Our October Practice of the Month — Manhattan Dental!

Congratulations to our October Practice of the Month — Manhattan Dental!

The team at Manhattan Dental (Manhattan, Kansas that is) always has new and exciting ways to involve their team members and patients in their social media efforts! They understand that the more people that participate in your practice’s social media, the more fun and effective it becomes. Practices that consistently give patients and fans a reason to participate — a promotion, campaign, or charitable event — see the best results in online visibility, reach and engagement.

By giving patients a reason to snap and share posts and photos on their own accounts, Manhattan Dental reaches more of the people most likely to become new patients.

Need some ideas on how to get your practice on board with social media? Take something from our interview with Manhattan Dental’s social media coordinator, Veronica Campbell, and apply it in your own office!

Q&A With Social Media Coordinator Veronica Campbell

(Responses edited for length and clarity.)

Since you started using social media in your practice, what has been the biggest surprise? The one thing you just weren’t expecting?

“How much our patients love seeing each team member on our Facebook page. They truly are interested in getting to know the team behind the curtain!”

How do you feel your social media efforts have most helped your patients?

“They get to know us on a more personal level, and they love participating in our small giveaways. Our social media also keeps them in the loop with any practice announcements or changes in business hours. Patients appreciate the opportunity to easily give us feedback, and we use what they tell us to provide a better experience.”

How has social media helped you grow your practice?

“It honestly has helped us become more united as a team. We come up with ideas together and get everyone participating and learning more about each other. Everyone performs better when we can have some fun time at work. And when we share that fun on social media, it really shows potential patients that going to the dentist can be fun, and not scary. We love using the printable materials, Social Signs and daily ideas we get from My Social Practice.”

What do you and your team do in the office to move forward your social media efforts?

“We have a monthly meeting we use to come up with ideas for giveaways, team and patient photo ops, and patient incentives for participating. Those incentives might be small gift cards or promotional cards from other businesses, or free services in our office.”

What advice would you give to a practice just starting out on social media?

“Definitely start out with My Social Practice. Go slow at first and be patient. Ideas will come and it WILL get easier to have more patient and team member interaction.”

Thanks for your stamp of approval and your insights Veronica! It’s a privilege for us to assist your great team in building a thriving practice.

So, even if you have little or no digital marketing experience, there’s never been a better time to start building your dental practice’s online presence. Request a free demo of our services and we’d love to show you step-by-step how to do it!

The post Our October Practice of the Month — Manhattan Dental! appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

How to Reach Ideal Potential Patients Using Facebook Audience Targeting

The founders of Facebook burned through millions of dollars for years, growing it into one of the most valuable marketing channels in the world. Now, you can use their incredible audience targeting tools to reach ideal potential patients!

There’s no getting around it: Building your dental practice on social media is now pay-to-play. Organic reach of business page posts continues to decline. However, with the price of entry come incredible opportunities to attract ideal new patients as well as retain the ones you have. Making small, smart investments in promoting your content to specific, targeted audiences is the new reality of social media marketing, and the faster you embrace it, the faster new patients can start finding you.

Even if your page is starting with a small number of fans, make audience targeting and paid social a central part of your online marketing strategy. As you create share-worthy content and invest in its promotion to the right people, you’ll build your online presence and create advocates for your practice. Start small and be consistent.

It’s time to bring your marketing strategy up to date with the new pay-to-play reality of social media. It provides incredible opportunities to connect with the people that will allow your practice to thrive, in ways that traditional advertising just can’t match.

4 Easy Steps to Getting Started With Facebook Audience Targeting

1. Create an ad account in your Facebook business manager

Open your Business Manager Settings. Select which Business Manager you’d like to work on. Under the People and Assets tab, click “Ad Accounts.” On the right side of the page, click “Add New Ad Accounts.” Choose “Create a new ad account.”

2. Create an audience of your current patients

Open your audience settings within your Facebook ad account. Click on “Create Audience” on the left and choose “Custom Audience.” Click on “Customer File.” You can then upload a CSV file of your patient email list, and it will match those email addresses with Facebook users. It’s the easiest, fastest way to target the people who will help your practice grow.

