Dental marketing is a vast domain that covers a range of treatments offered by dental experts, i.e., dentists, orthodontists, endodontists, periodontists, prosthodontists, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, etc.
Firstly, most people aren’t aware of these specializations in dentistry, and hence, always look for specific dental services such as teeth whitening, root canal, or dental implants. This is why it becomes necessary to promote your marketing strategies on those lines.
Secondly, just like you, most dental experts around the world are incorporating dental implant practices in their services due to their surging demands and high returns. Consequently, the competition to improve search engine rankings and social presence for implant treatments has skyrocketed.
Thirdly, though a significant part of our population actively searches for implant dentistry services online, there are those who aren’t well informed about their benefits. Hence, they look for detailed information about implant treatments before looking for the right dental expert.
At Karishma Cosmetic, our advanced laser technologies for targeting a wide range of hair and skin types.
First, based on your skin and hair tone, our cosmetologist will calibrate the laser’s time and wavelength to target maximum hair follicles effectively. We use a handheld laser beam projector that can freely maneuver over all bending and folding skin surfaces.
Before starting a session, the target area will be rubbed with a numbing and cooling ointment to reduce any discomfort you might feel during the treatment.
When the device is activated, a laser beam is focused over the skin’s surface and generates pulsed heat around the hair follicles. Our high-end laser technology ensures that your skin is cooled before and after each heat pulse is fired.
As the hair follicles are darker than the skin, they absorb all the heat from the laser and get damaged without affecting the skin cells around them. This cellular-level damage detaches the hair from its roots and prevents further formation of new follicles.
The device is moved repeatedly over a region in periodic intervals to damage as many hair follicles as possible in a session, which ideally falls between 40% to 50%. As not all hair is in the Anagen phase simultaneously, multiple sessions with similar processes will be performed over a fixed period to achieve complete hair removal.
Let’s start with profiling. You can make a list of the TOP 10 patients that your services are best suited for. You want them or similar patients to call and schedule an appointment with you.
You will find that the dental implant treatments patients search for aren’t always similar. They may be looking for long-term cosmetic dentistry options or an emergency tooth replacement. And though you may offer all of these treatments under one roof with exceptional results, you cannot spread out your marketing plan to target all of these treatments at once. If you do so, you will spend a lot of time and money in achieving visibility for even one of those services and lose many prospects in the meantime.
So, how do you decide which services to promote and to what extent?
“If you focus on one thing and do it consistently over a while, you would see all results coming your way.”
Every time we pitch this question to our dental clients, most of them feel confused, while others find it discomforting. But the inevitable truth about dental implant marketing is that niching down is the best way to gain fast and long-lasting results.
Once we start working on your medical practices, we highly recommend choosing the top 3 treatments that you would like to get more traffic and leads for, and then we ask them to choose just one. If they niche down to dental implants, we go further deep to specify the exact types of dental implants to target.
You see, the tech-savvy patients of today are increasingly learning about the specific treatment options available for a general medical problem. In the case of dental implants, the patient personas greatly vary for single tooth implants, full-arch replacements, and denture repairs. Hence, marketing for each individual category to cater to their specific persona proves to be more efficient and profitable.
However, this doesn’t mean you cannot promote other treatments; niching down simply implies that investing more in specific treatments as a specialty can help build trust amongst the majority of your target audience and generate more leads in the long run.
Whether you are in general dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, or pediatric dentistry, choose one implant specialty and focus all your energy to thrive with it.
I have seen tons of websites making the same mistake almost recurrently. They say they specialize in cosmetic dentistry, but their website is festooned with irrelevant images like kids brushing their teeth or a man suffering from tooth pain at the top.
These images would work for general dentistry to pediatric specialty. But for cosmetic dentistry, they are not passing the right message to your audience.
A lesser-discussed fact about website design is the positioning of different essential elements. Studies had shown that your website visitor would make up an impression about your entire website only by viewing the ‘above-the-fold’ section, which is the top region of your website visible when a clicked webpage first loads.
