The success of your dental practice depends on keeping your existing patients and attracting new clients. Digital marketing can help you win more business or referrals from your loyal customers. It can also bring you before individuals and families that have recently moved to your city or who’re otherwise looking to switch dentists after a poor experience or insurance issues.

Digital marketing encompasses a number of marketing and advertising activities on the Internet with the goal of generating brand awareness, boosting sales, and increasing patient lifetime value (LV). Here are the common ones to pursue to grow your dental practice.

Content marketing

Imagine a parent whose child is sprouting teeth is looking for a dentist near them on Google. If you’ve invested in online marketing and SEO, there’s a good chance your office will appear on the search results’ first page. Once on your website, they see your qualifications, services, patient testimonials, and your blog, populated with articles on kids’ oral hygiene. If you have added social media buttons, they may click through to check out your FB or Instagram page. They like what they see and call you. See how that worked?

Content marketing involves creating and marketing brand content online. Think blogs, videos, newsletters, and social media content (text, image, and video posts). Quality, relevant content addressing your patients’ needs and pain points creates the right impressions about your practice. It is a part of online marketing and SEO, hard to manage on your own or keep in-house for the sheer amount of work and technical knowledge involved. Dentists hire SEO consulting firms to plan and implement content marketing, measure results (position on Google, website traffic, and conversions), and provide reports.

Email marketing

Say the parent of the teething child sees an email signup form and provides their email, consenting to receive emails from you. This is email marketing, and it has been seen to return $44 for every $1 spent!

Email marketing involves growing your email subscriber list and sending subscribers – prospects or existing patients – emails on any new service or tech you’ve added, a change in prices, special offers, an event at your clinic, or other news, promotions, or announcements. An excellent use case is to remind patients about their annual or bi-annual checkups.

Many companies offering online marketing and SEO also include digital marketing in their services. Combining different digital marketing services in one package may fetch you a discount from SEO consulting firms.

Pay-per-click

While business search engine optimization focuses on gaining organic traffic from search results, pay-per-click ads are paid ads appearing on top of search engine results. The good news is that 65% of people click on PPC ads when looking to make a purchase. The downside is that once you stop paying for the ads, your visibility goes away, which is why it is more beneficial to have SEO practices in place for organic traffic.

Paid ads on social media also count as PPC ads. A catchy ad containing the right keywords earns more visibility and clicks. But costs can run high if those keywords are expensive per click.

Mobile friendly marketing

As of this writing, 52% of total web visits were currently from mobile devices. Mobile-friendly marketing is essential to be seen and heard by current and potential clients.

Mobile marketing goes hand in hand with business search engine optimization. Your website should look good and be easily navigable on mobile phones and tablets. One of the jobs of an SEO consulting firm is to create attractive websites that load quickly and are optimized for mobile devices.

You can create a mobile app that patients can use to book appointments or receive news and announcements. An online marketing and SEO firm can help you with app development or recommend a developer.

Mobile marketing involves SMS marketing and geofencing. In geofencing, you show your ads based on location. If you’re a pediatric dentist, you could target nearby daycare centres to get in front of parents. An advantage is that you’ll be able to track real visits, as you’ll know exactly how many patients came to your office after clicking on your mobile ads. On the flip side, people may find text messages distracting and choose to ignore them.

Results from business search engine optimization and paid efforts become apparent within 6-12 months. Getting there takes significant effort and time. As digital marketing is a full-time job, entrusting it to an experienced agency is best.