2021 and beyond, businesses need to remain competitive, need to have a strong digital presence. Dental practices are no different. In fact, the need to have a good Digital Marketing Strategy that involves social media and search engine optimization is a must.
Importance of an Online Presence
To have a successful dental practice requires a good balance of traditional and digital marketing. The referral business will always be a major strategy to attract new patients, but patients now have become used to seeking information online before making decisions.
People in today’s world are on the internet reading reviews, treatment information and rating the services they use. Not having a digital presence might mean that you are not getting the patients you should.
“72% of online seekers said they looked online for health-related information, including Doctors and Dentists as the top searches.”
What Should a Dental Practice Do?
1. SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means getting your website to rank higher in searches, to appear on the first pages of Google, Bing, or Yahoo. SEO involves making backend technical changes to your websites and generating strong, relevant, and shareable content.
Some of these tactics include the following:
- On-site meta-descriptions
- Updating the website with content regularly through blog posts, video and more.
- A search-friendly URL link structure
- A mobile-optimized webpage
2. A Robust Social Media Plan
Ensure you have a robust social media plan before launching your dental practice social media. Create a plan for your social media content, have objectives, and decide which platforms best suit your practice’s goals. Not all social media platforms are suited for all dental practices.
Decide on your target audience, and accordingly, pick the online tactics that make the most sense.
3. Make Use Of Paid Advertising On Both Facebook & Instagram
Facebook & Instagram paid advertising are affordable tools for small to medium-sized businesses to advertise to particular groups of people and build an online presence in a relatively short period of time.
4. Put Together a Content Marketing Plan
A content marketing plan helps you define the tone, voice, frequency, and topics shared, curated and created on your online channels. Build your customer persona. In essence, it is your online brand guidelines.
5. Setup Google Analytics
One of the greatest advantages of online marketing is the amount of data that we as marketers can collect. Make sure to have Google Analytics on your website. Use all this data to understand which tactics are working best and adjust those that do not seem to be giving the best results.
