It’s a well-known fact that referrals are a dentist’s best friend – so important that some practices acquire plenty of new patients every month without spending a dollar on marketing. Referrals aside, here’s ten tools you can use to spread the word about your dental practice.
- Your own website
- Pay per click advertisements (Adwords)
- Review sites (Yelp, Google Places etc.)
- Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pintrest, Tumblr, and more)
- White papers
- Business cards (worth talking about)
- Traditional media (newspaper, magazines, direct mail etc.)
- Pamphlets and direct mail
- Brochures
- Newsletters (email or traditional)
These are just a few of the tools you can use to market your practice, and all of them can work well if used correctly.
This list has no inherent order, but particular importance should be paid to your website, your Yelp page, and your Google Places account.
The single most important marketing tool at your disposal is a well-made (and maintained) website. The Yellow Pages are obsolete, and most perspective patients will use a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, or Bing) to find a dentist in their area. Yelp and Google Places are valuable tools because search engines typically favorably rank their pages. Over time, a well coded website should rank well too, but don’t expect a new website to show up on the first page of Google in a few days.
After you have built a website for your dental office, use Google’s Adwords program to promote your services in their search results while you wait for your website to be indexed. Be aware that you may wait quite a while before your website shows up at the top of the list in a competitive market and Google Adwords may become (or should become) part of your permanent strategy.
Note that Google Places has recently been re-branded by Google as “Google Plus Local”. Click here to find out what happened to Google Places.