If they don’t understand your website’s purpose right there, they will bounce off to a different website in less than 5 seconds.
Google algorithm also tends to consider the textual and graphical content in your above-the-fold section to judge its rank. Not just the top, the following titles, subtitles, videos, alt-text of your images (the title of the image), and passage content are analyzed in great depth to examine its relevance, authority, and credibility of your medical practices. The same goes for any end-user looking at a webpage on your site.
So how can you build a rock-solid foundation with your Medical website?
“A well-designed Healthcare website is key to your marketing success.”
1. Clinic and Team Photography :
I highly recommend a professional photoshoot every year or whenever you redesign your Medical website, as this brings more personality and authority to it. People would want to know about the professionals who would be attending to them before making a call to inquire. When they know enough about you and your staff, it instantly creates a connection, and they will want to see you in person soon.
2. Practice video stories :
Along with good clinic and team photography, this is one tactic that is an absolute game-changer. A practice video story can show your daily clinic’s routine, depicting how the typical patient interacts with you and your staff. And you can also talk about your values, ethics, or simply about what patient care means to you and how you implement it.
3. Call to Actions :
Your phone numbers, call-to-action (like book an appointment), and navigations are the minute details that are very critical for the success of your website performance. Add these elements at prominent spots on every webpage so that a viewer can reach out to you the moment they make their decision.
4. Highlight Speciality :
You must showcase your specialties and key patient-benefits on your banner images on the home page and all subsequent pages. Make patients realize why they should come to you for a dental implant, showcase dental implant patient testimonials, make it more convincing for them to choose your practices over the competition.
5. Optimize website for Voice search :
Another growth hack is to answer frequently asked questions or FAQs. Though there are several tools and platforms that can help you find such questions, the ‘Related searches’ section under the search results on Google SERPs is a google place to start. You can also find queries on forums like Quora, Reddit, and media forums related to dentistry.
Follow design consistency over all your content marketing sources, which include your:
You can ask for a “Brand Guideline” document from your logo designer. If they have not published it before, you can use this free “Brand Guideline Template” to build or redesign your logo. This template will guide you in understanding the following factors:
what color palette can you use in your logo and website designs?
How to highlight the fonts used In your branding, and how the logo looks in a negative space/dark space?
If you follow this and repeat a similar color and font over all your marketing materials with consistent messaging, your customer will easily identify you as a Brand on any digital channel or platform.
When creating content for your website, blog, and social media channel, you may persistently focus on educational questions, such as:
This is undoubtedly a good strategy, but it is equally important to engage your patients on a personal level. Can you think of 5 ideas that are outside of dentistry but are still relevant to your patient’s day-to-day activity? Well, here’s something to start with:
IDEA: Strike A Conversation: Give them a friendly feeling, e.g., Ask your patient whether they are a Cat or Dog person. If they have a pet, you can ask them to share a picture with you then post the photo on FB/Instagram tag your patient. Nothing gets better organic engagement than posting photos of pets over the internet.
IDEA: Post A Photo Daily: Make a habit of clicking a photo daily. It could be about a piece of good news your client just shared with you; it could be your own clinic’s ambiance or your own selfie with a good health quote. Though you are sharing something that’s not about dentistry, you are letting people know you are here and ready to serve.
IDEA: Post Top 10 Lists: It could be about the top 10 things to do in Metro Vancouver or a list of 10 reasons to go for a routine dental checkup. This way, you are promoting your clinic indirectly while adding value to your end consumer.
Facebook today is not just a sharing space; it’s an all-inclusive marketplace. Due to its country-sized population of more than 2.6 billion users, it is the most popular platform to promote medical services today. Facebook ads evidently generate the best ROI for every penny invested in your marketing funnel or system.
In fact, Facebook is one of the most powerful tools for dental marketing in 2021 and must be one of the main promo platforms in your marketing arsenal.
