In the entrepreneurial world of dentistry, competition can be fierce. Growing your practice means reaching new patients, and this can be a challenge when there are so many dental clinics trying to appeal to the same demographic groups online.
If you want to make your clinic stand out from the crowd, here are three things you can do to make your clinic more distinctive and appealing to potential patients.
1. Solicit Patient Reviews
Ask any dental marketing expert what you can do to raise your clinic’s online profile, and chances are they will tell you that the first thing you need to do is get more reviews.
Online consumer review sites have rapidly become one of the first places people check when trying to decide which dental clinic they should go to, so increasing your number of reviews is a great way to reach these undecided patients.
While there is always the risk that soliciting reviews will mean that you receive a few negative ones, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Responding to negative reviews has been proven to increase your overall favourability among patients, so harnessing this technology is worth the risk of the occasional criticism.
2. Hire a Dental Marketing Firm
Most dentists go into business because they are passionate about helping people. But running a clinic means knowing about a lot more than just oral health care.
For this reason, many dentists hire dental marketing companies to handle search engine optimization, web design, and marketing campaigns on their behalf. Not only does this ensure that marketing is being taken care of by the experts who know how to get the best results, it also frees up more of the clinic owner’s time for management and primary care.
If you are considering outsourcing advertising and marketing for your clinic, you can learn more at Patient News about how dental marketing works and how it can help you more effectively manage your marketing strategy.
3. Be Strategic About Social Media
For at least a decade, businesses of every stripe have been told that social media is a powerful marketing tool that can unlock incredible growth.
While it is certainly true that early adopters may have benefitted from their investment in tools that help them use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to attract new patients, social media is now such a central feature of the marketing landscape that simply having a Facebook page for your clinic is not enough.
In order to unlock the potential of social media, you need to be strategic about how you use it. This means approaching social media with a clear sense of what you want the tool to do.
For example, if you want to use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to field patient queries or respond to complaints, you will need to make sure you have clear protocols around how your social media manager is to engage the public, and you also need to take into account how time-intensive this kind of work can be.
The digital age has proved to be a boon for dental clinics of all sizes, but taking the fullest advantage of your clinic’s digital profile to attract new patients isn’t always easy.
Whether you are managing a startup business or managing an established practice like most Tampa dental clinics, every clinician must possess entrepreneurship skills. If you want your clinic to stand out online, soliciting patient reviews, hiring a dental marketing firm, and being strategic about social media use are a great place to start.
