If you’re like most dentists, you prefer caring for your patients’ teeth over digitally marketing your services. But to keep your doors open, you need new patients, making digital marketing necessary to bring in more patients.
Successfully presenting your dental skills and expertise to your community need not be challenging. With just a few changes and tweaks, you can make your digital presence shine brighter than a freshly polished set of veneers.
In this article, we’ll introduce three actionable strategies that will seriously boost the number of visitors to your website.
Design A Jaw Dropping Site
Your website should aptly reflect the brand image that you want to show the world. It needs to reassure visitors that they’ll be in the best hands when they sit down for a routine cleaning or uncomfortable tooth extraction - visitors will assume that the professionalism of your website matches the professionalism of your dental work.
Follow these basic aesthetic and structural guidelines so your site catches visitors' eyes and puts their minds at ease.
Build a Clean Site with a Modern Design
Your site should reflect your office - it needs to be clean and crisp, with warm colors. Site visitors should immediately see pictures of people smiling, with their pearly whites being the focus of attention.
Presenting your site in this way will shine a light on your professionalism. When building your site, keep these three cardinal pointers in mind:
- Introduce Your Team: Dentistry is a medical trade, art, and, above all, a trust-based profession. So your site should introduce your team and their backgrounds, showcasing professional pictures of them.
Shining a professional light on each team member, who might soon be literally poking around a site visitor’s mouth, will help with building trust before they even arrive.
- Office Location, Hours, And Contact Information: Potential patients must know your location and contact information to schedule appointments.
Keep your phone number at the top of each webpage, and provide easy-to-find links to your office hours and location. Providing this will help visitors plan out how and when they can visit your office.
- Create a Google Business account: Doing this puts your practice on Google Maps and allows customers to write Google Reviews. Actively monitor your Google reviews, and be sure to publicly thank everyone who provides a positive review on the platform.
If you receive a negative review, immediately address it, and reach out to the patient privately. Get to the root cause of the negative review. Try to rectify it by patiently listening to the client’s problems and owning your mistakes.
Constructively working through client-related problems will bolster your reputation as a responsible and care-driven dentist.
After dialing in your site’s aesthetic and structural appearance, it’s time to illustrate your expertise and showcase your relationships with patients. Do this by adding these three sections to your site:
1. Procedural Photos
Include pictures of each dental service your practice provides. Showing the transformation of shockingly stained yellow teeth to glistening white ones will demonstrate to potential clients you make simple routine cleanings into masterpieces.
Illuminate your specialization and expertise by providing photos and descriptions of your unique work. Displaying veneer and implant before-and-afters might convince site visitors that they should choose you for that needed major procedure.
2. An Educational Blog
Dentistry is an ever-evolving science, with new innovations being made monthly. Publish articles about the latest trends, topics, and technology in dentistry to educate visitors. You don’t need to write lengthy articles; just enough to educate the average layperson about the latest dental technologies and how you can provide them.
Publishing articles on your site will demonstrate to visitors your knowledge of dentistry’s newest trends. When potential patients read your article about new methods to soothe dental anxiety, they’ll be more likely to trust you and want you to be their dentist.
Don’t forget to write about common uncomfortable procedures like wisdom teeth extractions and root canals. Tell readers about the procedures, how long recovery will take, and how to manage pain. Your readers will appreciate the direction you give them to navigate through these unpopular but necessary operations.
3. Client Testimonials
Client testimonials are a powerful tool for building trust and influencing site visitors to book their next dental cleaning with you. Offer patients a one-time discount on their next appointment when they provide positive feedback about your dentistry or give you a referral.
Separate testimonials by dental procedure, such as cavity work, endodontics, and cleaning. Doing this will let visitors quickly locate and read feedback about how you approach specific procedures that they might need. It will also reinforce the idea that you’ve earned the trust of your patients.
Remember to keep your site up to date. When employees leave or when you onboard new ones, update your team page. Change pictures illustrating your practice to keep your site constantly fresh, and publish articles no less than once a month.
*Pro Tip: To really dial in your site, change its theme with the seasons. When winter starts, give your site a holiday feel. Showcase pictures of people with bright-white smiles set in flowery fields during spring. Constantly updating your site will reinforce your professionalism by demonstrating an active commitment to your brand.