Here are some quick and effective Facebook marketing options you can try to promote your implant service in your local area:
Promote/Boost Post:
You can boost posts about a patient every day (with their consent), seasonal offers on your implant services, or spread awareness about modern diseases and their treatments with people who like your page and their friends and family.
Lead Generation Campaigns:
Whether you are running an offer or promoting your lead magnet content, Facebook can target a highly specified prospect group of a certain location, age, profession, interest, etc. as compared to Google and other social platforms. You would be surprised to know how low the COST PER LEAD(CPL) is for Facebook ads.
Video Engagement:
Celebrating a staff member’s birthday? Shoot it and put it up on your Facebook page. Recorded a patient’s testimonial on camera? Boost it via the ‘Video Views’ campaign. Videos are the name of the social game today, and promoting more of them on Facebook is sure to build your brand reputation and get you more direct patient leads.
And to form such strategies, you must follow these essential guidelines:
1) Start with a Healthy budget:
Unlike Facebook, Adwords can take up to a week to approve and optimize your ads before displaying them to your target audience. Some of your ads may get rejected for policy violation, content quality, or appropriateness as any medical advertisement is highly regulated.
Consequently, you will have to spend some budget on a few trial-and-error strategies, and starting with a small budget as a test will not generate expected results. You’ll need both hands on deck, one to manage an expendable budget and another to create curated implant marketing strategies.
2) Conquer Keywords Research:
I have audited tons of google ads accounts either with overflooded clicks and no conversions or no clicks at all. The common mistake here was an improper use of keywords when creating ads for a specific campaign.
It is essential to perform in-depth, service-based local keyword research before creating ads and landing pages to match your ad campaign.
PRO TIP: Avoid using a broad match or exact match keyword type.
3) Search Term Analysis:
Google also factors in the search intent of a user who fires a query with specific keywords. Hence, your ads and web pages need to be optimized to target not just the right keywords by also a basic intent. Consider the following examples:
Example 1—What is a dental implant: Here, the user simply seeks information about implant treatment and not for a dental clinic. Hence, you should optimize your webpages to rank for this query, but not your Ads, as the chances of conversion are non-existent.
Example 2—Dental implant cost in Vancouver: Here, the user seems interested in opting for implant treatment and looking for viable options. Now, if you can optimize your ads in the top 4 results of SERPs for this search term, it will surely lead all users to your appointment booking system and generate impeccable ROIs.
4) Track, Improve, & Repeat:
PPC specialists follow a persistent analysis strategy every day that allows them to track and shuffle Adwords budgets. Since you can’t afford to spend that amount of time, you can stick to tracking your campaigns, keywords, and content to discover different combinations of those factors that generate expected results.
Over time, you’ll find the right content-budget combo that offers the best ROI or CPL for your dental marketing campaigns.
5) Don’t Take Breaks:
As discussed earlier, Adwords takes around a week to approve and optimize healthcare ads to display, and frequently ending campaigns and setting new ones will not only reduce your ROI.
I often recommend all the medical practitioners to lower the Adwords budget once the campaign is optimized to the desired ROIs but never to stop it as it burns more money to stop and start a new ad campaign than continuing with a lower budget.
SEO for healthcare is all about targeting the exact treatments for precise keyword strings. But before we dive into the technical nuances of SEO, you must understand the end goal here.
What you want is to be visible to patients looking for treatments that you offer and treatments that generate more revenue. As discussed before, this is why we niche down to one or a few specialties to build our repertoire around.
Apart from Google Analytics, you can find a myriad of tools today that can help you research keywords that people use in terms of:
Based on these factors, you can narrow down your keyword list to be more curated to specific actions, such as for informational content or lead generation landing pages or the home page.
Well-defined keyword research can take your SEO results from good to great.
We have already covered other essential activities that catalyze your SEO results, i.e.
