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Using Facebook For Your Dental Marketing Business? Tips For Marketing

Facebook has quickly become a valuable dental web marketing tool. And while many practices have recognized the importance of having a fan page on the site, most are still neglecting the value of advertising on the social networking site.

Facebook Advertising, which is essentially a pay-per-click platform, is easy, affordable, and a great tool for branding your practice.

Unlike Google Adwords, Facebook Advertising is not yet very competitive, so the cost-per-click is still very affordable (often times under a dollar). 

Facebook is also unique in it has a rather advanced targeting. 

While Google limits the advertiser to certain keywords and locations, Facebook can target by age, gender, location, interests, and more. 

This is not to say that it is a better option than Google, but rather to point out that it is different.

It is important to keep in mind that the main difference between a search engine’s sponsored listings and Facebook’s, is that on a search engine, users are actually seeking out your service. 

They are searching for a “Cosmetic Dentist in Denver,” while on Facebook, you are seeking them out. 

This is why traffic to your website from a Facebook Advertising campaign will not necessarily convert in patients (right away). 

It may not even generate much traffic, but it is GREAT for branding. 

By having your practice’s name and logo appear in front of your target demographic on a regular basis, you are implanting your brand into their minds.

And when it comes time, they will already be familiar and feel connected with your practice.

Facebook offers a cost-per-impression option, but it is generally not the best option for a campaign. 

Although when compared side-by-side the cost-per-impression is cheaper than the cost-per-click, it is safe to assume that there will be exponentially more impressions of your ad, than actual clicks.

Again, this is because Facebook Advertising is a much better tool for branding, than for generating traffic to your website.

If you are familiar with Facebook, then setting up and following a campaign is not hard. 

You can find step-by-step help here. If you are new to Facebook, enlist the help of your staff, your kids, your friends, anyone! 

Chances are that you know someone who is Facebook saavy.

[dentalseoexpert-blog]

A Marketing Tactic for More Dental Patients

Want more dental patients? 

Yes? Okay great. 

I’m going to just dive right into this one.

The title of this post pretty much says it all. 

What I have for you today is a marketing tactic any dentist can use to get more dental patients. It’s one very plump and juicy piece of low-hanging fruit.

But first…A quick confession:I’m a little worried about revealing this juicy piece of fruit to you. 

See, I know it’s going to seem “too easy” or “too obvious” to many dentists. On that basis alone, some of you will probably click away and go back to DentalTown or wherever.

You’re not that dentist, you say? 

You’re going to give me 30 more seconds?

Great.Then here we go: It’s Your Google Places Page.

Specifically, an OPTIMIZED one.

This is what “more dental patients” looks like! Google telling everyone where to go, and how “good” each dentist is. (You may have heard this called Google Maps, Google Local. It’s all the same thing as far as small business owners are concerned. Google can’t seem to decide what to call it. But what really matters is what it can do to help you get more dental patients.)

For the moment, grant me the assumption that Google Places is equally or more important for connecting new patients with dentists than the Yellow Pages ever was, even in its prime 15 or 20 years ago. 

A big claim, I know. (More on this later.)

The Places/Maps profiles of local businesses like dental practices are now forced up to the top of Google’s search results pages for ANY search that even remotely smells like the person might be looking for a local business. 

If you haven’t lately, try it.

Open up a new tab in your browser and search for:dentist [your town here]. Now, those regular Google results your SEO guy has been working so hard to improve for you (or maybe mailing it in) for months or years?

Now they’re smooshed down to the bottom half of page 1! 

Buried under an eye-catching map of your town with colorful pins in it, showing all the dentists closest to wherever the computer or smartphone is that did that Google search.

(Importantly, Google’s system favors those 10 dentists with the most complete Google Places profiles! Meaning, even if your office is farther away than Dentist B’s office is to the physical location of the person seeking a dentist, you can show up higher in the Maps Box and more prominently with ratings, photos, etc. if you will follow my instructions in this post.)

(By the way, local marketing consultants regularly charge $100 – $300 for setting up a Google Places profile and adding all the information, photos, etc. But you can do it yourself if you have about an hour and basic familiarity with the Internet & Google.)

Now – those pins and the little hyperlinks to the dental practice/dentist’s name and the blurb of information… all of that is pulling from the Google Places/Maps/+ for Business profile of each dentist. 

Not from your website, not from anywhere else. 

Straight from your Google Places profile.

If you click through on some of the listings, you’ll see that some dentists have reviews, and some don’t. Some have little thumbnail photos of the office, building, dentist headshot, team members, etc., and some don’t. 

Some dentists are showing basic information like website URL or primary services provided (cosmetic/pediatric/general/etc.) and others are just plain and empty little “ghost” listings with very little information.

That’s because some dental practices have taken the time to claim, verify (via postcard, about 4-5 business days) and completely fill out their Google Places profile, and others have not. 

