Spring is the time of new beginnings. With Spring comes the start of outdoor track, the baseball season, Oral Cancer Awareness Month, or National Family Wellness Month – all these make great online marketing opportunities. Dental offices can take advantage of them, too.
Here are a few spring marketing ideas for dental offices that you should consider adding to your spring dental marketing strategy – while simple, they can make a big difference for your dental practice – especially if it’s a new business. Read on!
1. Create or Engage with a Social Media Profile
Social media is the key to having a successful marketing campaign. In the days when everything is online, not having an online presence can be a deciding factor for someone making a decision whether to choose yours or another dental practice.
As a dental office, you can choose between a number of things to put on your social media. For example, you can focus on your clients’ success stories by showing pictures of before and after, which is actually a great opportunity to show potential patients the quality of your dental clinic business’s services. Existing patients can also benefit from your dental practice indulging in social media marketing, for example, by seeing what other services you offer. Another thing you can show on your social media are fun facts about dental health or shots from a normal day at a dental office.
When it comes to social media post ideas for dental service, there are many options. Which one you’ll focus on will depend mostly on how you want your dental office to be perceived by your target audience.
2. Focus on Local SEO targeting your keywords
If you want to gain some new patients for your dental care business this spring, then focusing on local SEO is your way to go. While other businesses that operate mostly online don’t need to focus on SEO involving geo-targeting, local businesses, so those who rely on clients from the area they are located in, local SEO is crucial.
Thanks to it, interested patients, looking for services located in your area will see your business as one of the first search results – and the higher you are in the search engine, the more likely a potential new patient searching for a dental practice in your area is to click on your website and become a prospective patient. According to a recent study done by Sistrix, the first Google search result gets an average click-through rate of 28.5%.¹
A great first step when it comes to this part of dental marketing would be to create a free Google Business account, also known as Google My Business, which allows you, for example, to list your dental practice in Google Maps, so that people with a hurting tooth or other dental issue looking for a dentist in your area can see your business as one of the results.
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Schedule Demo3. Invest in Google Ads and Facebook Ads
When creating a dental marketing plan, you need to take into account that there are many people who have probably never heard of your dental office. There could be several reasons for that – maybe they’ve never visited the area you operate in, or maybe they’ve been going to the same dentist for years, so they didn’t bother looking up other dental offices located in their vicinity.
If you wish to have more patients visiting your dental office and leaving their oral health in your hands, increasing brand awareness and targeting those people who have never engaged with your business can be exactly what you need – and you can easily do it with Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads are advertising platforms that are used for paid campaigns and ads. Both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages when it comes to using them for dental practice marketing. For instance, Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is great because it shows your website before the search results, increasing the chances of a potential patient clicking on your site. It also allows you to target specific keywords so that you don’t waste your resources on things that won’t have ROI, which is especially important for local dental practices. Facebook Ads, on the other hand, focus on something completely different – the potential patients’ profiles. It shows your ad to people who fit the description of your target audience.
You might be wondering which one is better for your dental patient care business – truthfully, both of them have their good and bad sides, which is why, if you have the resources, you should invest in both and see for yourself which one works for you and your dental marketing.
4. Consider Appointment Reminders
With spring cleaning being on the mind of most people, it is very easy to forget about other things, such as a dental appointment. This usually inconveniences both sides, as the client has to wait for the next available date, while the dentist is left without the patient to treat. Adding appointment reminders to your dental marketing plan will prevent such situations from happening, ensuring less stress for both your patients and you.
And if you want to make the reminders personalized, you can add, for example, current or upcoming events, such as 20th March, which is the World Day of Oral Health, or you can generalize it and send the same reminder for the whole month (e.g., April is National Oral Cancer Awareness Month, while May is National Family Wellness Month).
Aside from appointment reminders, you should also consider having appointment scheduling software, so that your patients can easily sign up for their next visit without having to call the office or visit it in person.
5. Use Email Marketing to celebrate spring with patients
Email marketing was probably one of the first digital marketing channels before social media became as widely used as they are today. Although there are some voices that claim that email marketing is slowly becoming less relevant, the truth is that it isn’t the case – email marketing is still very much needed and used. According to a report, in 2021 there were over 4 billion email users in the world.²
Email marketing allows you to create a connection between yourself and prospective patients/current patients in a way that social media platforms don’t – especially if you add a feature to your email marketing so that all the emails are personalized with the patient’s first name. It’s also a great way of introducing new services. Not to mention that it is one of the most budget-friendly dental marketing ideas, so if staying within a budget is something important to you, then email marketing might be just what you need.
6. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
There’s a reason why many marketing experts say that content is key. Creating a blog on your website is one of the best dental marketing ideas you could implement. It builds your dental office’s trustworthiness and helps your prospective patients make better decisions in terms of what kind of procedures they want to have done and whether their current dental health allows them to go ahead with them (for example, in some cases teeth whitening is not advised).
Good content as part of your dental marketing can help you stand out from the competition. If a person is hesitating between two dental offices but sees that one has a great website and a lot of informational materials with a number of related posts to each topic but the other doesn’t, they will most likely choose the first one. Additionally, content marketing can positively affect your other dental marketing efforts.
7. Create or Update Your Dental Website
As it was already mentioned, every business today should establish an online presence to attract new customers, or in the case of dental professionals, new patients. According to a report done by Visual Projects, over 76% of people will first look for a business online before they decide to visit it in person.³ If they can’t find you, they will be less likely to actually come to your dental practice and make an appointment in person.
A website is crucial for dental marketing because it acts as your business card – it provides your patients with all the information they might need to get in touch with you, such as your name, surname, dental office address, business phone number, and so on. You can also integrate reviews and ratings into your site. What’s more, a website gives you an excellent opportunity to showcase your services so that the people considering choosing your dental practice can see what they can expect.
To put it simply, a website ensures that a person visiting it has all the information they might need when deciding whether to go with your business. And if you want to do something fun for not only spring but also other seasons, you can adapt your website’s color scheme so that it matches the current one (for example, green for spring or yellow for summer).
Conclusion
Have you ever wondered whether marketing is something that can be used by dental offices? Although some people might think otherwise, dental offices can actually greatly benefit from having a good digital marketing strategy in place – marketing to dentists is as important as to other professionals and can greatly help them when it comes to getting new patients for their dental practice.
If you don’t have one already, spring is the perfect time to come up with one. Social media posts, emails, website content – all of this allows you to showcase your dental office. There is no limit when it comes to dental office marketing ideas – the only true limit is your imagination.
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