5 Ways to Grow Your Dental Practice

Dentists are excellent at fixing a patient’s smile but may not be great at finding a patient in need. That said, marketing is a necessary evil for all kinds of businesses, especially those in the service industry such as dental clinics.

Whether you’ve just started your dental practice or want to grow and expand your clinic, this feature will help you understand and adopt the best online marketing for dentists.

5 Ways to Grow Your Dental Practice

1. Consider outsourcing marketing help

Digital marketing for dentists can be quite time-consuming. As a dental clinic, you should be focusing on your existing clients. Whether or not you have experience or time, getting outside help from a specialized marketing agency can be quite beneficial.

Good marketing agencies work with your needs and goals, implementing the right marketing strategy for your dental clinic that can help acquire new patients. With their experience and the necessary tools and software, these marketing agencies ensure more productive results for your marketing campaign, saving you time and stress in the long term.

Additionally, incorporating a toll-free number for your business complements these efforts by enhancing your marketing strategy. It provides an easy, no-cost way for patients to contact you and plays a critical role in tracking marketing efforts. With a toll-free number, you can measure the effectiveness of various campaigns by monitoring where your calls are coming from, allowing you to optimize your marketing spend and improve ROI.

2. Design a professional website

A website is one of your most important assets for digital marketing. It’s like the digital door to your dental practice. So, just like you give enough attention, time and effort to design your brick-and-mortar dental clinic, you also need to carefully design your professional website.

In general, you should aim for a modern, clean look for your website. It should be easy on the eyes and allows for simple navigation and accessibility. Furthermore, you want a website with a mobile-friendly and responsive design to ensure good search rankings and a positive user experience. Also, you want to add convenient features such as prescription renewal, an appointment system, and bill payment capabilities.

That said, unless you have enough experience how to design a website, consider outsourcing a web developer to create your dental clinic’s website, especially if you’re considering adding advanced features to make it more functional.

3. Focus on local SEO

Speaking of search rankings, even the best-designed website is useless if no one actually sees it. And this is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. When done properly, SEO ensures that your website will show up in searches.

That said, instead of general SEO, you should focus more on a specific category, local SEO. Almost similar to SEO, local SEO focuses more on targeting audiences in a specific location, which is critical for location-based businesses such as dental clinics. Say, for example, you have a dental clinic in Dallas, TX — you would obviously want to attract customers within that specific area and not those from California. And local SEO can help with that.

There are various things you need to do to improve your clinic’s local SEO. For one, you need to claim or create your Google My Business (GMB) listing and other sites such as Yelp or Bing. Also, you need to have consistent formatting on critical information such as business name, address, and phone number.

Furthermore, you should make sure that you optimize your website and digital content for localized keywords. For instance, you must add your city or state on a keyword like this: ‘best dental braces in New York.’

4. Set up content marketing

Content marketing is a tried-and-tested strategy for local businesses like dental clinics to grow their digital presence and attract more patients. This digital marketing strategy refers to providing high-quality and valuable content that helps establish authority in your practice, expanding your reach, and improving your SEO ranking.

There are several types of content you can use. You can do blogging and write useful and information-filled articles that can guide people about your general dental practices you’re your services. Also, you can include visuals such as infographics or photos in your blogs to make them more relevant and easier to understand.

Video is also a growing category of content marketing. You can make animated videos of common dental treatments and procedures or share a video tour of your dental clinic including your staff members.

Regardless of the type of content you use, you want to make sure that it has a clear focus and provides quality and helpful information.

5. Be social

Social media has become one of the major marketing platforms for all kinds of businesses including dental clinics. And there are several social platforms you can choose from to market your dental practice.

In general, most dental clinics first create a Facebook page. You can use your Facebook page to showcase your procedures and patient testimonials. And you can use TikTok to create witty short videos about your services and dental tips.

Lastly, you can set up a LinkedIn page, both your personal profile and the dental clinic’s profile. Then, use your platform to engage in professional and industry-related discussions.

The takeaway

In order to stay relevant and competitive in this modern business world, dental clinics need to adopt a well-thought-out online marketing strategy. Whether you’re starting from scratch or already have an online presence, following the above mentioned tips should help get started on increasing your patient volume and growing your dental practice.