Why Dentists Must Embrace Internet Marketing

The rules of marketing across all industries have changed dramatically in the last few years, including dentistry. It is no longer enough to simply have an ad in the yellow pages, mail out a few thousand postcards each month and rely on referrals from current patients.

First, consumers (prospective patients) buying habits have changed. Primarily due to the increased popularity and accessibility of the internet. Today’s consumer is more educated than ever, more demanding than ever and less tolerant of traditional interruption based advertising.

This “push” style advertising (newspaper ads, direct mail, email marketing, TV commercials, telemarketing calls, etc.) is becoming less effective every year. With all the information available at their fingertips on the internet, consumers don’t want to be interrupted with advertising messages, they want to seek out and find what they want when they want it – on their terms. So, you need to be positioned in such a way that when they are searching for a new dentist, they find you.

Internet Dental Marketing: How to Leverage the Internet to Get More Patients

With a well executed internet marketing strategy, a dentist can achieve far better results on a much lower budget than his competitors who are trying to market themselves using traditional offline methods.

Dental marketing on the internet may include strategies such as:

1. Blogging
2. Dental Microsites
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
4. Online Video Marketing
5. Online Press Releases
6. Google Maps Optimization – also known as Google Local Business Center or Google Places

The Secret Weapon of Today’s Most Successful Dentists – Multi-Phase Internet Marketing

We spend a lot of time talking to dentists about marketing, studying dental marketing and implementing marketing strategies for dentists throughout the country and I can assure you, the most successful dentists in every market in the country are leveraging the internet.

This is not to say they aren’t also doing some offline marketing using more traditional methods, in fact although we strictly provide online marketing, we strongly encourage our clients to also utilize unique (not “me too”) offline marketing strategies.

There are simply too many people who use the internet (especially Google) when looking for a new dentist to not have a strong online presence. Take a look at the numbers below to get an idea of what you’re missing if you aren’t properly positioned online:

* Note: these numbers represent the average number of searches on Google (does not include Yahoo, Bing, or the other search engines) each month for only the term “dentist”. They do not include other dentistry related phrases (dental implants, cosmetic dentist, teeth whitening, etc) that are also being searched.

As you can see, you cannot afford to ignore the internet in your marketing efforts, doing so puts you at a huge disadvantage to your competition.

Sign up for a no-cost, no-obligation Dental Website Marketing Audit today to get started on your way to becoming one of the dentists in your area who are dominating the internet and growing their practices.