3. Choose Facebook posts suitable for promotion

Promote posts that showcase your practice culture and encourage sharing. These might be things like team photos, “Like Challenges,” contests and giveaways, or charity campaigns. Videos from your practice are also ideal for boosting. Also, be careful when boosting images with text on them, as Facebook may limit their reach to help provide a better user experience.

4. Promote content to your patients and ideal potential patients

Now, whenever you post something to your practice’s Facebook page using the Business Manager, you’ll see a “Boost Post” button in the bottom right. From there, you can boost the visibility of your post among your custom audiences, or using Facebook’s robust demographic and geographic targeting options. Promote posts to your fans, their friends, and locals, (especially parents). Start by boosting your practice’s best post of the week for $5 and see how much it enhances its reach. From there, decide how much your marketing budget will allow. The most important thing is that you remain consistent.

Need help creating posts that you can promote to your practice’s target audiences? My Social Practice clients have access to the world’s largest library of dental-themed social content and post ideas! Get a free demo of our Publisher tool today, and download our free ebook below for more strategies and actionable advice!

The post How to Reach Ideal Potential Patients Using Facebook Audience Targeting appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

How to Reach Ideal Potential Patients Using Facebook Audience Targeting

The founders of Facebook burned through millions of dollars for years, growing it into one of the most valuable marketing channels in the world. Now, you can use their incredible audience targeting tools to reach ideal potential patients!

There’s no getting around it: Building your dental practice on social media is now pay-to-play. Organic reach of business page posts continues to decline. However, with the price of entry come incredible opportunities to attract ideal new patients as well as retain the ones you have. Making small, smart investments in promoting your content to specific, targeted audiences is the new reality of social media marketing, and the faster you embrace it, the faster new patients can start finding you.

Even if your page is starting with a small number of fans, make audience targeting and paid social a central part of your online marketing strategy. As you create share-worthy content and invest in its promotion to the right people, you’ll build your online presence and create advocates for your practice. Start small and be consistent.

It’s time to bring your marketing strategy up to date with the new pay-to-play reality of social media. It provides incredible opportunities to connect with the people that will allow your practice to thrive, in ways that traditional advertising just can’t match.

4 Easy Steps to Getting Started With Facebook Audience Targeting

1. Create an ad account in your Facebook business manager

Open your Business Manager Settings. Select which Business Manager you’d like to work on. Under the People and Assets tab, click “Ad Accounts.” On the right side of the page, click “Add New Ad Accounts.” Choose “Create a new ad account.”

2. Create an audience of your current patients

Open your audience settings within your Facebook ad account. Click on “Create Audience” on the left and choose “Custom Audience.” Click on “Customer File.” You can then upload a CSV file of your patient email list, and it will match those email addresses with Facebook users. It’s the easiest, fastest way to target the people who will help your practice grow.

3. Choose Facebook posts suitable for promotion

Promote posts that showcase your practice culture and encourage sharing. These might be things like team photos, “Like Challenges,” contests and giveaways, or charity campaigns. Videos from your practice are also ideal for boosting. Also, be careful when boosting images with text on them, as Facebook may limit their reach to help provide a better user experience.

4. Promote content to your patients and ideal potential patients

Now, whenever you post something to your practice’s Facebook page using the Business Manager, you’ll see a “Boost Post” button in the bottom right. From there, you can boost the visibility of your post among your custom audiences, or using Facebook’s robust demographic and geographic targeting options. Promote posts to your fans, their friends, and locals, (especially parents). Start by boosting your practice’s best post of the week for $5 and see how much it enhances its reach. From there, decide how much your marketing budget will allow. The most important thing is that you remain consistent.

Need help creating posts that you can promote to your practice’s target audiences? My Social Practice clients have access to the world’s largest library of dental-themed social content and post ideas! Get a free demo of our Publisher tool today, and download our free ebook below for more strategies and actionable advice!

The post How to Reach Ideal Potential Patients Using Facebook Audience Targeting appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

How to Reach Ideal Potential Patients Using Facebook Audience Targeting

The founders of Facebook burned through millions of dollars for years, growing it into one of the most valuable marketing channels in the world. Now, you can use their incredible audience targeting tools to reach ideal potential patients!

