If your dental marketing is not on social media, you are already falling behind. Social media is how many patients now become connected with their dentists, since it's a way of learning about them in real-time. If you're dental practice is already on social media, here are dental marketing tips that will keep you stay afloat with competitors.
Key Dental Marketing Tips
- Integrate your website with social media pages
- Send "friend requests" to existing customers and referrals
- Use social media to build your email marketing list
- Make at least a few new social media posts every day
- Keep the tone positive and adventurous
- Gather plenty of eye-catching photos and content
Disadvantages of Social Media
It's important to understand both the advantages and disadvantages of social media. It's the type of communication channel that requires fresh content and engagement if it is to be used in a productive way. If you start a social media profile and don't keep updating the content, people may view your company as inactive or irrelevant. These days, online presentation is what shapes perceptions about people and businesses. That's why it helps to learn from as many dental marketing tips as possible. Here are some of the disadvantages with social media:
- Easy to lose patients to competitors
- Lack of branding strategy can hurt social media experience
- Difficulty to attract clients can convey lack of demand
- Low activity sends out a boring signal
- It allows for negative reviews from dissatisfied customers and competitors
How Social Media Can Bring New Leads
The key to attracting new leads is to offer content that your followers can share with their friends. There are many different ways to attract new dental patients with content by adding a personal touch, such as video demonstrations, customer testimonials and interviews with dental professionals. Whatever you can present that identifies your dental practice as unique can be very helpful in both search rankings and social media engagement. Interacting with prospects helps create a top of mind awareness that they may not have with competitors they don't interact with.
Visuals are an important key to catching people's attention on Facebook news feeds. Platforms that are designed to share visuals, such as Instagram or Pinterest, provide ways to connect with people who enjoy the same visual content, which allows for a wider range of connections than basing shared interests on keywords. Building your brand through photos can be quicker and easier for consumers than trying to educate them with volumes of text.
Even so, text is still the most valuable way to connect with new patients. Through search engine optimization, content creation and online advertising, keywords will help new patients find you, based on the specific services they are searching for.
Storytelling Has Value
Two keys to developing an online following are expertise and storytelling. The combination of these two qualities - in addition to offering a niche that you can own - can attract a crowd that craves more content. Ultimately you want to convey that you are an influencer, so that Google knows to give your blog or article pages high rankings in search engines. The more people share your content on social media, the more search engines will view your content as influential and in demand.
You must be willing to self-promote your practice, which can be done in subtle ways. Offering plenty of visuals helps draw eyeballs to your website and social media pages. Adding storytelling to the equation strengthens your ability to attract online followers. Everyone has enjoyed hearing and reading stories since they were young. It's a way to bring concepts to life, by associating them with people, places and things.
Through storytelling or interviewing you can convey how a dentist discusses procedures. It can help patients decide on the type of help they need or provide stress relief. Getting your staff to participate in sharing photos and stories can help build useful, original content, which is what search engines are looking for.
Creative Ways To Use Social Media
Social media allows you many ways to express yourself, through text, video, photos, audio and infographics. It allows you to display promotional information, such as special offers. You can also explain one post at a time, how you offer unique services and reasons that set you apart from competitors. Out of all the dental marketing tips you can study, one in which you should give primary attention is that social media allows you to creatively explore multimedia.
The most important reason to use social media is for active engagement. It's become a real-time customer service channel. It allows you to answer potential customer questions quickly, which can attract them as regular followers. There are plenty of things to talk about on social media, particularly the latest content you have published on your website. Feeding people with fresh content that they cannot find elsewhere online is how blogs become successful.
Since Facebook is the most popular social network and allows you to build a target audience, it's also an effective way to reach your most loyal followers. Facebook advertising uses the pay-per-click model, allowing you to get exposure while only paying when people click your ads. The platform provides tools that allow you to customize your message, audience and messages for specific audience segments. It allows you to reach more target followers at a lower cost than traditional advertising.
More Dental Marketing Tips...
- Create a blog that showcases your knowledge
- Build blogs on keywords that define your dental practice
- Share blogs through social media
- Brainstorm with staff to create endless content to share
- Find new ways to explain what makes your services unique
- Encourage patients to post their reviews online or do video testimonials
Don't let the disadvantages of social media dissuade you from mixing it with your marketing. Strategize your dental marketing plan with web properties that all promote each other, utilizing these tips. Develop an online following that showcases your unique personality and background, so that new patients know you before they meet you.