Dental marketing strategies are often noticed by the right people to help in their practice. Here are 5 of the most common dental categories used in dental marketing plans.
1. Traditional Dental Advertising Strategies
These strategies are advertisements in the newspapers, phone books, radio shows, and television that have been used for decades for they are comfortable and familiar traditional advertising strategies. They are easily used in front like when you turn on the TV or radio and read on newspapers, as well as seen in the phone book, or contain as ads in a direct-mail postcard.
First, this type is more expensive to produce, considering your time and money. For instance, television or radio commercials need weeks or even months of preparation to include: casting, editing, planning, recording, and scripting. The disadvantages are also the same for design, direct mail, distribution, newspaper ads, phone book ads, planning, and research. You can lose money in the process and it will take weeks or even months before knowing if you have made a single dollar profit of your campaign.
Second is the inflexibility of all traditional dental advertising strategies. If your television ad is not effective, you can add the number of times you present it; and time of day or day of the week and the program where it is shown. What you cannot change is the footage for it is already on the record unless you spend more time and waste money reediting or re-recording it. Even in readjusting offer made on direct mail campaign, you need to spend to start over.
The third is the inefficiency of traditional dental advertising strategies for aside from being expensive, they are also inflexible. Your ability to hit the right audience when using traditional ads is limited because of the audience for the newspapers, phonebooks. radio, TV and other publications are far distributed far and wide. Even if you will pay to reach a vast majority of people with common interests, they may already have their own dentist providers.
2. Local Networking Strategies for Dentists
Some strategies that your Dental practice can implement include charitable hosting drives, networking events, and organizing the participation of a group in a local race or another event.
These events offer bigger advantages for you to have the option to choose local area events where people gather and watch events as a fun activity. Even if you do not attract a crowd for the event itself, you have the opportunity to build stronger bonds with your team or other local owners of the business.
You and your team might wear uniform T-shirts to display your brand and get noticed in some useful team activity strategies during a food drive or a road race. Meanwhile, you can spend your free time to go around and collect email addresses from the crowd so if they become potential clients, you can easily follow up with a newsletter or for a Facebook ad campaign. Exchanging business cards with local business owners will be a good practice to help each other grow connections.
Local networking is better than traditional advertising where you spend more time participating in fun activities as team-building for networking. Additionally, your in-person event will be much stronger than what you can make through a television, radio, or print ad.
3. Using Sponsorships to Grow Your Dental Practice
Although similar to traditional advertising, in sponsorship, you have a wider audience for your promotion as sponsoring have more important advantages compared to traditional advertising that can make it much more effective.
First, sponsorships don’t require significant production or preparation. When an event is sponsored, you usually list a sponsor on an event or local sports organization’s website with accompanying printed materials. There will even be offers for you to speak or expose your physical presence at the organization’s events.
Second, through sponsorships, you can help your website get more traffic. For instance: if a popular event is included in the link of your website, people will click your site for the event’s web page. In addition, even if the link is not directly in your website, it enables your site to appear on more search engine results for Google and other search engines determine which websites are most relevant sites to link with.
Third, by sponsorships, you can make a meaningful impact in your community as an opportunity in local networking. You can attract pediatric patients, sponsors for charitable events and others to focus on empowering children and their family that could be a great way to invite people who are influential in your community.
Using strategic sponsorships, you have the opportunity to support your favorite charity while at the same time, you are positioning you and your practice in front of the people that matter.
4. Using Sponsorships to Grow Your Dental Practice
To help the business grow, joint ventures are always one of the best options. An easy way to do this is to create strategic alliances and hosting beneficiary programs.
Strategy alliance
With a strategic alliance, you, the people and other local businesses you served will be able to promote each other’s businesses. Most local businesses opt for these types of mutually beneficial relationships with trusted partners for it makes the task of finding and helping customers much easier.
With another business, you can agree to prepare cards and flyers for each other’s business or provide special promotions for each other’s customers or patients. For instance, my practice partnered is a local bridal shop and they can offer brides deals on teeth whitening. This is a great and very successful alliance!
Host a beneficiary program
This is similar to strategic alliances; however, the offer is not directed to clients but to the employees of your partner. For example, when I partner with a local bank or investment firms, associations, and even bakeries. I offer their employees a special promotion that benefits their teeth. This is certainly a great win-win situation and likely to get new patients from the employees of my partner.
The best aspect of joint ventures is that no cost is involved or time wasted in making the promotion. All you have to do is decide what you want to offer and reach out to a local business presenting your mutually beneficial opportunity. Begin this relationship with the business you or a team member has already a link by sending emails or flyers to their employees. Offer in an email a service that they and their family need.
Every dentist must have a strategic alliance or a live beneficiary program to host this week. This can be done easily.
5. Using Dental Internet Marketing to Grow Your Dental Practice
The strategy of using the internet to market your practice is called Dental internet marketing. It is a good way of replacing traditional advertising activities such as television, radio, and phone-book ads.
In other ways, internet marketing helps to take some offline activities online, such as participating in an online networking group like my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group, where I am with thousands of dentists helping each other to build better practices. Although it cannot replace the deep impact of person to person connectivity, the internet goes a long way in connecting people and even easier by removing most of the impediments that prevent people from linking with each other personally as physical distance, expense, and even travel time.
Ever since I discovered the power of Facebook for dentists, I focused my practice virtually using Facebook to regularly attract patients. This is also the focus of my team and thousands of other dentists with us.