There’s no getting around it: Building your dental practice on social media is now pay-to-play. Organic reach of business page posts continues to decline. However, with the price of entry come incredible opportunities to attract ideal new patients as well as retain the ones you have. Making small, smart investments in promoting your content to specific, targeted audiences is the new reality of social media marketing, and the faster you embrace it, the faster new patients can start finding you.

Even if your page is starting with a small number of fans, make audience targeting and paid social a central part of your online marketing strategy. As you create share-worthy content and invest in its promotion to the right people, you’ll build your online presence and create advocates for your practice. Start small and be consistent.

It’s time to bring your marketing strategy up to date with the new pay-to-play reality of social media. It provides incredible opportunities to connect with the people that will allow your practice to thrive, in ways that traditional advertising just can’t match.

4 Easy Steps to Getting Started With Facebook Audience Targeting

1. Create an ad account in your Facebook business manager

Open your Business Manager Settings. Select which Business Manager you’d like to work on. Under the People and Assets tab, click “Ad Accounts.” On the right side of the page, click “Add New Ad Accounts.” Choose “Create a new ad account.”

2. Create an audience of your current patients

Open your audience settings within your Facebook ad account. Click on “Create Audience” on the left and choose “Custom Audience.” Click on “Customer File.” You can then upload a CSV file of your patient email list, and it will match those email addresses with Facebook users. It’s the easiest, fastest way to target the people who will help your practice grow.

3. Choose Facebook posts suitable for promotion

Promote posts that showcase your practice culture and encourage sharing. These might be things like team photos, “Like Challenges,” contests and giveaways, or charity campaigns. Videos from your practice are also ideal for boosting. Also, be careful when boosting images with text on them, as Facebook may limit their reach to help provide a better user experience.

4. Promote content to your patients and ideal potential patients

Now, whenever you post something to your practice’s Facebook page using the Business Manager, you’ll see a “Boost Post” button in the bottom right. From there, you can boost the visibility of your post among your custom audiences, or using Facebook’s robust demographic and geographic targeting options. Promote posts to your fans, their friends, and locals, (especially parents). Start by boosting your practice’s best post of the week for $5 and see how much it enhances its reach. From there, decide how much your marketing budget will allow. The most important thing is that you remain consistent.

Need help creating posts that you can promote to your practice’s target audiences? My Social Practice clients have access to the world’s largest library of dental-themed social content and post ideas! Get a free demo of our Publisher tool today, and download our free ebook below for more strategies and actionable advice!

The post How to Reach Ideal Potential Patients Using Facebook Audience Targeting appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

Promote Your Dental Products and Services on Social Media — Without Annoying Followers

You worked hard to build a social media fan base for your dental practice, and the last thing you want to do is push them away with annoying advertising. Here’s how you can promote products and services to your fans — and stay on their good side!

We’re all being bombarded by marketing messages all the time. Most of it we simply ignore, but some online advertising pushes our buttons in just the right way that causes us to unsubscribe, unfollow, and find any way we can to stop further communication from the offender. It’s no wonder that the number of people using online ad blockers is skyrocketing, now in the hundreds of millions.

So it’s understandable when our client dental practices are concerned about creating posts that could be perceived as advertisements, and losing fans for it. It’s true — posting nothing but “buy, buy, buy” or “call now for an appointment” on your social media pages is a quick way to get a patient or fan to disengage.

Nevertheless, social media is an excellent platform to generate interest in products and services you offer in your dental practice. It just requires a little smarter approach — one based on personal connection and empowering patients. In fact, it can be even more effective than traditional advertising because when you sell something through education and building trust, you not only create a sale, you increase the likelihood of that patient becoming an advocate for your practice.

