If you are busy running your dental practice and treating patients, it may be low on your list of priorities, keeping your website up to date and creating social media content. However, for your practice to reach its full potential, you need a dental marketing team to undertake this work for you, as word of mouth alone won’t get you the patient numbers you deserve. A search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing strategy will ensure that you feature highly, if not at the top, of a search engine results page and this is where a team should be aiming for you and your practice to be.
A marketing strategy
While you may enjoy a tinker on a website you’ve created on a template, and you may enjoy the foray into the world of social media, it’s probably worth accepting now that unless you have a marketing degree that this isn’t your field, in the same way that people who brush their teeth are not all dentists. To become successful in your social media and internet presence takes a lot of time and effort, which you probably don’t have if you are also treating patients. This is why it’s important to seek a company that understands dentistry and can advertise your practice in a compliant way.
A marketing company can make bespoke websites that contain keywords that are searched for on Google. They do this by monitoring the popular keywords that are searched for and including them in the copy that is on the website. They also create social media and blog content to further boost the practice’s website’s position on a results page. This is search engine optimisation.
However, if your website isn’t user-friendly, it won’t matter how many times people click on it, if they spend less than a minute on it. If searches don’t turn into patients walking through your doors, you aren’t going to increase your business. This is why a strategy for dental marketing is really important.
7Ps
Some marketing companies have a 7P strategy, whereby they tailor your website to your practice under the 7Ps: price, profile, people, premises, promises, proof, and products. In doing so, they develop tailor-made content that is relevant to you and your potential patients, offering all the information they should need to know in an easily accessible way. This strategy has been tried and tested and for clients who choose to go with this strategy, they should see the results in increased patients at their practices. Find a marketing company offering this service, and you should get patients staying on your website long enough to choose to come and see you.
Take the next step
If you are feeling overwhelmed at the thought of keeping up with marketing your own business, it’s time to take a calculated risk and invest in the support of a marketing team. In doing so, you should see an increase in patients coming to see you and increasing your revenue. If you think you are comfortable with the number of patients you already have and that word of mouth is good enough, it might be time to recognise that people move on, and other practices can open, so protect yourself and your business by promoting yourself a little more to ensure you keep the business you started. SEO marketing matters and so do you.