The Pitfalls of Online Dental Marketing

When you went to dental school, their idea of teaching you to be a successful dentist did not include teaching you to be an effective marketer. That’s something every successful dentist has to pick up once they’re in practice. Fortunately, if you were smart enough to make it into practice, you can learn the basics of successful online marketing.

In this Age of the Internet, it’s a rare business that doesn’t have a website. But having a website —even a pretty decent one—doesn’t guarantee you’ll get new patients from it. There are certain errors you can make that will significantly reduce your success in online marketing. Some of the pitfalls to avoid in dental marketing are given below.

1. Not measuring results.

Let’s say you get a hundred calls a day from your website. Sounds fabulous, right? But what if none of the callers arrive in the practice? Your staff are tied up answering the phone, but all those calls do nothing for your bottom line. You’ve got to measure the right results for your marketing efforts—those results which actually benefit your practice. Ultimately, that means patients who arrive for service and pay. If you’re paying an outside company to maintain your website, get you onto the first page of Google search results, or run pay-per-click advertising, make sure you’re monitoring the right results. The company may give you glowing reports on how many clicks or visitors came to your site, but the right measure is how many new patients walked through the door. Correct measurement will always guide you in the right direction, no matter what marketing activity you’re evaluating.

2. Attracting the wrong kind of patients.

Your dental specialty, your staff and your equipment, all suit you to a specific kind of patient. Your online marketing should attract the type of patients you desire. If you are an oral surgeon, you’re not looking for a lot of pediatric patients. Some dentists don’t want to attract a lot of emergencies. You need patients within a reasonable driving distance who are qualified to buy your services. The company helping you with online marketing should intensively interview you so they understand the kind of patients that make you viable and what that kind of patient thinks, wants and needs. And then their efforts should bring in that type of patient.

3. Suddenly trashing your old website and domain name.

If you want a better website, leave your old one up while you acquire a new domain name and develop that better site. You’re going to want to leave that old site up at least until the new one is pulling in plenty of business and maybe even longer. Otherwise, you could find yourself in a drought with no rain in sight. An older domain name has greater value than your new one just by virtue of having been observed by Google thousands of times.

4. Unknowingly using duplicate content.

There are companies specializing in dental websites who go from practice to practice, selling each one a new site that has exactly the same text as all the other practices they’re selling to. They’ve generated a series of generic dentistry articles and put the same articles on every site. Or worse yet, they copy and paste content from a website like the ADA. For your site to rank well on Google, it must have completely unique content.

5. Neglecting your online presence.

Probably the worst sin of online marketing is simply neglecting your online presence. In today’s world, there are a large number of online profiles which have to be maintained for each practice. These include your website and blog, Facebook, Google, Zocdoc, Yelp, Healthgrades, etc. No practice can afford to ignore these or give them half-hearted attention. They are simple to fix, but do require a consistent investment of effort and resources.

Effective online marketing is a “make-break” for today’s dental practice. Everyone needs to know the key actions to take to be successful online. And even if you are technologically challenged, or have no understanding of marketing, you can still find a marketing agency that can help. The key is just to make it a priority for your practice and consistently work toward building it up.

Hopefully this article helps you avoid some of the pitfalls and speeds your progress to online marketing success.