Digital Marketing Ideas to Reach Your Ideal Dental Patients

Modern consumers are always online. As a result, it is important for dental practice owners and marketers to keep up with new trends in user behaviors that will impact their marketing strategy.

The ever-changing platforms and channels of the digital world can be challenging for growing practices. From small businesses to growing businesses, keeping up with the digital marketing world can feel like a full-time job.

Here are some tips to sift through the plethora of web-based marketing solutions and create a streamlined and effective digital marketing strategy for your brand.

Marketing Strategy vs. Digital Marketing Strategy

In today’s high-tech world, the terms marketing strategy and digital marketing strategy may seem interchangeable. So let’s examine the differences between the two.

A marketing strategy is the overall game plan that helps businesses achieve their business goals through specific marketing or revenue-based initiatives. A digital marketing strategy utilizes select online marketing channels to attain specific digital goals.

A digital marketing campaign refers to the specific actions you take as a part of your digital strategy to achieve a particular outcome.

Understanding Your Audience Is Key

Who are you marketing to? To create a smart digital marketing strategy, you need in-depth knowledge of your ideal patient. The best digital marketing strategies arise from well-researched buyer personas that represent your ideal patients.

You can create buyer personas by researching and analyzing your company’s target audience.

Perform a Content Audit and Plan Your Owned Media Campaigns

Owned media is the concept at the core of digital marketing. The more owned media channels your practice has the larger your digital footprint. Any content that your company owns and controls is owned media, including:

• blog posts
• service descriptions
• social media posts

Evaluate your existing content regularly, and add fresh content to keep followers engaged and attract more website visitors.

Effective content creation ensures a strong online presence for your dental office. Even better, search-engine-optimized (SEO) content boosts your search and organic traffic.

Mobile-Friendly Content

Consumer usage of mobile devices is at an all-time high and continues to grow. Therefore, incorporating a mobile-friendly website into your marketing plan should be a significant consideration in a smart marketing campaign.

Ensure that your website loads quickly and is easy to use on a phone or tablet device. Today, Google boosts sites that perform well on mobile phones as most consumers today complete their local searches via their phones.

Digital Marketing 

As a dental business owner, you’ll want to focus on marketing strategies that provide the best value for your business and most relevance for your industry.

Start by creating a digital marketing budget for your campaign. You will need to research digital pricing to get a sense of what your type and size of business requires—research digital marketing costs to build a realistic budget for your practice.

Once you launch your campaign, take advantage of Google’s free resources such as Google Analytics or Google Ads to track and measure the results.

Search engine optimization is perhaps the most important digital marketing enterprise in use. SEO aims to direct the target audience for your website, generating more leads and a higher conversion rate. You can achieve this by using specific phrases and keywords that relate to your services.

An effective SEO strategy brings more traffic to your website from members of your target market. These are the users who are actively looking for your dental services. As a local business, it’s important to attract leads from your local area. SEO is great because, when done correctly, it’s targeted to your service areas.

Other Digital Marketing Strategies

Content marketing involves engaging and connecting with users by creating content that is relevant and informative:

• video content
• infographics
• blog posts
• and more

Guest posts, also known as guest blogging, are when you contribute a blog post to another person’s site to increase your exposure and authority, as well as to add links to your own website. This type of content should not be sales-related but should provide value to users as an informative free resource.

Well-executed, relevant content is one of the most effective online marketing strategies to increase sales, traffic, and conversion rates. In addition, an effective content marketing strategy should optimize your content for high rankings with search engines, increasing your prominence in Google search results.

Email marketing focuses on retaining existing patients and gaining new patients by building brand awareness and increasing sales via email. Email marketing is similar to content marketing in that the focus is on providing valuable information to subscribers. As a result, email marketing generates about 50% more sales than other digital marketing tactics.

Social media marketing is probably the most popular marketing strategy for dental practices since it’s easy to get started and fairly easy to maintain. Social media marketing campaigns can utilize multiple platforms based on the preferences of the audience.

Social media marketing may also employ online advertising platforms. For example, Facebook Ads is a paid advertising service where you can create ad campaigns with targeted goals and objectives. You write your copy in the voice of your business to help reach its intended audience. The most popular social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

You may have heard of “Social Media Stories,” which started on Facebook and have become so popular that they’ve extended to Instagram. Facebook Stories are images and videos that appear independent of your regular feed and disappear after 24 hours. The ephemeral format drives followers to engage with the story before it disappears from their feed.

You can utilize video marketing across multiple digital and social media channels. Its purpose is to market and promote your business and increase viewer engagement.

Lastly, influencer marketing is a relatively new type of word-of-mouth marketing by individuals with a large social following. Influencers have established a strong trust from their following and gain a reputation as experts within their niche.

Let Us Bring Your Marketing Ideas to Life

Our marketing firm is a full-service marketing agency focused on the dental industry.

We pride ourselves in building collaborative client relationships on mutual respect and trust. Our experience, knowledge, and expertise make us one of the most sought-after agencies for dentists nationwide.

Let us help you take your practice to the next level.  Give us a call or send us a message on our contact page for more information on our services. We look forward to hearing from you!