When marketing a dental practice it’s all about reducing risk. If a patient buys a product in a local store they can always take it back if it doesn’t work or they don’t like it, but if they have their new teeth with new and they don’t like them… oops there’s no going back!
This means that a purchase from you at, say £5,000 comes with considerably more risk than a purchase for, say £40,000 on a new car – if the new car is not up to scratch it can be taken back, so overall risk is lowered.
This basic difference between marketing a product (the car) and a service (dentistry) is, in my opinion often overlooked, so here are my 5 top tips to reducing rick potential new patients which will enable more local people to come to your practice.
Write a blog
If you set up a blog the first thing is that Google loves them so you get a nice boost to your website rankings (assuming your blog is part of your website*). Your blog can then also become a great portal to help the local people with their dental health advice, simply hand out your dental tips to keeping teeth healthy.
Have your photo on your website
We buy from people we like, so a photo helps a person to like you and engage with you – it doesn’t matter if you’re ugly (hey I’m no Brad Pitt) but people love to see who they are talking to, so use your photo on your business cards and all your marketing.
Have a video on your home page
This is the logical next step from the photo, again it allows people to see who you are, get a feeling for what the practice is like and feel like they know you. If you have a really informational and welcoming video you will definitely see conversions go up – my recommendation is to embed the video from YouTube (again for a little boost from Google) and have the video about 2.5 minutes max.
Recommendations for videos:
Jem Patel – JSP Media Group
Engage with people on social media
Once again this shows you are approachable and nice. We buy from people we like, and we like people we are like. So help potential patients to like you by showing that you are just like them!
Have video testimonials
This is so, so, so important. They give what we call social proof, as it’s not you saying you are great, but happy customers. I recommend as many testimonials as you can, uploaded to YouTube and embedded on your website, and shared on Facebook and Twitter.
So there you have it, my top 5 tips… what tips would you add?
*yes, yes I know this blog is NOT part of my website so I’m not taking my own advice – this blog has been in operation for a few years now and is in the process of being redesigned and migrated to my own website – so there 🙂
