Using a Google My Business (GMB) profile is one of the most effective ways to gain exposure for your dental practice and improve your SEO rankings. Google My Business is a free marketing tool for local businesses. It is a great tool to capture the attention of potential patients as they are actively using Google search and maps to find dentists. While most commonly known for giving businesses visibility on Google maps and sharing customer reviews, your Google My Business profile has more to offer.

One of the most useful features: Google My Business Posts.

Google My Business posts allow you to share information about your business, services, goods, events, and offers. Located below your knowledge panel on your GMB profile, these posts offer room for detailed information about your business and reach a broad audience.

Google My Business posts can help you rank for local search results

What is a Google My Business Post?

A Google My Business post is a type of social media update that can be published on your Google My Business profile.

Google My Business posts allow you to connect with your audience when they’re online, including the business hours you’re open, details about your events, special offers, and more.

When optimized, your Google My Business profile shows up in search and maps. Regularly creating quality Google My Business posts helps with your rankings on Google.

Posts can be used to tell patients about:

• Events 
• Offers and specials
• Announcements

Here are a few tips and best practices to help you write an effective Google My Business post that drives results.

5 steps to creating a great Google My Business Post

Pick your post type

Google My Business provides several different post types to use.

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish and the message you want to share, selecting the right type of posts on Google My Business can make your content more effective.

Offer Posts

An offer post is perfect for promoting a limited-time deal at your dental office. You can include a headline, description, and start and end date. These posts are only shown during the time your offer is available.

Update Posts

When you have news about your practice, like new products and services, you can use this type of post. This is a great way to keep patients informed about the latest updates to your dental practice.

Event Posts

Unlike update posts, event posts are for when you have a special event for your office. These posts can include a date range or times of day and will stay live during that range.

Product Posts

When you want to feature physical products for sale, this is the post type to use. You can include details like product name, description, price, and a call to action.

Choosing the right photos and videos

Photos and videos are a great way to make your posts more compelling. When you create a GMB post, always include a photo or video. The posts you create need to attract engagement, and photos, videos, and clear calls to action are the foundations of a great post.

The photo or video you upload with your new Google My Business posts should be authentic to your practice. Any image you use should be visually appealing, engaging, and represent your business well. If possible, avoid having text over your photos, particularly as images get cropped differently for desktop and mobile.

Picking a keyword-driven title

Keep your post title concise and include a keyword you want to target when you write a post. If you’re not sure what keywords your audience would use to find your business, check out Google Keyword Planner.

Any post on Google My Business can potentially influence your SEO ranking factors, so it’s smart to create clear, search engine-friendly titles.

Choosing the right Call to Action (CTA)

Always include a call to action button when posting. The action button you choose will vary depending on the type of post you create. Here are some of the current options:

• Book
• Order online
• Buy
• Learn more
• Sign Up
• Call Now

Using the right action button ensures that potential patients click through to your website. Use a link that relates to your GMB post. The more specific a landing page you can use, the better. For example, you could use the button “Learn more” and send users to a landing page specific to the event when promoting events.

Consider desktop & mobile devices

Your Google My Business Posts will look different on a mobile device than they do on your computer.

While your post can include upwards of 1,500 characters, it’s often recommended to keep them below 500. The entire content of a post is visible on desktop devices; however, the text is truncated on mobile devices. As a result, you want to keep the most important information at the start of your post, so it doesn’t get cut off on the mobile view.

Keep in mind that the hashtags you use on social media won’t be relevant on Google My Business posts. They don’t impact your SEO or search rankings, so it’s best to omit them.

Don’t get rejected

To avoid your GMB posts being rejected, follow Google’s guidelines for GMB Posts. For starters, don’t include your email address or your phone number. Those are all listed in your Google My Business listing. When you create a post, the CTA button will link to your website, so there is no need to include your URL in the post. Steer clear of using all caps, too.

Some words may also be deemed offensive. Use your best judgment, and don’t post anything disparaging about your local competition.

Lastly, don’t use stock photography. Google My Business posts are meant to highlight your local business. Use photos of your team, happy customers, or even an image of yourself! Customers love getting to know the owner of a business, and this is a great tool to do this, especially with video.

Added benefits

Your business profile has a variety of features, including a Q&A section. Google’s machine learning can try to use the content from your posts to answer questions in your GMB Knowledge Panel.

Posts you create on your GMB listing also help potential patients see that you’re an active and engaged company. Alongside positive reviews, when people utilize Google search and maps to find services like yours, your posts on Google My Business will help you stand out from the competition. Having such amazing visibility in both Google Search and Google Maps is a huge win for dental practice owners like you. This free marketing tool is incredible for businesses looking to improve their SEO rankings in search.

Contact our team if you’re not sure how to create a post or what to post about. We have extensive experience optimizing Google My Business accounts and can develop a great strategy for consistent, traffic-driving posts.

Marketing strategies for your orthodontic practice must change as you move from thinking like a single-doctor practice to a multi-doctor office. The nature of the patient population, referral base, and expectations as well as the duties of key employees all shift as the number of providers increases. As an orthodontist thinking about growing your practice, here are five strategies you can use to transform your current marketing efforts into a successful strategy for growth.

1. Set up Marketing Automation Systems

Marketing automation is critical because it allows your practice to scale effectively without requiring an army of employees dedicated to managing marketing campaigns. Marketing automation allows you to manage multiple customer touchpoints, including email, text messages, and social media posts.

2. Keep Your Brand Consistent across Channels

The key to scaling your marketing efforts is to build a system that allows you to manage all of your touchpoints, including emails and social media posts. Your branding should be consistent across all channels so customers can easily identify when they are interacting with your business. Whether it’s your imagery, call to action, or tone of voice, consistency in your branding allows you to scale your reach with ease.

3. Invest in Online Reviews

Orthodontists who are thinking about growth need to treat their practice like a startup company by continually seeking new ways to lower cost-per-acquisition. Online reviews are a critical part of a successful marketing campaign because they’re directly influencing how patients find and choose their orthodontists. Make an investment in technology that allows you to collect, track, and respond to online reviews across multiple review sites. This is especially important for Google business pages which are often the most influential when it comes to online reviews.

4. Create an orthodontic blog on your practice’s website

Blogging is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. By sharing industry trends and advice, you’ll show visitors that your practice is cutting edge and up to date with the latest orthodontic innovations.

Video blogs (vlogs) are another powerful tool for expanding reach because they allow patients from your local area to easily access information about your practice, orthodontic care, and treatment options. Videos are particularly useful for showing cases of difficult orthodontic problems that you’ve corrected.

5. Invest in pay-per-click ads

Paid search is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive local traffic to your practice’s website. Whether you’re targeting people searching for orthodontists within a five or 50-mile radius, pay-per-click ads are an excellent way to expand reach and build awareness of your practice.

If you’re thinking about scaling your orthodontic practice, it’s critical that you have a strong marketing strategy in place. The 5 strategies we’ve outlined can help you set up an effective system for growth and success. If all of this sounds intimidating and you want to learn more, reach out today so our team can partner with you through the entire process from branding to content creation.

Listen to the audio-only version:

Watch the podcast here:

In this training, dental marketing expert, Chris Pistorius will talk about the importance of posting quality content to your Google My Business page. Chris will get into the details of what to and not do when it comes to writing content for your dental practice.

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!