With over 200,000 dentists in the US, how to market a dental practice that truly commands the attention of your ideal patients depends entirely on how seriously you take your inbound marketing.
Marketing and building up a steady stream of new clients is tough for any business, but especially in the medical field which has various specialist niches and sub-niches. Without a constant stream of qualified new patients every single month, your medical practice will struggle to be profitable or sustainable.
If you’re not experiencing the volume of new patients that you can serve, don’t worry— there are definitive action-steps that you can invest in to improve your monthly patient acquisition and conversions.
What is Dental Inbound Marketing?
Dental inbound marketing is a set of actions you can execute upon around a proven business framework in order to attract minimum 15+ new patients to your dental business every month using your dental website.
As opposed to traditional outbound marketing strategies (like billboards, television, radio and print ads), inbound marketing is focused on harnessing the power of digital tools to attract your ideal prospects who are actively searching for you in Google for your dental services and then converting them as paying new patients.
At the heart of dental inbound marketing is a data-driven, content-rich dental website that is designed for speed, aesthetics, analytics and conversions. In short, dental inbound marketing is you realizing the true potential of your dental website being your number one sales employee who will work 24 / 7 for you to attract your ideal new patients every single month, qualify them and then get them to schedule appointments with you.
How To Market A Dental Practice Using Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is about creating useful content for people to find. Unlike outbound marketing, which bombards us with messaging we didn’t ask for, such as commercials, inbound marketing is about putting content out there for people who are already looking for it.
In the dental field, many people are searching for dentists in their local area. What will make them select your practice over another?
Clients are looking for professional, updated websites that provide answers to all of their questions. Blog posts, your medical website design and social media presence, and lots of positive reviews can all help with this.
Without inbound marketing, dentists may not attract enough new customers to keep the business going.
Inbound Marketing Strategies for Dentists
If you’re wondering how to grow a dental practice, then you’ll need to understand inbound marketing as part of your business plan for your new business.
If you’re new to the field, or just need help in growing your business, looking for specialized medical marketing services who can help you attract more patients.
Some of the top dental marketing strategies for dentists can be found below.
Well-Designed Dental Practice Websites
Every dentist needs a professional website to attract and convert potential new patients. You should purchase your domain name in alignment with your dental practice brand name, making it easy for your patients to remember and find you. Google also favours brands. If you have a keyword-rich domain name that is also not your brand name, it will hurt your digital presence and result in algorithmic penalties.
Select a website theme that is clean, easy to navigate, and well-organized. There are also a few sections that should be on every dental website.
Include an ‘About Us’ page, so patients can learn more about your staff. You can include photos, qualifications, and anything else interesting about each dentist.
You’ll also want to include testimonials from past clients, your opening hours and contact details, and as much information as you can about your services and what they include.
A quality, SEO-focused website can bring in over 20+ new patients a month, increasing the revenue and value of your dental practice business. While researching dental practices, your ideal patients will always check if your dental practice has a website— and if it’s good enough.
Mastering Dental SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a series of practices that will improve your website’s search ranking in Google. We are at a point when Google has made SEO extremely challenging and unless you really know what you are doing, you will never get results.
Dental practices can do well by focusing on local SEO. When someone searches for ‘dental bonding’, for example, you want your ideal patients in your geo-local city to find you first. Check below how we helped Dr. Kate Brayman in NYC own her prime digital real estate in Google.
Localized search terms are incredibly competitive to rank for, but they are also more valuable to your business. People all over the world might be searching for ‘best dentist’ as a keyword, but if they aren’t local to your area, it won’t help your business at all.
Content Marketing for Dentists
Helpful content marketing can be a fantastic tool to convert visitors to your website into clients.
Content marketing means creating valuable information to help clients on your website. This could be a series of informative blog posts, a FAQ page, or a free e-book to help patients learn more about dentistry.
If your content can inform and educate readers, satisfying reader intent, it can rank higher on Google, which means more traffic to your site. Hopefully, they will stick around, be impressed by your well-written content, and decide to visit you for their dental needs.
Online Reputation Management for Dentists
We search for reviews for almost any purchase we make these days. Shops, restaurants, hotels— and dental visits are no exception.
