Marketing your dental practice can seem overwhelming at times. You know you need to generate a steady stream of leads to get new patients, but how?
Ultimately, you’ll generate the best leads when your marketing campaign is run by a professional marketing agency. With that in mind, here are 5 strategies that will help you get those leads.
- Hire a professional web developer
Hands down, the best marketing strategy you could employ for your dental group is to hire a professional website developer. Although many people market themselves as developers, many are not true developers and only know how to copy and paste content into drag-and-drop content editors.
For marketing purposes, your website needs to reflect the values of your practice and speak to your potential patients at the same time. To get this, you need a professional website developer with experience in the dental industry. For instance, website design for dental practices requires building websites that draw in new patients by making them feel at ease right away. This is a skill you can only find in a professional developer.
If you’re using a free website builder, or if you’ve thrown something together just to have a web presence, consider hiring a professional. Your patients will trust you more and you’ll see a jump in new leads.
- Utilize pay-per-click (PPC) ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are one of the most powerful marketing strategies you could ever use to generate new clients. When done correctly, you’ll get plenty of targeted traffic from PPC ads.
How do PPC ads work for dentists?
First, you’ll create ads for your practice and/or specific services you offer. For instance, maybe you’re offering free cleanings for new patients or discounts for children. You’ll craft a short ad to present the offer along with an image. Preferably, your ads should be created by a professional marketing agency.
Once your ads have been created, your ads will be placed in search engines and social media sites, targeting your ideal market and people who have recently expressed an interest in dental services. When users click on your ad, they’ll be taken to a predefined landing page on your website where they can learn more and/or redeem your offer.
This is where the rubber meets the road and you’ll want to have your landing pages designed by a professional. Clicks are great, but your landing pages need to convert.
- Click-to-call ads
In addition to PPC ads, you can also run click-to-call ads on Facebook and Google. With these ads, you’ll add an extension to your standard PPC ads that gives users the option to click a button and call you directly from their smartphone.
The faster you can get leads to call, the more likely you are to convert them into a new patient. This cuts through the time-consuming process of making a lead sift through your website to find your phone number and then manually place a call. If you want more leads, make it easy for your leads to contact you.
- Local search engine optimization (SEO)
Local search engine optimization is important for all businesses with a local presence in their community. Your new patients will mostly come from within your local area, so it’s important to optimize your website for local search.
With many search engines, especially Google, search results are personalized based on location and interests. For instance, Google takes a user’s location into account when providing search results and business listings. If your dental practice is local to the user, and your website is optimized, you have a better chance at coming up in that user’s search results.
In order to fully capitalize on local search in Google, you need a Google My Business listing. Business listings come up before organic search results, and when your business listing shows up for users, they’re more likely to call you before scrolling down to the rest of the search results.
- Appointment reminders
Some people are terrible at remembering their appointments without reminders. Other people need to be reminded when they’re due for a regular cleaning. Sending out appointment reminders to your existing patients will help you retain those patients for the long-term.
To send out appointment reminders, you’ll need to create an email list. If some of your patients don’t want to give out their email address, you can always have your secretary call them with a reminder.
Make lead generation your priority
If you haven’t already, prioritize generating leads for your practice. Work with a marketing agency to get leads on a regular basis and before long, you’ll see your practice grow.