Marketing is an aspect many small and medium-enterprises overlook. Yet in today’s highly digital environment, it’s essential to get your brand out there for potential clients.
You’ve probably seen marketing efforts done by businesses that deal with products. That doesn’t mean that service-centered businesses shouldn’t do the same. In fact, healthcare firms actually invest in marketing to connect with patients and expand their capacity to serve their needs.
Nowadays, digital marketing is the norm. Since the demand for healthcare, including oral care, never goes away, dentists ought to be among those who leverage digital marketing to reach clients.
If you’re new to the modern digital marketing scene, this article offers a comprehensive guide for building a strategy scaled to your needs and objectives.
Here are the steps you should take to get started on a digital marketing strategy for your dental clinic.
1. Gather a Team
Succeeding in digital marketing as a dentist may not be something you can achieve on your own. With all the other work you have to do, you’ll struggle to balance everything and still hit your marketing goals. Therefore, it’s best to hire a team for the job.
You can start by bringing together graphic and web designers, social media managers, and content creators. Each of them should have the tools and experience needed to help promote healthcare brands.
Alternatively, you can turn to providers of digital search marketing services to do the job. They can partner you with a dedicated team of professionals who’ll handle your marketing strategy for you. You’ll only have to pay one fee to access a variety of services. Depending on your budget, this may be the more feasible option over hiring individual professionals.
2. Understand Your Business/Practice
Different industries have unique expectations and ways to engage with clients; what works for one may not work for the other. In light of this, you should study the dentistry industry in your immediate area.
As you do this, your focus should be identifying how best to advertise your brand. What services do you offer differently from other already existing dental clinics? What qualities make you the dentist of choice for your dedicated clients? These serve as your unique identifiers and should be the focus of your marketing strategy.
3. Know Your Target Audience / Ideal Patients
Target audience refers to the people to whom you offer your dental services. Knowing them fully is important to understanding how to engage them with your marketing.
Start by learning about their interests, pain points, preferences, and routines. Having a grasp of what they usually do and what they expect from you will guide you toward opportunities to directly appeal to them.
Suppose you specialize in pediatric oral health. Is there a large number of families living in your community? How far do they have to go to visit their chosen dentist when you could offer the same quality of services (or even better) while being nearby? What kind of environment does your clinic have that makes it great for children, especially those who feel anxious about dentist appointments?
Take the answers you provide to these questions and translate them into points your target audience can understand. From there, you establish a point of reference for them to want to reach out to you. This paradigm is what you use to develop the ideal marketing strategy.
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4. Know Which Digital Marketing Method you Should Use
Digital marketing is broad, and many people have developed strategies to take advantage of specific aspects of this ever-growing sector.
The most common digital marketing methods are search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media management, influencer marketing and email marketing for dentistry practices. SEO is currently the most widely utilized. Local SEO for dentists involves increasing your website’s visibility through organic searches. You accomplish this by generating content that directly addresses your client’s needs while meeting standards set by the algorithms of search engines.
A more direct method service-centered enterprises like yours can use is content marketing. This hits on the same principles as SEO, though you’ll be focusing on providing personalized value to your clients by talking about insights related to oral care. You can do this through blogs, videos, case studies, graphics, and even memes.
There are more ways to approach digital marketing. For instance, social media marketing for dentists can do wonders. Sharing video content on TikTok, before and after on Instagram as well as running ads can bring patients in. The key is finding which one can help you achieve your goals while staying scaled to your current capabilities. You need to strike this balance if you want your strategy to keep going for as long as possible.
5. Study your Competitors (Other Dentists, Practices and Clinics)
Knowing what other dental clinics are doing can guide you in your marketing strategy. You should have a good grasp of their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to adequately respond to the challenge they pose to your brand.
But monitoring your competitors means more than just trying to get ahead of them. It’s also about discovering what works for your target audience and what doesn’t. Think of your competitors as potential versions of your own brand. By knowing the unique ways they succeed and fail, you get a vantage point from which you can set your short and long-term plans for marketing.
6. Write Down your Marketing Goals
Goals provide points of focus for your marketing strategy in the field of dentistry.
Are you running a new clinic and want to raise brand awareness? Do you have a new service you’re introducing to your practice? Or are you working in an established clinic wanting to reach out to younger clients?
Questions like these can provide a framework for setting your marketing objectives. You can use it to determine if you’re reaching milestones or falling behind the competition.
7. Create a Plan
At this stage, you have probably identified your ideal digital marketing strategy in relation to your goals. Now, you want to know how to implement it.
Start by identifying the resources you need for implementation. For instance, with social media marketing, you need social media accounts and tools for creating content, like cameras for videos and pictures.
Next, prepare a timeline for how you’ll implement the plan. Is it next week or next month? Are you going to adopt it all at once, or will you do it in phases? It’s advisable to implement your plan at a pace you can sustain. This should give you time and energy to identify any issues and address them early on, cutting the risk of making costly decisions to salvage your efforts further down the line.
8. Set a Digital Marketing Budget
When implementing any plan, it’s crucial to have resources and funding. You don’t want to blow all your business’s profits on the project and deal with financial strain, after all.
Setting a budget always comes in handy. Suppose you’ve chosen SEO as your main strategy. Depending on the method by which you procure an SEO specialist for your dental clinic, you need to have funds to pay for services and order specific projects.
Have a realistic view of how much you’ll spend. Take into account contingencies and unexpected events. Above all, you should regularly review your budgets to ensure you’re staying on track.
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9. Set Performance Standards
Performance standards are the measures you’ll use to determine the success of your adopted marketing plan.
When you’re setting them, it’s best to use quantitative metrics for easier analysis. For instance, you could aim to increase website traffic by 5% within four months of implementing SEO. Also, they should be realistic to avoid unnecessary pressure on yourself and your contracted team.
10. Monitor Constantly
A successful digital marketing strategy doesn’t end with you launching it. It’s a continuous process you must be ready to follow from start to finish. Regular evaluation is vital.
It’d help to have a project manager monitor your digital marketing efforts. They’ll ensure everything is going to plan. If there are issues, they’ll inform you, after which you’ll find amicable solutions to the problem. You get to work with these people if you decide to hire an agency.
As you try to resolve issues, make sure you don’t compromise on your performance standards. Instead, find new ways to achieve them. By altering them, you risk becoming complacent with your marketing strategy and losing sight of your original goals.
11. Stay Updated
Some methods, like social media and content marketing, require you to be proactive. It’s the only way to remain relevant and get your brand noticed amid changes in demands and shifts in trends. Always think of ways to offer value to your target audience. There’s no shortage of opportunities to reach out to them so long as you stay aware and open.
As mentioned before, don’t let this distract you from the goals you created for your brand. Digital marketing isn’t an end in itself; it’s the way through which you can direct people in need of your services closer to you.
Final Words About Digital Marketing For Dentists – A Comprehensive Guide
Implementing a digital marketing strategy can be challenging if you have no insight into how to do it. Hopefully, this article has laid the groundwork for creating and adopting the ideal digital marketing strategy for your dental practice.
From the guide, it’s clear that one basis of implementation is knowing. You need to know your business, target audience, competition, and short and long-term goals. The other lies in planning adequately, as you would with any other project, to ensure success.
Here’s to your enterprise’s success.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning dentist marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs, business owners and dentists use digital marketing strategy, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