Here are a few ways you can promote your dental practice’s products and services on social media while avoiding being perceived as pushy or annoying:

1. Inform Patients and Prospective Patients About What’s New and Interesting in Dentistry

Unfortunately, many dentists think talking about dentistry on social media would bore their fans. Not true! Modern dentistry is incredibly fascinating! Share about your practice’s latest equipment, products, and procedures in a way that explains how they improve patients’ lives. This dental team member demonstrated how their new whitening procedure let her brighten her smile on her lunch break, and fans loved it:

2. Demonstrate Your Commitment to Patient Education and Providing the Best Treatment

By giving patients and fans details about your products and services, you empower them to make the right choices for their family’s dental health. Share your thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of treatments you provide, and what options patients have to address dental issues. This practice created a video about the proper use and oral health benefits of water flossers:

3. Share Your Love for Dentistry and Meeting New Patients

If getting dental treatment has been at the back of a patient or fan’s mind for a while, all it might take is a little friendly encouragement to motivate them to action. Create posts that showcase your welcoming, caring practice culture, and invite prospective patients to give you a call.

Patient-Focused Product Promotion Builds Relationships

In most cases, it’s not the mere presence of advertisement that turns people off. It’s advertisement combined with the perception that a business is only interested in making a sale, rather than building a relationship. Social media gives you a unique opportunity to strengthen and maintain relationships, so that when you do occasionally promote a product or service, patients and prospective patients know that you have their best interest in mind.

My Social Practice offers a ton of free downloadable materials to help you get started with social media in your practice! Learn more and schedule a demo today!

The post Promote Your Dental Products and Services on Social Media — Without Annoying Followers appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

6 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is an Easy Win for Dentists

Email has been around longer than the internet itself — but its marketing effectiveness continues to grow! Here’s how a smart email strategy for your dental practice helps you retain and motivate patients.

With so many new and sophisticated apps and social platforms, the humble email sometimes gets pushed aside as an old and obsolete marketing tool. Nothing could be further from the truth! A strategic approach to emailing your current patients should be a cornerstone of your dental practice’s digital marketing plan. Here are a 6 reasons why:

1. Virtually Everyone Uses Email, and Checks It Often

Over 90 percent of adult internet users in the U.S. regularly use email! And it’s not just the older age groups — over 75 percent of teens report checking their email frequently as well. With the rise of mobile devices, we carry our email inboxes in our pockets all day, and often check them the moment we get a notification.

How can this help you grow your practice? When you send valuable, engaging content to your patient email list, there’s a higher chance of them actually seeing it than if you were to send it through just about any other medium. Your patient email list is a direct channel to the people who care about your practice and team, and would recommend you to family and friends — if you strengthen your relationship with them. Email can be a big part of that!

2. Email Offers Better Organic Reach Than Social Media

Speaking of getting through to the people who can help you grow your business, you’ve probably noticed it’s getting harder to do that on social media. All major social media platforms are now using algorithms to determine which posts to show users, and unless you promote your practice’s posts, your content is only reaching a small fraction of your follower base. Studies estimate that on Facebook, un-boosted posts from business pages only reach about 2 percent of their fans!

While connecting with patients and prospective patients on social media is certainly worth the effort, sending an email to a well-tended patient email list allows you to reach 90 to 100 percent of those people, unobstructed by content algorithms.

3. Emails Motivate People to Act

Digital marketing tools have different strengths. Social media is good at establishing an online presence, building a brand and connecting with people on a personal level. Online reviews grow your practice’s visibility and reputation. And email is an excellent vehicle for telling patients and prospective patients about products and promotions you’re offering that could improve their lives. People expect emails to be a little more “salesy” — whereas on social media too much promotional content could cause someone to click the unfollow button.

A quick email telling your patients about a whitening deal or referral bonus you’re offering could be just the thing to motivate them to take action.

4. Email Offers Outstanding ROI

Gone are the days of needing to spend thousands of dollars on mass mailers to promote your practice — email marketing gives you the tools to create and send high-quality content to thousands of addresses at little to no cost.

Need an email provider? MailChimp allows you to create and send 12,000 emails a month for free.

5. Email Engagement Statistics Are Easily Measurable

Using a platform like MailChimp, you can see exactly how many people are receiving, opening, and interacting with your emails. This gives you an easy way to see what’s popular with your patients and prospective patients, and what motivates them to action.

6. Content-Rich Emails Build Your Other Social Media Pages

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your social media pages is to create a monthly email newsletter that features one or two of your best posts from each page, and invite readers to stay in touch by following. Showcase your team’s personality and practice culture, and invite fans to participate in campaigns and contests!

