for “New York Dentist” or “New York Dental Implant” or “New York Implant Dentist”. Those are three different searches coming from three different strategies and one of the main factors for a successful SEO is selecting the right choice of Keywords.

Depending on your area, local Long-Tail keywords are some of the best keywords to optimize your dental practice website for. Long Tail keywords usually are keywords consisting of two to five words and representing the exact search when a searcher looks for something. In search for dentists and dental practices, it translates to a combination of “Area: City, Zip-code, etc.” and “Specialty: Orthodontist, pediatric, etc.”. What makes the keyword search increasingly important is the areas are different so depending on the area, competition and population, the right choice of keywords for dental practices vary.

Let me give you an example. In our New York example, unless if you have lots of money to invest and lots of time to wait, “New York Dentist” is not the right keyword for you. Why? Because there are other dentists that have spent lots and lots of money over the years to increase their visibility and winning the competition over them for a new comer, is close to impossible at least for the short-run. Now, you may want to target one of the zip-codes or neighborhoods instead and have your keywords concentrated on specialty. That way you target less number of people but if you choose the right set of keywords, with the right SEO, you still will have enough searches and enough visibility to bring you a decent number of new patients every month.

On the other hand if you are living in a small city, let’s say “Moraga, California”, then it may be a wrong choice to pick “Moraga dental implant” as your keyword. Why? Because the competition is less so with the right investment and the right consultant, there is a high chance for you to be on top of Search Engine Page Results (SERP) for better keywords because of limited competition. And here is the reason for fatal error in this case: Being concentrated on the first results on search engines for local keywords with very low search volume doesn’t bring enough new patients. What is the use of being the first result for the search term “Moraga Dental Implant” in search engines if rarely anybody ever searches for it? In an area like that you might be better off with concentrating on more general keywords such as “Moraga Dentist”

To summarize, if you choose the wrong keywords for your Dental SEO efforts, they might fail when 1- Because of high competition in highly populated areas, you will have a low chance of being on top for general keywords. 2- Because of low volume of search in low populated areas, you will not have enough website views even if you are on top.

At “DDS Strategy” we help dentists for search engine optimization among many other dental marketing campaigns. We take our own advice and deeply analyze the keywords before starting the dental SEO process. Contact us today for a free no-commitment consultation session.

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What is Dental SEO?

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Dental Marketing Expert

The Art of Dental Website Marketing

Dental SEO is the key to be more visible on the internet. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a series of techniques that help your website rank well on search engines. Before I explain further about the techniques I would like to take a moment and emphasize that search engine optimization is the key to your dental website marketing. I explain why:

Owning a domain name or website URL (…DentalPractice.com) is similar to having a piece of land. Depending on your domain name address it may have some value on its own or not, similar to having a piece of land in the middle of desert versus having it in the heart of New York City. When you ask experts to develop a dental website, they basically build a commercial center on this land, again similar to the day you opened your practice. If you go back to when you opened your practice, you’ll remember that just opening an office was not enough to get patients pouring in. You had to do dental marketing. Whether it was asking for referrals, mail marketing or whatever other dentist marketing campaigns, you had to do marketing. Obviously, you may have been one of those rare lucky cases that opened your office in a location with so much demand that it alone was enough to bring lots of new patients in without advertising. Back to the application of a dental website; having a dental website is just the first step. Similar to having an office, it will bring you some visitors but not enough. Dental SEO is one solution.

When people search for a term in search engines – let’s say “Los Angeles dentist” – as an example, they see a lot of results. They normally trust the order of ranking so they believe a website listed higher on search engine has more credibility. In the real world, does it mean they have better service? Absolutely not! It means they have invested more money in Dental SEO. In an ideal world, your rank in search engines should represent the quality of your service. It is a criterion for how much people have mentioned you on the internet and have referred to your website. In search engine optimization literature, that is called backlinking. Backlinks are referrals from other websites to your website. It means somebody has mentioned you on the internet and has linked-back to your dental website. Since we don’t live in an ideal world, not always these backlinks are organic. It means SEO professionals have worked to get some of those referrals. So far, you know backlink building is an essential part of dental search engine optimization. It is called off-page SEO.

Another important element of Dental SEO is the content and structure of your dental website. Remember that search engines are robots that crawl your website and gather whatever they understand. Obviously they can’t assess your credibility or the quality of your service from the content of your website. They only understand the relevancy of your content to specific keywords. They also understand a good or bad website structure. So the other element of Dental SEO is giving search engines what they need in a way they understand. That is called on-page SEO. To over-simplify, this means embedding the keywords that represent your interests in an organic and natural way in the text of your website and structuring them via different codes, tags, titles, etc. in a way that the most important elements, from your point of view, will be perceived as the most important from search engines’ points of view.

To summarize so far, dental website marketing starts with dental SEO, and dental search engine optimization has two key elements: 1- off-page SEO; 2- on-page SEO. It is important to know that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have been developed by geniuses who have tried to design every possible means to find out if a website is organically popular or if the popularity is artificial. I will give you an example: if you build lots of backlinks in a short period of time – for example, let’s say two months – and then stop the process, it will be easy for search engines to figure out it has been an artificial rank increase, versus having backlinks built every month that could be a measure of continuous popularity. Think about it. If you are a popular person, you get referrals all the time, and the same goes for your dental website. That’s why “one time SEO efforts” barely work and as with any other dental marketing campaign, persistence and continuous investment are the keys to success.

Knowing that Dental SEO needs continuous investment, one important question remains: “Is it worth it?” To answer that question you need to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI). A patient that finds your practice through your website may never come back after the first treatment. On the other hand she/he may become a regular patient and stay with you for 20 years. Depending on the area your practice is located and the competition in your neighborhood, the average length of stay of a patient may vary from 3 to 10 years. Remember that dentistry is a residual income industry, so expectations of getting the money back right away are unreal. At the same time you should know that not investing in dental practice marketing is opportunity loss. You are paying for the fixed costs of the office anyway, so whether you get more patients or less, you will be paying those costs. That means your profit comes from the last patients and not first ones. The more patients, and the less empty chairs, the more profit will come in. And the last thing you should ask is the efficiency of Dental SEO. The question is “How many patients should I expect from Dental SEO?” The answer depends on what dental marketing company is conducting it.

Dental SEO is a complicated process that needs a long-term plan. The results also depend on your location but in almost any area, there are strategies that will bring a good number of patients on a monthly basis. That is the reason behind so much competition between dental clinics to rank better for various keywords. The ones that have done a proper Dental SEO know the outcome and they continue investing on it to block the others from being ranked higher. The main reason is, they know they can have a reliable stream of new patients through dental website marketing every month.

At DDS Strategy, Dental website design and development and dental website marketing via search engine optimization are our main services. We have conducted those services successfully over and over and that’s the reason we have so many clients that have stayed with us for a long time. They have seen that it pays off; hence they continue the investment. Contact us today for more information about dental website marketing and dental SEO services.

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