DentistsDigital Marketing

Digital Marketing For Dentists – Making a Plan

By August 3, 2020 August 28th, 2020 No Comments
Marketing for Dentists


It’s probably NOT your favorite place to visit. It’s probably NOT a place that you pay attention to until you need a root canal or braces. Going to the dentist is something most people consider once or twice a year. If you have decent oral hygiene it probably isn’t too unpleasant of an experience either. But let me ask you this question? How did you come to find your current dentist in the first place? Google, Facebook, a close friend? Perhaps a combination of the two? 

Digital Marketing For Dentists

Depending on how you answered the above question, you might be realising that your dentist may  already be marketing to you. Do dentists have marketing teams? What? Yes. Every business needs to spend money on marketing if they want to be around in a few years. This ‘word of mouth’ marketing is a lot of nonsense in the 21st century. It’s called search engine & social media marketing. Why? Because we use digital media to share with our network of friends and family. All those viral videos, all those cute photos of kittens and puppies. The vast majority of people nowadays send each other links to websites and social media channels. Sooooooooo, if you expect people to refer you, you’ll have to have your act together when those opportunities come along. But what in the world do you share on social media as a Dentist? 

Industry Specific Content Help You to Leverage Your Relationships

Every single dentist is board certified and membered up to the eyeballs with associations and governing bodies. That means that dentists have a huge amount of content to share on their social media channels as part of a comprehensive marketing campaign. Industry  specific content helps you to leverage your relationships and adds credibility to your offering and message. If you share a post from the American Dental Association, you’ll most likely be adding value to your communities. Those safety messages, new techniques, discoveries in treatments etc, are all excellent things that can be shared to your communities as part of your content strategy. 

Using your website as a homebase your social media channels begin to develop as channels that feed into your website for various actions like watching videos, completing surveys, reading blogs and of course booking appointments. Many small businesses will love some of the functionality that Facebook and other channels provide ‘in-house’ . Your website is where you want to drive that traffic. There are many horror stories of companies and businesses losing their access to social media channels. It impacts on their ability to do business but it leaves them open to being too reliant on Facebook. Over time, your content and services should drive people to your website where you have more control over the data and can now communicate with most of those visitors for free (another blog link back to POE). 

Building a Sales Funnel of New Clients 

Outside of infomercials from your product providers, dentist’s have to really think outside the box with what to post and when to post it. This blog isn’t really about what to post but rather why it’s important. Think about adding value at a minimum. Don’t post to sell. Post to inform (not always about you). Post to educate and engage with your customers. Storytelling is a very powerful tool. People always buy from people and when you can humanise your business your customers will want to engage. Just a thought. 

Back to that sales funnel…

It’s called churn,right? One out, one in. Some months it’s in your favor, some months it’s not. After you have identified the churn rate in your business, you can start to think about how you can fill a sales funnel of awareness, engagement and conversion content. Here is a great example that any dentist could set up tomorrow for $5 a day. 

New Clients 

Target Location (10 miles of practice)

Audience (families who just moved into your area within 30 days) yes, you can do this

Content (evergreen awareness video view, blog post)

Call to Action (subscribe, book appointments, etc)

After a month look at the data of your $150 investment. Track the call to action against your website functionalities of your online booking providers.

Then consider the average lifetime value of that new client and the costs needed to convert. 

Some clients will bite at the awareness content. Others will visit your website (make sure it was updated recently) for further consideration. If they don’t convert on your website, you can always follow them around the internet with engagement content. It may take another 2 or three at bats before you can get a new client. No matter the figures, comparing them against your traditional methods will allow you to see if social media is working for you.

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