Accompany Your Website with Social Media
Social media is a vital platform for boosting your dental practice. It provides opportunities for growth and engagement by allowing you to post updates, recent photos of work, advice about dental conditions and procedures, and videos of certain technologies.
Instagram and Facebook Content
Your Facebook page serves as a 21st-century Yellow Pages listing. Just like your website, it should display your hours of operation, a link to your site, and other basic information like your location.
Instagram is arguably the most important social media platform because it allows you to seamlessly upload photos, videos, and other content featuring your work. Here is a list of items to post on Instagram:
- Before and after photos to showcase cleanings, veneers, and caps.
- Educational videos about oral health and brushing techniques.
- Short video clips providing an overview of new dental technologies your practice is offering and who might benefit from them.
- A short checklist about how to care for your gums after an extraction.
- A monthly Q+A roundup: allow patients and website visitors to submit questions to your site or booking app, then address them at the end of the month in a short video clip.
- Basic tips to optimize brushing and flossing.
- Product reviews, like the newest electric toothbrush on the market.
- Video testimonials from happy clients.
- Photos and videos of your team enjoying activities beyond dentistry, like your staff volunteering at local charities or shots from the annual barbeque.
Before posting, you want to ensure that your pictures and videos are clear, well-done, and professional-looking. In the eyes of viewers, the content you post on social media will directly reflect your level of professionalism. Because dentistry sometimes involves messy procedures, make sure your content is palatable to all viewers (no pun intended).
Encourage every client to follow you on Instagram and like you on Facebook. You should routinely post updates on Instagram.
Build Your Own App to Complement Your Site
Using a no-code app builder like Adalo, can help you create applications that enhance your booking process and supercharge your CRM without any prior coding or technical knowledge.
Adalo has an extensive library of custom-made templates, providing clear directions about how to build your app. With Adalo, you could easily make the following two applications and integrate them into your site:
1. An Online Chat App To Take New Bookings and Answer Questions
Adalo’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows you to build your own custom-made chat app. Site visitors can use this to book appointments or ask questions, as the chat app could connect directly with your front desk. Millennials and Zoomers will appreciate this, as they prefer to interact with online chat interfaces rather than talk on the phone.
Visitors can download your chat app directly from the Apple iOS, Google Play Store, or your site. They’ll find interacting with your team through a chat app more convenient than calling or sending an email or SMS, appreciating the quick feedback. This will increase the chances that they’ll book their next cleaning with you.
2. A CRM App For Convenient Client Communication
Use Adalo to custom-create a client-relationship management (CRM) app. Create your CRM by choosing a template and adding to the layout. Then, your front desk team can make individual profiles for each client.
You’ll be able to enter their cleaning records, past appointment dates, x-rays, and more. Adalo also allows you to send automated push notifications to effortlessly remind clients of easily missed appointments, like bi-annual cleanings.
Adalo lets you build a messaging feature for your app to inform clients about precautions they need to take for upcoming procedures, like not eating 12 hours before their wisdom tooth extraction. A few days after their extraction, check on them using the messenger.
This messaging feature allows you to completely forgo using 3rd party messaging apps or SMS and gives you a private messaging system, which will portray you in a very professional light. Your patients will appreciate the quick and convenient communication that comes with your own messaging system.
Like the chat app, clients can download your tailor-made CRM app on the Apple iOS or Google Play Stores. Or, if you prefer, you can also make your app downloadable directly from your website.
Using Adalo to easily make a user-friendly CRM system and chat app will keep clients returning to your practice. They’ll appreciate the extra care and attention it brings to your dentistry. Demonstrating all-around professionalism will help in winning patients’ trust in your steady hand to perform everything from routine cleanings to painful yet necessary extraction procedures.
Turn Your Site Visitors Into Patients
The main goal of your site is to transform website visitors into patients. By updating your site and social media with new content, responding to reviews on Google, and offering a pleasant website user experience with crisp colors, a mobile chatbot, and a downloadable CRM system, visitors will see that you’re serious about offering the community your dental expertise.