That’s all a marketing person means by “optimizing” one of these profiles, by the way… 

just grabbing it, telling Google it’s yours, and then filling it out! 

Some big firms have entire teams of offshore outsourcers cranking these things out at lightning speed for about $3/hour, while charging clients $295 for set-up and $49.95/month for “monitoring and optimization. ” Total, unadulterated BS, if you ask me. Here’s where to go to get started: 

http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/Back on track now…

If you haven’t optimized your Google Places profile, then you’re relying on whatever info Google pulled from the phone book and some old, probably half-baked Yahoo! Local or MerchantCircle profile from 7 years ago…

You’re relying on potentially stale and incomplete data to show the world what your practice is all about!I’m going to hammer this home one more time, while we take a ride in my dental marketing time machine:Hop on in. 

It’ll just take a minute of your time… in 1988!Let’s pretend it’s 1988. And you flip open the “local Google book” of 1988, which was called a “phone book,” if I remember correctly. 

And you flip through this enormous, funny yellow book with really thin, crinkly paper, to “D” for “Dentists.”

Now, your eyes naturally zero in on the listing for your dental practice…

But instead of the beautiful and compelling ad you hoped to see,it’s a half-empty space, mis-aligned, totally uninteresting and utterly uninspired ad that just says:“XYZ Dental. Call 987-654-3210.”  

How livid are you going to be about this? 

Hopefully, very. Okay now. 

That amount of anger and frustration is exactly how angry and frustrated you should be right now if your Google Places profile doesn’t currently have:

all of your business information correct

beautiful photos of your practice and maybe your team

a complete list of your services offered

your web address

hours of operation

what insurance plans you accept

a nice blurb about your practice and what makes you special, unique, and trustworthy

your nice consistent logo throughout, and

a cover photo giving people the right feeling when they glance at your profile

And of course – your New Patient Special should be prominently featured so you’ll increase your response rate –  dramatically!

If you’re not allowing Google to direct relevant new patient leads your way, for free, when people are located geographically near your practice and right when they’re searching for dentists in your town, then I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say that you have missed out on at least several new patients every month for several years. 

Ever since Google started really pushing Maps results to the top, and everyone got a smartphone and never un-glued their eyes from it. AT LEAST 75% of the eyeballs searching the Internet for a dentist will be shown a Google Places/Maps box at some point during their searching.

This is because Google dominates local search (over Bing, Yahoo, etc.), and Google pushes Google Places/Maps results right to the top.To show up poorly on Google Places is like sabotaging your own Yellow Pages ad in 1988.

It’s just a huge self-inflicted wound and missed opportunity. And it’s free! FREE! Now it’s time to get crackin’. Make sure you grab some napkins at the counter, and enjoy every bite of that plump, ripe, low-hanging “more dental patients” fruit!

[dentalseoexpert-blog]

Local Dental Practice Marketing Tips and Strategies

Their not much change in Marketing as much as you think over the years. But technology sure has. 

One of the keys to success of local Dental Practice marketing today  is to be every place where your prospective and current patients are.

In the past, this was easy. 

You could put up a website or a blog, announce to your prospective patients where they could find it, and you could have your message in a position to be seen where people who were interested could easily find it.

However, that’s not nearly as easy now, as patients no longer wait for messages to be sent to them when they need information. 

They seek to find solutions to their problems, by going to the Internet and using the search engines.

The practice’s that make sure that their solution is present when a patient is looking to solve a problem, will have their message heard. 

The old forms of “announcing” it, are less and less effective (newspapers, Yellow Pages). 

By the time a patient is hearing an announcement in the old form, they’ve likely already solved their problem by going to another practice.That means that if you want to market your practice effectively. 

You need to be found in search engines at the same point that patients are looking for their solution. You want to make sure that your website, is the one they see with the information they are looking for. This involves a couple of steps. 

The first one is knowing the keywords that your prospective patients type into the search engines when they are looking to solve their problem. 

In fact, Google provides this information to help practices determine how best to reach their patients. You’ll want to take the information that Google provides and prioritize the keywords that will provide you the most impactful advantage if you were to be visible to patients that were typing it in.

This then moves you into the second step. You want to make sure that your website is structured properly, so that it will appear in the search engines for the keywords that your patients are typing in. 

This structuring process is called optimization.

In fact, there is an entire profession and branch of marketing people, that focus on nothing but this optimization process. 

More than likely, if you have competition in your local area, they are being assisted by these people that know how to structure their website properly so that it appears at the exact moment when consumers are having their problem.

Of course, the third step, is making sure that when patients actually find your website in the search engines they click through to land on a page where you have the right message that makes them want to take the action that’s favorable to your practice. 

Many times, this will take the form of collecting their contact information. In other cases, it will mean inviting them to schedule an appointment.

The language that a company uses, is called copywriting. 

This is the language that is necessary to guide patients toward making the right decision. It is a key part of this process that you’ll want to make sure that you have thought through consistently across your website.