Tuesday Tip from Pride Institute: Is your online marketing presence enough? 5 tips for dentists
Having an online marketing strategy continues to be one of the most important ways to reach new patients and maintain relationships with existing patients. Here are five online marketing tips that can help make the rest of 2015 your practice’s most successful yet:
1. Update the practice website – If your website has not been updated during the past two years, it might be time to refresh. Work with a trusted web designer to discuss upgrades including responsive design, SEO, an on-site blog, and social media integration.
2. Get more online reviews – 72% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. If you don’t yet have many reviews on sites such as Yelp, Google, or Healthgrades, or if it’s been awhile since a patient left a review, set a goal to collect one to three patient reviews online each month.
3. Create a social media calendar – Setting up Facebook and Twitter pages for the dental practice won’t provide much benefit if your profiles aren’t updated regularly with interesting and timely information about the practice and dental team. Create a social media calendar so that updates don’t get pushed to the back burner. Brainstorm relevant posts ahead of time and designate a team member to use a tool such as Hootsuite to preschedule posts. This ensures your social media profiles feature fresh content on an ongoing basis.
4. Post videos – Creating informative videos about the practice helps prospective patients get to know you, and boosts SEO at the same time. Smartphones have made it easier than ever to shoot and upload quality videos to the practice website and social media profiles. Examples of video content include patient testimonials, a quick and friendly tour of the practice, a welcome message from the dentist, and answers to patient FAQs about procedures or aftercare instructions. Remember, online videos should always be 60 seconds or less!
5. Start a blog – Incorporating a blog into the practice website is a smart way to stay in touch with patients throughout the year and a strategic way to enhance your overall online presence. Just remember to keep the content interesting for your patients, and avoid posting anything that is overly technical or that only other dentists would understand.
Online marketing certainly isn’t a magic bullet for practice growth, but it is without a doubt a must-have element of a successful dental practice marketing strategy.
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Tuesday Tips from Pride Institute are provided weekly on their Facebook page as well as in this column in DentistryIQ. To ensure you don’t miss any of Pride Institute’s proven methods to take your practice to the next level, visit prideinstitute.com, and like them on Facebook.