Dental Internet Marketing
Dental internet marketing uses the internet to attract people to your practice. A common example in dental internet marketing technique includes search engine marketing and optimization, or SEO for dentists. This uses email marketing for dentists, online funnel marketing for dentists and social media marketing for dentists. Although the technical terms at first might seem intimidating but in reality, each of these things is just another way to position your dental practice in front of potential clients to attract them to patronize your practice.
Cost, flexibility, and speed are the main benefits of dental internet marketing. Get started with any of the common dental internet marketing techniques in a matter of minutes without having to invest thousands of dollars and to wait months or longer to see any benefit.
Social Media Marketing for Dentists
There are many forms of Social Media Marketing to fit your marketing budget. For example, anyone in dental practice can create a free Facebook page. After setting up your Facebook page dental practice, you can begin posting for free right away. Your FB page must be interesting with text, images, and video posts that you want to share with people so they will know why your dental services are not stereotyped but different from the rest.
In fact, your Facebook page can begin before you open your practice doors. One of my team members in dental-marketing started posting about her story and an interesting vision for her practice while building her office. This earned her hundreds of leads plus over fifty appointments scheduled before she even opened!
I love Facebook but there are other social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest that will help you build a profile and share content all for free!
Facebook is always my favorite social media site for dentists because it creates powerful ads platform. They are so powerful because of their control, cost, and speed over every part of your ad campaign, unlike traditional ads.
Facebook allows you to look and go over your content while with a few clicks it can adjust nearly every aspect of your ad campaign. You have the option to run multiple versions of the same ad that is called split testing where you change one part of an ad and leave the same with others to find which version works best. For example, you can email the same offers to the same group of people but use four different images, and later on, Facebook will show you which image performs better. When you discover the best version, you can delete the worst-performing ads with just one click. You could utilize the same image and target audience, but change the offer to see which offers work the best. You have endless possibilities and you do not need to change. With traditional advertising, the new version could require weeks or months and cost thousands of dollars to test.
In a matter of seconds with no cost, Facebook can do everything for you while you have lots of control over your target audience. This helps you to target only people who are eager to take you up on your offer. For example, you can send your ads to new additional patients or you can also use your patient list to exclude current patients from new-patient promotions to avoid upsetting current patients by those offers.
Finally, another reason Facebook ads are so great is because of their cost or how they charge you. Not only are their costs traditionally much lower than other platforms, but you can choose which action you want your ad to encourage, such as link clicks or look at videos for charges are paid when that see the result.
With all these options, Facebook is really the best and most flexible place to market your dental practice, starting from its free Facebook pages to its flexible, sophisticated ads platform available.
Funnel Marketing for Dentists
To shorten the time and effort necessary to turn strangers into patients, online funnels are a powerful way to do it. Just like in Facebook, I developed core marketing activity in my dental practice as well as an activity for my team and me. I have assisted other dentists in their practice. Because they are so powerful, I would recommend that every dental office maintain an online marketing funnel.
Online funnels are a great help to automate many of the steps every person goes through before becoming a patient. The first step, they begin to know you in some ways through a personal connection or marketing campaign. The second step, they develop an interest in something you have to offer. The third step, they made the decision to engage your service by visiting your site and learning more about you. Finally, they make an appointment for treatment.
If done manually in person or on the phone, this task is time-consuming and an expensive process. With the use of funnels, however, the process can be automated through a series of web pages that walks people through the pretreatment process.
There are many reasons to build funnels: to promote a specific high-value procedure, to build an email list of people to contact if you need to fill last-minute cancellations and no matter what your goal is, you can design an automated funnel to help you lower the time and money you need to spend accomplishing your goal.
Email Marketing for Dentists
A simple and powerful for dentists is email marketing. Using a newsletter to communicate with your patients is the simplest form of email marketing. Sharing news, events, reminders, and last-minute appointment opportunities with people will help you stay on top of their mind, strengthen relationships with patients, and communicate promotions to people who already know, like, and trust you.
In addition to communicating with your patients and making offers that are best presented to existing patients, your email list can help you improve Facebook advertising results. To accomplish this task, you need to upload to the FB’s ad manager your email list for Facebook to create a custom advertising audience consisting of people on your email list who have Facebook accounts.
This is Facebook’s powerful audience for three reasons. First, people are more receptive to ads on Facebook than they would be if you send an email ad to them. Second, not all emails are opened so if you only make your offers in an email, it’s likely that much less than half of your list will see it. Lastly, in addition to your custom audience email subscribers, Facebook can create a second audience of people that make good prospects as they have things in common with your email subscribers. In Facebook, they are called “lookalike” audience.
As a final activity, your email can be used to act as an online marketing funnel for offers not suitable to be delivered through a series of web pages. For example, a teeth whitening funnel would consist of a Facebook ad to a webpage that promises people who enter their email a coupon. The printable coupon is found on a second webpage after they enter their email. No sequence to the long email is necessary to this type of funnel, a long email sequence is not necessary.
Prospects need to be prequalified and have to answer several questions that are the higher-priced procedure. Watch for best results after a series of web pages delivered minutes apart. If your funnel is designed to put people into an automated email sequence, your results will be better when you build people’s trust after a number of days or even weeks as you answer questions, share testimonials, and showing that you have a quality and trustworthy practice. Include in this process a website of your Facebook and promise to send information by email and a corresponding sequence of five emails sent to people over a number of days or weeks.
For a dentist and other reasons, Email marketing makes a powerful tool. Use it regularly to start an email to market your practice. This allows you to communicate regularly with your patients, making your Facebook ads more effective, and be able to deliver automated funnel sequences that is a simple and great way to start!