Why and How to Market Your Dental Practice with Paid Promotions

You wouldn’t hand a dentures advertisement to your teenage patients when they are in your office. Or, if you would, you’d be wasting your breath, money and paper.

But many small businesses – like dental and orthodontic practices – are doing the digital version of this every time they try to use social media to promote their practice or a specific service. And the ineffectiveness of this tactic is giving social media marketing efforts a bad rap.

There has been a misconception that advertising with social media (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) is a waste of time because the advertisements are easy to ignore; however, any advertising that is not aimed toward the proper audience is ignored.

Just like you wouldn’t target teens for dentures in your office, you shouldn’t be showing up promoting dentures to them on Facebook.

One of the benefits of social media advertising is that you can easily target a specific group of people because these networks gather information about an individual’s age, location, interests and lifestyle, which makes it easy for you to advertise to a specific age-group and your local community.

Social Media Marketing

Once you begin marketing on social media with interesting and informative posts, including blogs, you create a network of people that will continue to grow. As you continue adding blog posts and content to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, your visitors can share this information with their friends and family.

Although you will want to post information about your current specials and discounts, it is also important to post content that is not ‘dated.’ For example, a special may read, “For a Limited Time, Smith Dental is Offering a $200 Teeth Whitening Package for Only $150,” this is a dated post. An evergreen post is something that is relevant for a very long time. This type of content includes blog posts about something that does not change. For example, you could write a blog post that offers advice to new denture wearers (during the first week, eat soft foods like eggs, yogurt, cooked vegetables, etc.).

Local Happenings May Bring Unexpected Visitors to Your Page

Because you are interested in keeping your current patients and making yourself visible to potential patients, address local happenings. Writing about things going on in your community may draw someone to your page that needs dental treatment, but has not taken the time to find a dentist.

Create Contests – Everyone Wants to Win!

Creating online contests is inexpensive and fun. Ask your current dental patients to visit your page and enter your contests. This is a great way to promote your brand new webpage, Facebook page, Twitter or LinkedIn account to your patients.

There are numerous things you can give away, consider:

• Dinner for two at a popular local restaurant (avoid fast food)
• Tickets to a local festival, water park or theater
• A gift certificate
• A bicycle (especially practice is tailored to children)

Gentle Intervention Through Paid Promotions

Use social media to distribute interesting content and direct your current and potential dental patients to your practice’s website with advertising banners.

You can accomplish this in five simple steps:

1. Offer interesting evergreen content on your webpage (blog posts).
2. Share your webpage content on your social media sites (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn).
3. Keep track of your likes, shares and retweets to determine which of the content you posted is the most popular. For example, if you have a blog addressing root canals and another blog that addresses teeth whitening, if the teeth whitening blog is much more popular than the root canal blog is – advertise your teeth whitening services.
4. Use online ads to promote your most popular content. In the scenario above, that would be your teeth whitening services. You can do this using Facebook Promoted Posts, Twitter Promoted Tweets and LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.
5. Connect with the individuals (potential patients) who communicate through your new online ads.

Opportunities for paid promotions using social media have continued to expand, which is why this type of advertising is important and should not be ignored.

Learn more about how to grow your practice here.

To learn more about how Weave can assist you in building strong relationships with your patients and growing your practice, please visit our website and request your free, no-commitment demo.