Digital Tools & Tips for Dental Offices In 2023
Have you wondered what other dentists or marketing teams use to ensure sustainable online growth? Here I’ll outline a few digital tools we use to help our dental clients create and maintain a strong digital marketing strategy for production growth!
As most of us are aware, a website is the second point of contact for potential patients. As such, we can’t stress enough how important it is to regularly analyze your website for performance to ensure both technical and search efficiency!
Search efficiency with respect to digital marketing involves the use of effective content and search terms on your website to ensure it is attracting the right group of users with higher purchase intent. At Patient NEWS®, we’ve been writing superior, high-quality, educational content for dentists since 1993. We continue to invest in and prioritize writing effective, unique, customized, and relevant content when building websites for dentists.
If you’ve been considering a better online presence and are wondering how to boost new-patient numbers, call for a free consultation today. Our team works exclusively with dentists, and we’d love to take your call! As mentioned, we’re celebrating our 30th anniversary this year, so rather than worry about how to DIY, leverage our 30 years and proven processes!
While it is a process, online tools provide insights into whether the right target audiences are visiting your website, and they help guide decision-making to improve results.
Analyze your website performance:
- Google Analytics – As part of Google’s marketing platform, Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that allows the tracking and reporting of website traffic. The platform shows various demographic data like user location/region (where are my website visitors located?), search keywords (what are my website visitors searching for to reach my page?), and page drop-off rates (which pages are audiences leaving my site from?). Statistics from a web traffic report allow marketers to update and optimize their marketing campaigns to target a more effective audience set.
- GT Metrix – To test your website’s technical efficiency, GT Metrix is a free online tool that quickly shows important data like speed, structure, image sizes, etc., that are related to your website performance. Finding out how fast your website loads is much needed to make sure an aspect like web speed does not become a bottleneck for online booking!
Pro tip: Ensure your website has the right technology to make your website load fast. Google ranks fast websites higher, and patients like the smooth experience a fast site provides. Patient NEWS employs Turbo Technology to ensure our dental websites are the fastest in dentistry.
Search engine optimization (SEO):
Having heard about SEO multiple times from your marketing team or a digital agency encouraging SEO services, the prime narrative usually is: “It’s a long-game investment.” True, but did you know you can track how well your SEO efforts are going?
From link building to organic traffic growth, your dental practice does not need to stay in the dark when it comes to SEO. Here are some of the tools we use to manage our dentists’ websites that can give you the insight you’ve been looking for:
- Google Search Console – While a bit technical in nature, you can ask your webmaster to use this free tool to check indexing status, search queries, and crawling errors to optimize website visibility.
- Semrush – A strong SEO strategy stems from conducting keyword research, tracking your competitors’ keyword strategy, running SEO audits for your blog, identifying backlinking opportunities, and much more. Semrush is an all-encompassing SEM tool that can do all this for you!
- Ahrefs – The Ahrefs tool is an SEO specialist’s best friend. A detailed SEO dashboard on Ahrefs provides marketers with all the important metrics to establish and sustain a strong search engine optimization strategy for your dental practice.
Online design & content development:
Almost every marketing company that works on a local level (marketing in a local area surrounding a small business – like a dental practice) refers to the importance of omnichannel marketing.
Omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy involving the integration of online and offline channels to interact with your customers. Most dental offices adopt this strategy through the use of direct mail, practice website, email marketing, social media pages, and more.
When developing your marketing strategies, it’s important to factor in the dental patient journey. Did you know that a business can negatively impact client loyalty with inconsistent brand messaging between channels? Conversely, brand consistency builds brand recognition, which leads to confidence and trust in the brand.
When patients have positive associations with your brand across all channels, you’re more likely to attract and retain them. When considering your various digital marketing platforms, consider how they will work in concert with other marketing strategies. How will the entire marketing mix support and reflect your brand identity, mission, vision, core values, and brand promise to not only your clients but also your team and community?
Having an experienced, omnichannel dental marketing agency on your side, like Patient NEWS, will take all the worry out of managing your patient experience across channels.
Online advertising platforms for dentists:
With intense competition across every industry, online advertising has become a means of standing out amongst the multiple options patients have to choose from in a dental practice. In order to create a strong online promotion strategy, it’s important to know and prioritize what works for your office.
Here are a few recommendations:
Google Reviews
Ah, reviews … need ‘em, hate ‘em … they are here to stay. According to the latest research, 49% of consumers trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation, and that number jumps to 91% for the 18- to 34-year-old crowd. The factors that are most important to patients are:
- 85% – overall star rating
- 73% – recency of latest review
- 60% – number of reviews is critical – a high number of reviews can positively impact a consumer’s likelihood to purchase.
Not only are reviews important to convert more new patients, but they are also a significant factor for people looking for work. If your practice is one of those challenged to hire more staff, take a look at your Google review state.
Another important stat for dentists: Two-thirds of consumers EXPECT businesses to respond to reviews, yet less than 50% of dentists report doing that. Use software that makes getting and responding to reviews easy, like Review Booster from Practice ZEBRA.
This proven tool is designed specifically for dentists to generate more patient reviews. Review Booster makes reputation management easy for dental offices:
- Best-in-class solution for dental offices
- Includes value-add educational content
- Includes convenient patient updates, like next appointment dates
- Includes response dashboard to respond to reviews (64% say it’s important that healthcare providers respond to reviews, yet many dentists say they haven’t responded to theirs)
- Users generated three times more reviews after implementation than before.
If you’re using standalone review software, Review Booster beats them all and provides so much more to the dental practice to manage marketing. Call for a free consultation and find out more.
Social Media Marketing
As most of us are aware, social media has become the go-to for consumers making service decisions. Popular opinions from influencers with a large following across the globe highly influence purchase decisions. While organic social media (posts without paid promotions) are helpful in maintaining an online presence, these posts are unable to reach a wider and new population specifically interested in your services.
Pro tip: Personalize your social media posts by getting your entire team involved in posting, participating, and building community awareness. When you are genuine on social, your patients and community will build and strengthen your practice reputation and attract more like audiences.
Paid social media allows in-depth targeting of customers using specific demographics to ensure your communication reaches the right target audience. With a more detailed target market, social media advertising becomes a strong means of connecting users with a high interest in what your practice has to offer. While ad spend is likely best allocated to Google Ads for local businesses, and particularly dentists, Facebook Ads are second in line if budgets allow increasing both your dental brand’s popularity as well as your patient volume!
Google Search and Display Ads
Pro tip: Use Google Trends to up your marketing game!
As per Google Search Statistics 2023, more than 3.7 billion Google searches are conducted every day. Over 90% of searches take place on Google! That’s why limited online ad spend should focus on Google versus social media.
Using Google tools like Google Trends, you can see which terms users are searching for and adapt your Google PPC Ads efficiently. The image below is an example of the data Google Trends allows you to see.
With multiple filter options, narrow down a search term on the basis of region, time span, category, and more. Trends also allows you to compare more than one option for search terms so you can zero in on creating an optimal ad copy (ad content) with the largest reach.
From GT Metrix to Google Trends, these digital tools can help strengthen your overall digital strategy. Stay informed about your online presence and improve your marketing campaigns every day!
As always, call Patient NEWS if you want to improve your online presence, attract more new patients, and grow your practice production. Our team is here to answer your call, and we care about your success!