Modern Dental Practice Marketing

Are you puzzled by blogging and branding? Wondering how marketing evolved from Yellow Pages ads to search engine optimization? You aren’t the only one. The marketing world has changed dramatically in the past decade! But there’s hope. You can get on the modern marketing bandwagon and bring in new patients.

Just this evening, CBSNews.com released an article about blogging. In it, Robert Pagliarini provides “7 rules of successful bloggers.” I want to take Paliarini’s tips and evaluate how they relate to dentists and dental blogging.

We’re told to create valuable content. What is valuable, when it comes to content? That depends on who you are. To a potential patient searching for a dentist or an answer to a question, interesting information not found elsewhere online would be valuable. To a dentist, a blog that ranks high on Google would be valuable. To Google, a blog that’s original and informative would be valuable. So, ideally, a valuable dental blog has unique, informative content that’s keyword rich and well optimized. When this formula is used, everyone wins.

Focus on a niche and identify popular markets are tips two and three. Obviously, the niche for a dental blog is dentistry. However, you can be more specific. Perhaps your blog should be about sleep apnea, Invisalign, cosmetic dentistry, or sedation. Many of our clients have two or more blogs. This allows them to focus on general dentistry to attract bread-and-butter patients, as well as a specific treatment that they find profitable and enjoyable. Before you blog, consider which procedures or ideas (holistic, biomimetic, systemic health, for example) are most important to you. Read the rest of this entry →

One of my favorite movies is You’ve Got Mail, and some of the dialogue that really resonates with me is when Joe (Tom Hanks) tries to explain his division of business and personal matters. You see, he’d just run Kathleen’s (Meg Ryan) independent children’s bookstore out of business…at the same time, the two were falling for each other, of course.

Joe Fox: It wasn’t… personal.
Kathleen Kelly: What is that supposed to mean? I am so sick of that. All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. It’s *personal* to a lot of people. And what’s so wrong with being personal, anyway?
Joe Fox: Uh, nothing.
Kathleen Kelly: Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.

When I think about it, this conversation really applies to my life, being a blogger. The reason I blog, and the reason I comment on blogs, and the reason I engage in social networking is because business is personal. You worked your haunches off to get where you are today, a dentist and the owner of your own independent practice. If a corporation infringes on your business, it’s personal to you.

Your patients feel the same way. They trust you. Your treatment, to them, is personal.

• “Findings from this study support our hypothesis that trust in health care providers is a significant predictor of having a regular dentist and is independent of education level, income, race/ethnicity and perceived health status.” – from JADA
• Doctors and nurses are the third most trusted professionals, just behind teachers (no. 2) and firefighters (no.1). Journalists are second on the least trusted professionals list, so I thought I should provide hard evidence for my case . – from Divine Caroline

It’s personal.

Why do you think blogs and social networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) are so popular? Because they are web platforms that facilitate personal communication, and people love “personal.” Web marketing is a tool you can use to enhance relationships with your current patients, establish personal relationships with potential patients, network on a personal level with people who have similar interests (same community, professionals, hobbies).

You may think there’s a separation between “personal” and “professional,”
and there has been a bold, black line there for years.
But times, they are a-changin’.

Use your blog to become the authoritative source on all things dental. While you’re sharing all of your expert knowledge, keep the tone and presentation personal. Just like I’m doing in this post. I started by telling you about my favorite movie. That’s personal. It tells you something about me. I like sappy romances. Read the rest of this entry →

Do you have a dental website? Why?

Whether you have a high-end custom website, a template site, or a WordPress blog website, you should consider why you’ve pursued online marketing. The goal, for most dentists, is to have a website that represents their practice online — because marketing on the Internet is a necessary, effective, and wise investment. The ultimate goal is to increase profitability, either by attracting a more targeted audience of patients or by increasing the number of patients in the practice. To meet these goals, you gotta get your message out, and just slapping a flyer on a domain isn’t going to do the trick. Promise. But marketing your dental practice online doesn’t have to be difficult, either.

Don’t have time to read this post? Don’t want to wait for the whole series?
Call Modern Dental Practice Marketing today at 940-395-5115 for a complimentary consultation.

This week, we’re going to cover the main points you should consider when creating or overhauling your dental website. Let’s start with…

Drawing a Targeted Audience with Your Dental Website

This goal has two paths. One is search engine optimization; two is design.

First, you have to define the demographics of your target audience, or who you want to serve. What type of cases do you most enjoy? Which cases are most profitable? What’s the age, income level, education level, and lifestyle of your ideal patient? Do you like treating children? Do you like treating senior citizens? As for location, are you in the big city, so that you should try to attract professionals during the workday? Are you in the suburbs, so that you should attract the moms who will choose their family’s dentist? Are you near a retirement community, so that you should appeal to the growing number of Facebook and Internet users over the age of 65? Sketch out your target audience and keep your notes handy for your website design company’s keyword research and graphic design consultation. Read the rest of this entry →

If you don’t have a blog for your dental practice, you need one. Blogs offer extremely affordable and effective web marketing. Unlike website pages, blog posts are considered news by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Bing. News gets higher priority. So, with keyword-rich, well optimized blogs, in addition to some other key tasks, your online marketing strategy can soar.

Modern Dental Practice Marketing has a team of talented, experienced dental copywriters. Yes, dental copywriters. These professionals have composed content for dentist and dental related companies for many years. In addition, the MDPM copywriters have experience with search engine optimization, so you’ll get true experts–the best of the best–to compose your dental practice blogs and make sure they rank well on search engines.

If you already have a blog, take advantage of our summer special: one month of blogs, that’s 8 posts, at half price, $100.

If you need a blog, MDPM can set you up in no time, and the special offer still stands. To take advantage of the MDPM Sweltering Summer Special, email [email protected] with the subject line “summer promo.”