Lyons Leadership

You’ve done it-you’ve created a truly brilliant website that contains all the pertinent information about the dental services you offer along with contact information so new patients know where to find your practice. You’ve even added a convenient map that will allow people to drive straight to your office with ease. So why aren’t new patients flowing in to your office at a good enough rate to ensure that your days are full of appointments? Simply answered, it’s because people who are using the Internet to search for the services you offer never see your information. Merely having a great website does not generate traffic. You have to have a good marketing tool or else your website just won’t show up easily on Internet searches.

Well the sad truth is that, if you don’t have an Internet marketing program for your dental practice, that your site will have minimal to no traffic. In fact, it will serve as nothing more than a reference for people who were already planning to visit you to look up your address and/or phone number so as to coordinate their visit. The time period when you could simply put up a dental web site and expect that to generate traffic is long gone.

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching Internet dental marketing and different online tactics and strategies which dentists have used successfully and which they have used with not such good results. And it’s the tactics that both work and the tactics that don’t work that I want to share with you so you don’t make the same mistakes that others have made, and then you could build on the work that other dentists have done to improve their online marketing program.

Some marketing tools, Yahoo! Answers for example, are good ways to generate a flow of traffic to your website. On the other hand, maintaining this type of advertizing takes a monstrous amount of your time, which is time taken away from your practice and your family. To implement this type of marketing, you will need to sign up to use the forum, which in this case is a place where people can go and post questions about dental services. You will also need to sign up to get an email alert when one of these questions is asked. This answer will need to be given fairly quickly. After that, the person whose question you have then answered might come into your practice for their dental needs. This marketing tool is not the most time saving way to advertize online because you will have to wait for a question to come in, take the time to answer it thoughtfully and then hope you’ve earned a new patient.

Another channel which some dentists have used with moderate success is to create a dental blog. With a dental blog, you can make entries regarding the different kinds of experiences you’ve had creating certain dental conditions. Clearly, you want to make these anonymous. However, this also has the major drawback of requiring a significant amount of time, and the problem is is that that time commitment is an ongoing, a longstanding process. That takes time away from your family, and it takes time away from being a dentist which is what you want to focus on when you’re at work. Some dentists go with the channel that doesn’t require a lot of time, and that’s to pay for quick advertising on something like Google AdWords or on the Yahoo! network. That is certainly something that doesn’t require a lot of time, outside of picking the key word, such as dentist or dental, that you want to target for people who are searching online. However, that is an extraordinarily costly way to advertise.

Something you want to accomplish in any Internet marketing program for your dental practice is something that’s low cost. If something winds up costing you $200.00 to $500.00 every month, that adds up to more than $2,000.00 to $5,000.00 a year. The other drawback with using click-through advertising is that you can have competitors click on your ads and wind up costing you significant amounts of money. Also, when people come and click on your ads, there’s no guarantee they’re going to wind up in your office. The actual conversion rate for click-through ads for many different services is less than one to two percent. Can you imagine paying $5.00 for a click-through, and then of those people that are clicking the actual cost of someone who walks through your door is more than $200.00? You barely break even on it.

There is a better time- and cost-effective way for a dental practice to advertize online. Some dentists have started asking the patients that are happy with their experiences to go to a third-party site like Yelp to post a review of their practice. This is extremely effective in getting good information in circulation on the Internet because when someone searches for a dentist they find favorable reviews about the dentist’s practice. This works well to bring in new patients. Although these dentists are getting good reviews posted from their patients, there is the problem that not every patient is pleased with their experience with the dentist even though the dentist thinks they are. This patient then will go to the site and post a questionable, or a negative review that is damaging to the dentist’s online reputation and does exactly the opposite of what the advertizing was supposed to do. Instead of finding purely favorable reviews during a search, a potential new patient could find something negative, and this is clearly not the goal.

As you well could guess, if someone is looking online for a new dentist and they find a negative review of your practice they will not be walking in your office door anytime soon. The perfect tool for this situation would be a marketing tool that will let you sort the good and the bad feedback, and then let you publish what you choose on the Internet to advertize your dental practice. It is very important to have this kind of control over what prospective patients are reading about your practice because even an “okay” review is not as favorable for you as a “great” review.

The best way to address this is to have your own review site with your own brand, your own logo, with your own web address. With such a site, you can have patients go there and write reviews. You can collect reviews from virtually every patient who walks through your doors, whether it’s positive or negative. In a matter of no time, you’ll be able to collect more than 20 to 30 reviews, and the best thing about having your own review site is you control what gets published onto the Internet and pushed out to search engines like Google and Yahoo! That means that you will have the most favorable reviews in your community because you have complete control over what you publish online. What this ultimately translates into is a highly leveraged way to do Internet marketing which requires hardly any of your time and is extraordinarily cost effective. Essentially, what you’re doing is having your happy patients do all the work of typing in content for the promotion of your practice, and with one simple click of a button, you decide what gets pushed out on the Internet.