Past Tense

You’ve done it-you’ve created a truly brilliant website that contains all the pertinent information about the dental services you offer along with contact information so new patients know where to find your practice. You’ve even added a convenient map that will allow people to drive straight to your office with ease. So why aren’t new patients flowing in to your office at a good enough rate to ensure that your days are full of appointments? Simply answered, it’s because people who are using the Internet to search for the services you offer never see your information. Merely having a great website does not generate traffic. You have to have a good marketing tool or else your website just won’t show up easily on Internet searches.

Your website may give you a new patient here or there but this is not getting the most out of your site. If you fail to choose a good marketing plan, your website will end up being only a way for existing patients to get your phone number or address. You have a well-designed website. Why not maximize the number of times it will be seen? If you do not, it will stagnate on the Internet and be overlooked by prospective patients who, instead see another competitively marketed dental website.

My time investigating dental marketing online has shown me the marketing plans dentists have used with great success, some with moderate success and a huge advertizing bill, and some that just do not work to optimize a dental website. I would like to share my findings about these marketing strategies; both the good and the ineffective, so that when you choose a marketing plan for your dental practice you can avoid the tools that will not be successful to your marketing campaign.

Some marketing tools, Yahoo! Answers for example, are good ways to generate a flow of traffic to your website. On the other hand, maintaining this type of advertizing takes a monstrous amount of your time, which is time taken away from your practice and your family. To implement this type of marketing, you will need to sign up to use the forum, which in this case is a place where people can go and post questions about dental services. You will also need to sign up to get an email alert when one of these questions is asked. This answer will need to be given fairly quickly. After that, the person whose question you have then answered might come into your practice for their dental needs. This marketing tool is not the most time saving way to advertize online because you will have to wait for a question to come in, take the time to answer it thoughtfully and then hope you’ve earned a new patient.

Another channel which some dentists have used with moderate success is to create a dental blog. With a dental blog, you can make entries regarding the different kinds of experiences you’ve had creating certain dental conditions. Clearly, you want to make these anonymous. However, this also has the major drawback of requiring a significant amount of time, and the problem is is that that time commitment is an ongoing, a longstanding process. That takes time away from your family, and it takes time away from being a dentist which is what you want to focus on when you’re at work. Some dentists go with the channel that doesn’t require a lot of time, and that’s to pay for quick advertising on something like Google AdWords or on the Yahoo! network. That is certainly something that doesn’t require a lot of time, outside of picking the key word, such as dentist or dental, that you want to target for people who are searching online. However, that is an extraordinarily costly way to advertise.

Something you want to accomplish in any Internet marketing program for your dental practice is something that’s low cost. If something winds up costing you $200.00 to $500.00 every month, that adds up to more than $2,000.00 to $5,000.00 a year. The other drawback with using click-through advertising is that you can have competitors click on your ads and wind up costing you significant amounts of money. Also, when people come and click on your ads, there’s no guarantee they’re going to wind up in your office. The actual conversion rate for click-through ads for many different services is less than one to two percent. Can you imagine paying $5.00 for a click-through, and then of those people that are clicking the actual cost of someone who walks through your door is more than $200.00? You barely break even on it.

There is a better time- and cost-effective way for a dental practice to advertize online. Some dentists have started asking the patients that are happy with their experiences to go to a third-party site like Yelp to post a review of their practice. This is extremely effective in getting good information in circulation on the Internet because when someone searches for a dentist they find favorable reviews about the dentist’s practice. This works well to bring in new patients. Although these dentists are getting good reviews posted from their patients, there is the problem that not every patient is pleased with their experience with the dentist even though the dentist thinks they are. This patient then will go to the site and post a questionable, or a negative review that is damaging to the dentist’s online reputation and does exactly the opposite of what the advertizing was supposed to do. Instead of finding purely favorable reviews during a search, a potential new patient could find something negative, and this is clearly not the goal.

As you well could guess, if someone is looking online for a new dentist and they find a negative review of your practice they will not be walking in your office door anytime soon. The perfect tool for this situation would be a marketing tool that will let you sort the good and the bad feedback, and then let you publish what you choose on the Internet to advertize your dental practice. It is very important to have this kind of control over what prospective patients are reading about your practice because even an “okay” review is not as favorable for you as a “great” review.

The absolute best way to harness this truly powerful dental marketing tool is to have your own site for the purpose of collecting the reviews of your dental practice; a site that is complete, displaying your logo, all of the contact information for your practice, a link to your main website, and tons of positive reviews to be easily found by the 80% of people who search using the Internet to find a good dentist. This will save you huge amounts of time because your patients will do all the content writing for your review site by posting both their positive and negative reviews for you to use as you see fit. You are bound to have at least a few negative reviews; but instead of publishing them, they can be used internally to address issues that will create a better experience for your patients. You will have lots of favorable review and you will be able to simply push a button to publish all of the great things your patients have to say about your practice right onto the Internet. This is truly the most cost effective, time saving way to market your dental practice online.