Get the Most out of Your Online Dental Marketing Plan

No matter what services your dental practice offers, you want to be easily found on the Internet. Having a creatively designed website alone may not be enough to support a regular flow of traffic, which will not generate many new patients for your practice. Whether you specialize in cosmetic dentistry, complete family dentistry or offer only services for kids, those who are looking for a good dentist need to see your information first.

Well the sad truth is that, if you don’t have an Internet marketing program for your dental practice, that your site will have minimal to no traffic. In fact, it will serve as nothing more than a reference for people who were already planning to visit you to look up your address and/or phone number so as to coordinate their visit. The time period when you could simply put up a dental web site and expect that to generate traffic is long gone.

There are two kinds of marketing programs for dentists-the effective kind that doesn’t cost much but rewards you with your goal of lots of new patients, and the other kind that costs lots of money and gives you limited to no results from your efforts. In-depth research of Internet marketing for dental practices has taught me the difference between the two, and I would like to tell you about both kinds, including the not-so-effective kind to save you the trouble of repeating the mistakes of others. First, the marketing plans that pay off but take incredible amounts of time to implement.

You may already be familiar with Yahoo! Answers, which is a forum designed specifically to answer the questions of the people who post there. As a member, you would have the opportunity to field questions concerning dental services via email. For a dentist, this is not an effective way to get the most out of your time marketing, because you will have to wait for the questions to come in and then wait again for a possible new patient from the contact at the forum.

Another moderately successful tactic some dentists are using is to keep up a dental blog. This is no time saver, because you will need to post new entries constantly to keep new information turning up on the Internet all the time. It takes large amounts of time to write about the dental services you’ve provided and these will need to be posted anonymously, as well. The blogs will need to be continuously written for a long time to achieve positive effects of this type of marketing.

To get away from these time commitments, some may elect to purchase advertizing with a site like Google Adwords, where all that needs done is picking keywords to drive searches your way. This way of advertizing works; although, it is extremely costly. 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.

Now that we’ve reviewed the methods that will not be to your advantage, let’s talk about the best effective way to market your dental practice online. Many dentists ask their satisfied patients to write an online review of their experience at their dental practice. These reviews become a great tool when posted on a third-party site such as Citisearch. Prospective patients who are looking for a new dentist in your community will easily see the reviews of your practice online because when someone uses a search such as Google, that search engine will index available information on the Internet and pull up your reviews.

This will translate into new patients for your practice-unless one of the reviews was posted by a patient who is frustrated by his experience with your practice. Search engines index whatever information is available, be it a stellar review or a really bad one. The obvious best scenario here would be to have only favorable information available for the search engines to pull from. If a search turns up information on a third party site like Citisearch the dentist has no control over what reviews have been posted there, nor does that dentist have a way of collecting the reviews himself. This makes the dentist powerless to control his online reputation.

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.

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