Your patient email list is one of your greatest marketing resources, and only using it to send appointment reminders ignores so much of its potential. We at My Social Practice would love to show you step-by-step how to help new patients find you through email and other digital marketing strategies! Request a free demo today!

The post 6 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is an Easy Win for Dentists appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

Promote Your Dental Products and Services on Social Media — Without Annoying Followers

You worked hard to build a social media fan base for your dental practice, and the last thing you want to do is push them away with annoying advertising. Here’s how you can promote products and services to your fans — and stay on their good side!

We’re all being bombarded by marketing messages all the time. Most of it we simply ignore, but some online advertising pushes our buttons in just the right way that causes us to unsubscribe, unfollow, and find any way we can to stop further communication from the offender. It’s no wonder that the number of people using online ad blockers is skyrocketing, now in the hundreds of millions.

So it’s understandable when our client dental practices are concerned about creating posts that could be perceived as advertisements, and losing fans for it. It’s true — posting nothing but “buy, buy, buy” or “call now for an appointment” on your social media pages is a quick way to get a patient or fan to disengage.

Nevertheless, social media is an excellent platform to generate interest in products and services you offer in your dental practice. It just requires a little smarter approach — one based on personal connection and empowering patients. In fact, it can be even more effective than traditional advertising because when you sell something through education and building trust, you not only create a sale, you increase the likelihood of that patient becoming an advocate for your practice.

Here are a few ways you can promote your dental practice’s products and services on social media while avoiding being perceived as pushy or annoying:

1. Inform Patients and Prospective Patients About What’s New and Interesting in Dentistry

Unfortunately, many dentists think talking about dentistry on social media would bore their fans. Not true! Modern dentistry is incredibly fascinating! Share about your practice’s latest equipment, products, and procedures in a way that explains how they improve patients’ lives. This dental team member demonstrated how their new whitening procedure let her brighten her smile on her lunch break, and fans loved it:

2. Demonstrate Your Commitment to Patient Education and Providing the Best Treatment

By giving patients and fans details about your products and services, you empower them to make the right choices for their family’s dental health. Share your thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of treatments you provide, and what options patients have to address dental issues. This practice created a video about the proper use and oral health benefits of water flossers:

3. Share Your Love for Dentistry and Meeting New Patients

If getting dental treatment has been at the back of a patient or fan’s mind for a while, all it might take is a little friendly encouragement to motivate them to action. Create posts that showcase your welcoming, caring practice culture, and invite prospective patients to give you a call.

Patient-Focused Product Promotion Builds Relationships

In most cases, it’s not the mere presence of advertisement that turns people off. It’s advertisement combined with the perception that a business is only interested in making a sale, rather than building a relationship. Social media gives you a unique opportunity to strengthen and maintain relationships, so that when you do occasionally promote a product or service, patients and prospective patients know that you have their best interest in mind.

My Social Practice offers a ton of free downloadable materials to help you get started with social media in your practice! Learn more and schedule a demo today!

The post Promote Your Dental Products and Services on Social Media — Without Annoying Followers appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

6 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is an Easy Win for Dentists

Email has been around longer than the internet itself — but its marketing effectiveness continues to grow! Here’s how a smart email strategy for your dental practice helps you retain and motivate patients.

With so many new and sophisticated apps and social platforms, the humble email sometimes gets pushed aside as an old and obsolete marketing tool. Nothing could be further from the truth! A strategic approach to emailing your current patients should be a cornerstone of your dental practice’s digital marketing plan. Here are a 6 reasons why:

1. Virtually Everyone Uses Email, and Checks It Often

Over 90 percent of adult internet users in the U.S. regularly use email! And it’s not just the older age groups — over 75 percent of teens report checking their email frequently as well. With the rise of mobile devices, we carry our email inboxes in our pockets all day, and often check them the moment we get a notification.

How can this help you grow your practice? When you send valuable, engaging content to your patient email list, there’s a higher chance of them actually seeing it than if you were to send it through just about any other medium. Your patient email list is a direct channel to the people who care about your practice and team, and would recommend you to family and friends — if you strengthen your relationship with them. Email can be a big part of that!

