As a dental business owner you should never underestimate the power of marketing your dental practice to add value. When you freely give people the answers to their questions by utilising great written content, the search engines will love you for it.
In fact, the search engines can’t get enough of meaningful, insightful content. So much so that they’re willing to place great emphasis on those people, or businesses that provide it.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at this….
In the not too distant past, if you entered the phrase ‘Make money online‘ into Google you would have been bombarded with a ton of garbage that would either not really tell you anything, bankrupt you very quickly, or land you in prison. Not a great experience for the searcher right?
However if you type that exact same phrase into Google today, the first organic search result that comes up is one from Lifehack.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the post doesn’t list the latest get-rich-quick schemes, nor is it written by some so-called guru asking you to pay a gazillion dollars, pounds, euros, or yen in order to buy their latest product. Instead, it’s a hugely insightful and meaningful piece, offering real-life suggestions to those actually looking to make legitimate money online.
Wow! And all of this without making you feel like you’ve sold your soul to the devil. How times have changed!
If you then take into consideration that the phrase ‘Make money online‘ is probably the most competitive keyword on the internet, it just goes to show the emphasis that the search engines place on adding real value.
Now I know what you’re thinking! “That’s great and thanks for pointing that out, but what has this got to do with me? After all, I’m a dentist.”
True you are, but aside from doing a great job of fixing teeth, you’re also in the trust business. So the question is “How can you get potential patients to trust you before they even enter your clinic?”
The answer…. by giving them valuable, and useful information through dental content marketing. Marketing your dental practice has to be more than advertisements – it has to have value that the prospective patient will remember, and come back to for more!
The good news is that this can be done in many ways (some more successfully than others). However, in order to make it so that this post doesn’t read like War and Peace, I’m going to keep it (relatively) short and sweet.
With this in mind, here are 3 examples of how you can use great content and indeed, dental content marketing to add value, build trust, get new patients through your doors, and build your business. So here goes…
Marketing your Dental Practice – Technique 1: Forum Marketing
Who’d have thought that dental content marketing would involve becoming an agony aunt. However if people have a particular dental problem, question, or concern, they need answering, they’ll often seek help in online forums or communities. So as a dentist, by being a member of these said communities you’re more than qualified to help them. You might even really enjoy this side of marketing your dental practice, and take up the position of resident clinician on any number of dental forums where you can:
- Build up a trust and rapport with any number of potential patients
- Spread the word about your services and your clinic and
- Get your name out there.
All of this for doing something that you probably do in your day job anyway. What’s more, every time you make a comment or help someone, it creates a link which inevitably drives traffic directly back to your site.
Marketing your Dental Practice – Technique 2:Compile A Free Giveaway/Guide
It might seem totally counter-productive to invest a shed load of your time and energy writing an insightful guide, to then place it on your website to give it away. However believe me, dental content marketing of this kind is a powerful thing and here’s why…
Let’s imagine for a minute that you’ve swapped hats. You’re no longer a busy and well-respected dentist. Instead you’re a long-term denture wearer who’s pretty hacked off with their false teeth and all the problems they can bring. You keep reading about how dental implants are the perfect answer to missing teeth replacement, so now you’re looking to find out more about them before making a final dental decision that could change your life.
After spending countless hours of trawling through the World Wide Web trying to find the answers to your many questions, you just happen to stumble across a site (namely yours). Here you see a handy guide entitled ‘Everything you need to know about dental implants but were afraid to ask.’ Not only are you going to be impressed, but you’re likely to be impressed for several reasons:
Firstly, the dentist in question has just saved you time. Time you no longer need to spend by trawling through endless web pages to find the individual snippets of information that you need to help you in your quest. Why? – Because all the information you need is right here, packaged up in one handy guide.
Secondly, it hasn’t cost you anything. That’s right, all that information the dentist has provided is totally free of charge.
So putting your dentist’s hat back on, why would you do this? After all, it’s a serious investment on your already precious time.
Because by providing something of real value to that particular person, your reputation as a trustworthy dentist has just risen through the roof. This is before the soon-to-be patient has even set foot inside your clinic.
But not only this, unlike blogging which needs to be done consistently and continually, you only ever need to write a comprehensive guide once. It can then sit happily on your site forever and a day, where it can be downloaded over and over again. Now that’s effective dental content marketing right there!
Marketing your Dental Practice – Technique 3: Finally, get blogging!
I guess you knew it was all leading up to this right? But the point is that if you did no other form of dental content marketing (or indeed any other form of marketing for that matter) you really need to be blogging and here’s why!
The bottom line is that search engines hate static websites. Okay so the word ‘hate‘ may be a little strong, but let’s put it this way… static websites are dead in the water as far as the search engines are concerned.
Because of this there’s a strong chance that a dental website that hasn’t been updated for sometime, or worse still… has never been updated, can just as easily be buried way down on page 137 of the search engines. That’s not a good place to be, especially when more and more people are searching online for dentists in your specific area.
The problem is that it can be hard to consistently and regularly add new content to your dental website. The good news is that by adding a blog page to your website, it gives you a platform to do exactly this.
What’s more, a blog is your chance to consistently impart those pearls of wisdom and knowledge that your potential patients are looking for. Do this and give the person what they want, and you’ll not only build trust, but provided that it’s optimised for the relevant keywords that you want to rank for, you’ll start to see your dental website climb the rankings. I effect blogging really is a win/win situation.
So there you have it – 3 powerful tools for marketing your dental practice that you can (read, should) try in 2016. Remember add value and you’ll build trust. Build trust and new patients will follow. Simple!
About The Author
Dale King is a content marketer, freelance dental writer and co-founder of dentalwriters.com. He works closely with dental practices to help them grow their client base. You can catch up with him on Twitter and on Facebook