Marketing for Dentists: 5 Digital Marketing Tips To Get Started

Marketing for dentists is a relatively new concept in the digital space. For years many dentists and dental clinics were not using digital tools and platforms to promote their services.

Now, many are seeing the benefits of digital marketing and are using platforms and tools like Google My Business, Social Media, Google Maps, Google Ads and many others.

One of the first things to have is a good website. It should have great content and should be easily navigable and accessible on all devices including mobile.

In this article I list five digital marketing tips to help you get started. Following this advice will help your dental clinic target people in your locations and help you achieve a good ROI.

1. Invest in Google Ads

A marketing strategy for dentists should include an effective digital channel like Google Ads. And this is a proven digital channel and most dentists are seeing the benefits of keyword-based advertising as they target local people searching for their services.

Google Ads has other campaign type too like Display and Remarketing and you can use these to bring people back to your website.

As an inbound marketing channel, you can be confident that people who are searching are highly qualified. So, they are ready to make contact, or make a booking because they are at the later stages of the purchase funnel.

2. Review Your Landing Pages

It’s not enough to get quality traffic to your website. You need to make sure your website and landing pages are well optimised, structured and targeted to the people you are looking to reach.

So, as people land on your pages, they should be able to find all the information they need within one or two clicks. And your visitors should be able to book a dental appointment easily on your website or use a form to contact if they have a query.

Your pages should load quickly especially for mobile visitors too. People will not hang around if your pages are slow loading and they will leave to view competitor websites.

And if you are running Google Ads and your landing pages are slow, they will click the ads and leave before the full pages load, and you’ll still get charged.

And metrics like bounce rate will help you see how engaged your visitors are. If they arrive and leave without seeing other pages, then you will see a high bounce rate. A good bounce rate to aim for is below 50%.

3. Conduct market research online

Digital marketing for dentists should start with research to find out the size of the market and how much you need to spend to reach them. This includes keyword research and competitor research, and you should do it for the locations you are targeting.

First start with keyword research if you want to run pay per click (PPC) campaigns. There are free and paid tools that will help you with this and one of the best free ones is the Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads. This helps you find keywords to bid on and reach people as they search for a dental clinic in your location.

And you should use a competitor research tool to see what searches other dental clinics are appearing for. There are a few tools to choose from and a good one is SERanking and it will show what competitors are spending in their PPC campaigns.

4. Track your enquiries and leads

Running effective digital marketing campaigns for your dental practice is best when you track your leads and enquiries. It’s not possible to run successful campaigns without correct tracking, whatever channels or platforms you are using to promote your dental services.

Google Analytics provides you with goal tracking tools to track enquiries, bookings and leads. Using one of the templates, you can set this up easily and if you are running Google Ads campaigns, you can import these from Analytics to see what conversions you are getting for your campaigns, ads, and keywords.

5. Hire a PPC consultant

Hire a PPC consultant if you need help implementing and updating the features mentioned above. They will help you to setup and manage Google Ads campaigns to promote your dental clinic.

However, check that they have experience running Search campaigns and that they are certified and are a Google Partner. Also, check that they have marketing experience for dentists and have setup and managed PPC campaigns before.

Get in Touch

I’ve been setting up and managing marketing campaigns for dentists for many years and I’d be happy to help you create a strategy. Use the form below to contact me to discuss.