2. Email Offers Better Organic Reach Than Social Media

Speaking of getting through to the people who can help you grow your business, you’ve probably noticed it’s getting harder to do that on social media. All major social media platforms are now using algorithms to determine which posts to show users, and unless you promote your practice’s posts, your content is only reaching a small fraction of your follower base. Studies estimate that on Facebook, un-boosted posts from business pages only reach about 2 percent of their fans!

While connecting with patients and prospective patients on social media is certainly worth the effort, sending an email to a well-tended patient email list allows you to reach 90 to 100 percent of those people, unobstructed by content algorithms.

3. Emails Motivate People to Act

Digital marketing tools have different strengths. Social media is good at establishing an online presence, building a brand and connecting with people on a personal level. Online reviews grow your practice’s visibility and reputation. And email is an excellent vehicle for telling patients and prospective patients about products and promotions you’re offering that could improve their lives. People expect emails to be a little more “salesy” — whereas on social media too much promotional content could cause someone to click the unfollow button.

A quick email telling your patients about a whitening deal or referral bonus you’re offering could be just the thing to motivate them to take action.

4. Email Offers Outstanding ROI

Gone are the days of needing to spend thousands of dollars on mass mailers to promote your practice — email marketing gives you the tools to create and send high-quality content to thousands of addresses at little to no cost.

Need an email provider? MailChimp allows you to create and send 12,000 emails a month for free.

5. Email Engagement Statistics Are Easily Measurable

Using a platform like MailChimp, you can see exactly how many people are receiving, opening, and interacting with your emails. This gives you an easy way to see what’s popular with your patients and prospective patients, and what motivates them to action.

6. Content-Rich Emails Build Your Other Social Media Pages

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your social media pages is to create a monthly email newsletter that features one or two of your best posts from each page, and invite readers to stay in touch by following. Showcase your team’s personality and practice culture, and invite fans to participate in campaigns and contests!

Your patient email list is one of your greatest marketing resources, and only using it to send appointment reminders ignores so much of its potential. We at My Social Practice would love to show you step-by-step how to help new patients find you through email and other digital marketing strategies! Request a free demo today!

The post 6 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is an Easy Win for Dentists appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

Promote Your Dental Products and Services on Social Media — Without Annoying Followers

You worked hard to build a social media fan base for your dental practice, and the last thing you want to do is push them away with annoying advertising. Here’s how you can promote products and services to your fans — and stay on their good side!

We’re all being bombarded by marketing messages all the time. Most of it we simply ignore, but some online advertising pushes our buttons in just the right way that causes us to unsubscribe, unfollow, and find any way we can to stop further communication from the offender. It’s no wonder that the number of people using online ad blockers is skyrocketing, now in the hundreds of millions.

So it’s understandable when our client dental practices are concerned about creating posts that could be perceived as advertisements, and losing fans for it. It’s true — posting nothing but “buy, buy, buy” or “call now for appointment” on your social media pages is a quick way to get a patient or fan to disengage.

Nevertheless, social media is an excellent platform to generate interest in products and services you offer in your dental practice. It just requires a little smarter approach — one based on personal connection and empowering patients. In fact, it can be even more effective than traditional advertising because when you sell something through education and building trust, you not only create a sale, you increase the likelihood of that patient becoming an advocate for your practice.

Here are a few ways you can promote your dental practice’s products and services on social media while avoiding being perceived as pushy or annoying:

1. Inform Patients and Prospective Patients About What’s New and Interesting in Dentistry

Unfortunately, many dentists think talking about dentistry on social media would bore their fans. Not true! Modern dentistry is incredibly fascinating! Share about your practice’s latest equipment, products, and procedures in a way that explains how they improve patients’ lives. This dental team member demonstrated how their new whitening procedure let her brighten her smile on her lunch break, and fans loved it:

2. Demonstrate Your Commitment to Patient Education and Providing the Best Treatment

By giving patients and fans details about your products and services, you empower them to make the right choices for their family’s dental health. Share your thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of treatments you provide, and what options patients have to address dental issues. This practice created a video about the proper use and oral health benefits of water flossers:

3. Share Your Love for Dentistry and Meeting New Patients

If getting dental treatment has been at the back of a patient or fan’s mind for a while, all it might take is a little friendly encouragement to motivate them to action. Create posts that showcase your welcoming, caring practice culture, and invite prospective patients to give you a call.