With every factor in place, all you have to do is;
Research – Iterate – Repeat
This should be a separate eBook altogether, but we will cover some critical factors to overtake our competitors not just in terms of online presence but also in offering above-satisfactory client service in your clinic.
Tip-1) Answer leads ASAP:
If you dig deeper, you will see that dental practices majorly focus on inpatient experience. But a crucial factor that most miss out on is the online queries from FB chat, website forms, emails, and even missed calls.
Online queries are a gold mine of potential leads and life-time clients if nurtured with genuine care. Either you or an assigned person must ensure that all online queries are answered promptly and honestly and try to get them to pay you a visit if necessary.
This one basic tactic can potentially improve your dental practice revenue by 200%!
On an avg, if you respond to a lead within an hour on the same day, the chance of converting that prospect to a patient is 300% higher.
Here, there are two essential steps of review management that you simply have to follow;
Step 1 – Accumulating More Reviews:
The more ratings and reviews you have, the more genuine your practices seem. And when we say reviews, we mean both online AND offline. Provide all your patients with social links and ask them to rate and review your services on Google and platforms like Practo. If they’re visiting you in person, ask them to leave a written review (with proper safety measures of course) which can later be converted into digital testimonials.
Step 2 – Analyzing & Displaying Positive Reviews:
Use online review analysis plugins that collect all positive reviews from different social accounts and create a single rating to display on your website and other accounts. The tool we use allows us to count in the handwritten reviews and creates a brief review list that is sure to influence any patient viewing your profiles.
3) Educate Your Leads Rather Than Imposing Your Services:
‘Content is King – But Context Is The Key To Its Kingdom!’
Two separate studies have shown that 80% of patients looking for healthcare services believe that a brand’s online content relevance is more important than their mentioned services.
What this means is that patients more often want to learn more about a treatment before actually opting for it. And the website that offers the most detailed and relevant information automatically dominates as an authority for that treatment or service.
Hence, make sure your website offers in-depth information, guidelines, tips, risks, and, most importantly, costs incurred by your dental implant treatments.
4) Offer Flexible Financing Options:
Some implant cases that are not covered by insurance companies can cost a fortune to the client. Knowing these high costs, most people would avoid getting those treatments or go for the cheapest options.
Hence, it is vital to understand the financial conditions and expectations of your local patients and offer flexible financing for treatments that would cost them above their expectations. You can find several insurance agencies that offer no-cost EMI packages for dental treatments today.
So tie-up with a good insurance service and make sure you display your insurance plans on your website and your clinic prominently.
5) Plan Your Schedule Such That You Never Miss An Appointment
One of the common reasons why many dental practitioners get bad reviews is appointment cancellation or postponing. If you don’t have an apt appointment management system in place, you’ll lose good clients to tardiness.
A first-come-first-serve system isn’t a viable option these days as nobody has the time to wait at a clinic for long hours. Also, overlapping multiple appointments can also cause a bad impression on the patients whose reviews could hamper your image online and offline.
Hire a front desk professional to digitally manage your appointments and daily schedule to ensure that patients get to visit you as early as possible.
Now that you know the prime strategies and tactics to attract patients to your dental implant practices, you can modify them and choose one or all of them to amp-up your healthcare digital marketing for your unique clinic. And needless to say, ethics come before profits, so remember that your content is going to impact a lot of lives, and you must responsibly promote your services without misleading your prospects in any way.
My team at Healthcare Marketing Agency has spent more than a decade working with healthcare professionals and analyzing the intricacies of targeting unique patients for distinct medical centers. Our goal is to guide the doctors of today to evolve with the digital era and make the best of healthcare marketing to grow their practices.
We are always ready and glad to share our exhaustive research with medical experts like you so you can get valuable insights into the various methods of improving your marketing tactics. So feel free to schedule a call with our team, and we’ll help you with personalized solutions to overcome your patient acquisition challenges.
Until then, stay safe and keep up your priceless work!
