10 Dental Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Dental Practice

Need Dental Marketing Ideas?

Learning what you need to do to market your dental practice is easy - figuring out how to do that is much more difficult. 

Marketing is essential to any business’s success, and dental practices are no different. Each practice and market are unique, meaning that there is no one way to develop a marketing strategy. Each marketing mix comes from a combination of various tactics that will help your practice yield results.

At Wonderist, our focus is to help dental practices across the nation grow. Whether you’re a brand new practice or you’ve been helping patients smile for years - marketing matters! Not sure where to start? Here are a few dental marketing tips to help you develop your marketing plan:

Focus on Local SEO by Targeting Major Neighborhoods

Dental practices are local businesses, so targeting your immediate area is crucial. If you are located in a large market like San Francisco but are specifically in the Inner Richmond neighborhood, targeting Inner Richmond would give your website a better chance of ranking higher for potential patients within your immediate area. Local SEO for dental practices means targeting hyper-local areas for terms patients are searching and optimizing your website for those keywords. If people are searching for “Inner Richmond cosmetic dentist,” then you will want to make sure your cosmetic dentistry page is optimized for that keyword. 

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Using tools like Keywords Everywhere can help you determine which keywords your potential patients are searching for in your area and help you better optimize your website! Google search result pages are the new Phonebooks, so engaging in SEO best practices for your website is important for driving new leads!

Increase Your Practice’s Exposure by Getting Involved With a Local Non-Profit

Getting involved with your community is always a great way to get your name out there - no matter what industry you’re in. Get involved with your community by partnering with a local non-profit or providing dental care to underserved areas to help increase your local presence while helping your community! We love working with dentists who give back to their community because it provides a creative local marketing opportunity. Becoming an active participant within your community sets the groundwork for how potential patients will view you while giving you a chance to engage in word-of-mouth and local marketing. 

Utilizing your existing patient base to discover under-served nonprofits your area or using websites like Great Nonprofits to help you find an organization that aligns with your mission and values are both great ways to get started!

Answer FAQs On Your Blog to Bring in Website Traffic

Content marketing is the practice of bringing in visitors to your website through resources like blog posts, eBooks, and FAQ pages. Potential patients love searching questions related to their oral health. For instance, “why does my tooth hurt?” receives over 1,500 Google searches each month! Finding these commonly asked questions and addressing them through a blog post or compiling them on a FAQ page is a great way to gain visibility for these search terms and increase organic traffic. Content marketing allows websites to build relationships and trust with visitors and eventually turn them into patients. Taking common questions your hear from your patients and addressing them in a blog post is a great way to get started! Chances are, if your patients have these questions, other potential patients do as well!

Use Personalized Content to Increase Your Social Media Presence

With an estimated 3 billion social media users in 2019, creating a social media presence for your dental practice is crucial to your digital marketing efforts. Social media gives you the opportunity to reach out to a vast pool of potential patients as well as connect with your existing ones. Posting genuine content from you and your team encourages followers to engage with you!

Whether it’s a video of the doctor explaining a new patient special or doing the latest viral meme challenge, a picture of the Office Manager’s new puppy, or a team outing - personal, unique content performs well on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Potential patients love getting to know the person behind the scopes!

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Apps like Canva allow you to easily edit images, overlay text, add borders and add filters to make your photos stand out online!

Get a Well Designed, Responsive Website That Represents Your Brand

Your website is a reflection of your dental practice which is why having a beautiful website that performs quickly matters! There’s a good chance that a patient’s first interaction with your practice will be your website, so making sure that your website accurately represents you and is easy to navigate is crucial. Approximately 51% of the world uses their smartphones to access the internet, this means that your website needs to be formatted properly for smaller screens.

Lucky for you, Wonderist is a pro at mobile responsive dental websites! You can check out some of our work, here.

Already have a site? Using tools like Pingdom allows you to see if your current website is as up to speed as it needs to be.

Run a Google Ads Campaign for Emergency Dental Appointments

Pay per click (PPC) is the “sprint” portion of digital search marketing. Google Ads is one of the strongest pay-per-click platforms that allows you to specifically target certain keywords and appear at the top of the search engine results page. When a potential patient is searching for an emergency dentist, time is of the essence. Because of this, patients are more likely to click results at the top of the page. You’ll want to use location-targeted keywords in your Google Ads campaign to increase the relevance of your ad placement and only run your ads during business hours to make sure you’re efficiently using your ad budget. 

You can learn more about PPC campaigns, Google Ads and how to build a landing page that converts on sites like Instapage. 

Offer a New Patient Special to Get Patients in the Door...

...then WOW! them with your service to keep them coming back! The only way to grow your dental practice is to increase your new patient numbers. Offering a new patient special for uninsured patients is a great way to get new patients in your chair for a general cleaning and check-up and turn them into lifelong patients! 

Determine a price you’re comfortable with and promote it on your website, social media, direct mailers, or any other form of marketing your practice uses. Setting exclusions on the new patient special is also necessary, such as “not valid in cases of periodontal disease” or “uninsured patients only.” Determining a price that’s right for your practice and attractive to your demographic can help drastically increase new patient numbers for both new and established dental practices. 

Send Text Message Appointment Reminders to Your Patients

Most people screen phone calls from numbers they don’t have saved - that’s why text messages perform well for patient communication! Sending patients appointment reminders via text is a great way to maintain a relationship with your existing patient base and not disrupt their day with phone calls. Appointment reminders are beneficial to the patient because it reminds them of the appointment they scheduled 6 months ago, and to your practice because it decreases the risk of appointment no-shows.

Additionally, sending reminders to patients to schedule their appointment is an effective way to re-engage with them and make sure they are getting the dental care they need.

Companies like RevenueWell offer effective communication options that keep you connected with your patient base!

Offer 24/7 Online Appointment Scheduling

Nobody likes talking on the phone - especially to schedule a dentist appointment. Fortunately, there are numerous online appointment scheduling platforms out there for dentists to utilize! Online appointment scheduling offers a 24/7 opportunity for new and existing patients. Additionally, you may capture patients that other dental practices lose out on because of your convenient scheduling options!

Online scheduling platforms like LocalMed offer a streamlined approach to appointment scheduling for patients.

Send Direct Mailers to Your Target Market

Dental practices have a unique advantage over many businesses - they know their customer base is local. Because of the locally based clientele, sending out postcards, brochures and other direct mailers to a set area around the practice can prove beneficial! 

Direct mailers can be used to promote a variety of services, including:

• A new patient special to encourage new patients in the area
• Discounts on cosmetic services to target higher-income patients
• Your in-house membership plan to attract uninsured patients
• Information about you and your practice, especially if you are new to the area
  

Snail mail is not dead! Doing research on the demographics around your practice can help determine which direct mail strategy is right for you.

Marketing for Your Dental Practice With Wonderist Agency

These are just a few of your marketing options for your dental practice, but they’ve been proven to work! 

While marketing your practice can seem overwhelming, the benefits are worth it! Using a combination of strategies that work best for your practice and offering something unique will help your practice grow and increase your new patient numbers.

Do you need a little help developing your marketing plan, website, or PPC campaign for your dental practice? Wonderist has the experience to help you! Contact us to set up a consultation to go over your digital marketing needs!