Testimonials from previous patients provide reassurance to new clients that the dental practice is of a high standard, caring, friendly, and skilled.
In the medical practice, reputation is everything, so find a place on your website or social media where you can share reviews.
If by any chance you do receive a negative review, try to address it as politely as you can, find out what went wrong, and address the client’s concerns.
How Does Inbound Marketing Benefit Dentists?
Inbound marketing is essential for all dentists. It will bring in new patients, encourage previous patients to return, and help build a stellar reputation for your practice.
Not just that, your investment towards inbound marketing allows you to develop an evergreen traffic asset by owning prime digital real estate in the most coveted neighborhoods of Google where your ideal patients are always searching for your high-value dental services.
Through our services, we helped make Kate Brayman, DDS one of the top 5 dental websites in all of USA.
How would you like to command this level of laser-targeted, revenue-producing organic traffic every month through Google that will cost you a fortune to acquire through PPC?
If you neglect inbound marketing, you’re missing out on one of the biggest revenue streams for growing your business.
How Much Should a Dental Practice Spend on Inbound Marketing?
High-quality medical inbound marketing services are not cheap. As such, if you think you can spend $500 – $1,500 a month and be able to build a powerfully robust enough digital infrastructure and foundation that will convert 15 – 20+ new patients a month at minimum, then that’s just not a realistic expectation. Or you do not understand the work it really takes to dominate a market as saturated and competitive as dentists (or any medical) niche.
Your inbound marketing comprises of a number of independently moving parts, all of which need to be executed at a high enough level and then need to come together and fire in harmony. Only then will your website become an appointment-generating machine churning out qualified new patients every single month.
These inbound marketing services include:
- Digital strategy and branding
- Keyword and competitor research
- Growth driven web design
- Technical SEO
- Content creation
- Digital PR and promoting your content to earn qualified editorially relevant backlinks
- Conversion rate optimization and tracking analytics
As such, your minimum monthly investment towards a results-driven inbound marketing strategy with us starts at $5,500 a month. And you need to be able to sustain this monthly investment over a period of 1 – 3+ years. This doesn’t stop. We are just being honest and direct about what it takes to get results.
We are not here to sugar-coat the process with sweet, saccharine words and to “win the sale” and somehow, anyhow get you to work with us. We are here to tell you that this is a lot of work. And you need to have already built a decelty successful dental practice yourself before we are able to take things to the next level. If you are a start-up dental practice without an already steady stream of referrals and with no steady revenue, our services are not the right fit for you.
However, if your dental practice is already generating close to $100,000 a month (or more) in monthly revenues, then ask yourself this: doesn’t it make sense to invest about $60,000 – $72,000 over 12 months (cost of a full-time Junior Marketing Employee) to create a reliable new patient acquisition system that will generate you an extra $360,000 – $1,000,000+ annually?
Want A Free Patient Acquisition Analysis?
Are you still wasting your time, money and resources on outdated medical marketing strategies? Stuck in analysis-paralysis when it comes to digital?
Interested in learning how ownership of your prime digital real estate in Google is a an excellent investment towards securing a steady stream of 100+ new and qualified patient leads every single month?
To get started, schedule a strategy session. But please ensure you are the leader and key decision-maker at your dental practice business. This strategy session will be with our founder, Dev. We will learn more about your dental practice, competitors and business goals, while sharing with you key insights pertaining to your existing digital infrastructure along with competitors who are outperforming you. We will also create a custom digital inbound marketing blueprint specific to your dental practice and high-value services you offer to show you how to convert minimum 15+ new patients a month through Google.
We are eager to learn more about your dental practice and can help you develop a custom digital strategy following a proven format that will increase your monthly sales and bring in new clients. However, it is important we have a good mutual fit. We helped Dr. Kate Brayman go from a poor digital presence with zero organic traffic to becoming the #1 dentist website in all of USA with over 10,000+ organic visitors every month. We look forward to hearing from you and showing you all the benefits local seo for dentists can bring to your practice.
In the meantime, you should educate yourself on how to choose the right healthcare digital marketing agency.
