How to Drive New Patients to Your Dental Practice with Digital Marketing

Let’s be clear about a few things. Traditional marketing was the past. Digital marketing is a huge part of the present. Digital marketing will dominate the future. It’s that simple. Therefore, it’s important to drive new patients to your dental practice with digital marketing.

Think of digital marketing as the great equalizer. Solo dental practices, for example, can compete far more effectively in digital marketing than they ever could in a more traditional dental practice marketing setting. A world of possibilities opens up with digital marketing. Are you ready to leverage the advantages of digital marketing?

Why Drive New Patients to Your Dental Practice with Digital Marketing?

Until the pandemic came along, more than a few dental practices hadn’t completely embraced digital marketing. It seemed an odd thing to do. Why would you basically say no to an increase of new patients? Unfortunately, what you’re doing if you haven’t fully exploited the advantages of digital marketing. Let’s look at the variety of reasons that show why digital marketing is such a valuable asset, especially in a pandemic and post-pandemic world:

It’s Extremely Cost-Effective

Dentists are painfully aware that marketing means a major financial commitment. In the past, solo and small group dental practices were greatly limited by their marketing budgets as to what they could do in terms of marketing. Then, along came the internet and the world headed in a whole new direction. Email, for example, is an extremely cost effective way to communicate. So is social media.

The ROI is Definitely There

With some traditional marketing, determining that you even have a return on investment can be difficult. Digital marketing is a whole different ball game. It allows you the possibility of a substantial return, frequently for a relatively modest investment. For example, an email campaign to prospective patients is an inexpensive way to maintain contact and cultivate relationships. Social media performs a similar function, also at a low cost. When you drive new patients to your dental practice with digital marketing, you’re doing it cost-effectively.

It’s Easy to Measure Your Results

With digital marketing, detailed data is available, and it will paint an incredibly clear picture of what’s working (and what isn’t). In terms of your dental practice’s website and blogs, for example, Google Analytics (GA) provides an effective way to measure specific data points. Dental practice PPC campaigns are also highly measurable. For example:

  • Know down to the very last person how many prospective patients are finding your website: At your fingertips are important metrics like keywords and the percentage of visitors following external links versus percentage of visitors following search engine results.
  • You’ll know exactly which web pages and links prospective patients go to the most: Which of your webpages are doing great? Which ones are currently a waste of bandwidth? With data readily at hand, dental practices don’t have to guess anymore about how their marketing is doing.

You Can Make Adjustments Easily

Here’s one of the big reasons why digital marketing is so great: it’s more cost effective than traditional marketing could ever hope to be. Tweaks can easily be made to web pages and blogs to increase their effectiveness. Clearly, the flexibility of digital marketing of one of its most attractive features. The ability to drive new patients to your dental practice with digital marketing gets easier when your communication platform is so easy to adjust.

Viewers Can Effortlessly Share Your Media

No one is ever going to pass around a hard copy of a print ad to a hundred of their friends or acquaintances. On social media, however, someone could easily pass along your marketing to hundreds of others with one click. The individuals who receive it may pass it along to even more people. Needless to say, that can work out really well for you. With digital marketing, your dental practice can be on equal footing with even your largest competitor. As you seek to drive new patients to your dental practice with digital marketing, remember that shareability is a huge asset.

Super Precise Targeting

Digital marketing empowers your GP or specialty practice to carefully target campaigns to certain prospective patients based on their preferences and unique characteristics. You can also target people who have taken initial action after being exposed to your marketing message. Good luck doing this in traditional marketing.

Make Digital Marketing Work For Your Dental Practice

It’s not easy for solo dental practices to compete against large, better-funded DSOs… at least it didn’t used to be. As digital marketing becomes more dominant, the playing field becomes more level. That means you can drive new patients to your dental practice with digital marketing. Properly implemented, digital marketing is capable of targeting very specific audiences and acquiring qualified leads, even on relatively modest budgets. That’s what makes dental practice marketing so effective, even for smaller practices. If you’re looking to increase your production, digital marketing is going to be what makes that happen. Contact us today to learn more by calling 888.307.7304.