Patient-Focused Product Promotion Builds Relationships

In most cases, it’s not the mere presence of advertisement that turns people off. It’s advertisement combined with the perception that a business is only interested in making a sale, rather than building a relationship. Social media gives you a unique opportunity to strengthen and maintain relationships, so that when you do occasionally promote a product or service, patients and prospective patients know that you have their best interest in mind.

My Social Practice offers a ton of free downloadable materials to help you get started with social media in your practice! Learn more and schedule a demo today!

The post Promote Your Dental Products and Services on Social Media — Without Annoying Followers appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.

6 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is an Easy Win for Dentists

Email has been around longer than the internet itself — but its marketing effectiveness continues to grow! Here’s how a smart email strategy for your dental practice helps you retain and motivate patients.

With so many new and sophisticated apps and social platforms, the humble email sometimes gets pushed aside as an old and obsolete marketing tool. Nothing could be further from the truth! A strategic approach to emailing your current patients should be a cornerstone of your dental practice’s digital marketing plan. Here are a 6 reasons why:

1. Virtually Everyone Uses Email, and Checks It Often

Over 90 percent of adult internet users in the U.S. regularly use email! And it’s not just the older age groups — over 75 percent of teens report checking their email frequently as well. With the rise of mobile devices, we carry our email inboxes in our pockets all day, and often check them the moment we get a notification.

How can this help you grow your practice? When you send valuable, engaging content to your patient email list, there’s a higher chance of them actually seeing it than if you were to send it through just about any other medium. Your patient email list is a direct channel to the people who care about your practice and team, and would recommend you to family and friends — if you strengthen your relationship with them. Email can be a big part of that!

2. Email Offers Better Organic Reach Than Social Media

Speaking of getting through to the people who can help you grow your business, you’ve probably noticed it’s getting harder to do that on social media. All major social media platforms are now using algorithms to determine which posts to show users, and unless you promote your practice’s posts, your content is only reaching a small fraction of your follower base. Studies estimate that on Facebook, un-boosted posts from business pages only reach about 2 percent of their fans!

While connecting with patients and prospective patients on social media is certainly worth the effort, sending an email to a well-tended patient email list allows you to reach 90 to 100 percent of those people, unobstructed by content algorithms.

3. Emails Motivate People to Act

Digital marketing tools have different strengths. Social media is good at establishing an online presence, building a brand and connecting with people on a personal level. Online reviews grow your practice’s visibility and reputation. And email is an excellent vehicle for telling patients and prospective patients about products and promotions you’re offering that could improve their lives. People expect emails to be a little more “salesy” — whereas on social media too much promotional content could cause someone to click the unfollow button.

A quick email telling your patients about a whitening deal or referral bonus you’re offering could be just the thing to motivate them to take action.

4. Email Offers Outstanding ROI

Gone are the days of needing to spend thousands of dollars on mass mailers to promote your practice — email marketing gives you the tools to create and send high-quality content to thousands of addresses at little to no cost.

Need an email provider? MailChimp allows you to create and send 12,000 emails a month for free.

5. Email Engagement Statistics Are Easily Measurable

Using a platform like MailChimp, you can see exactly how many people are receiving, opening, and interacting with your emails. This gives you an easy way to see what’s popular with your patients and prospective patients, and what motivates them to action.

6. Content-Rich Emails Build Your Other Social Media Pages

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your social media pages is to create a monthly email newsletter that features one or two of your best posts from each page, and invite readers to stay in touch by following. Showcase your team’s personality and practice culture, and invite fans to participate in campaigns and contests!

Your patient email list is one of your greatest marketing resources, and only using it to send appointment reminders ignores so much of its potential. We at My Social Practice would love to show you step-by-step how to help new patients find you through email and other digital marketing strategies! Request a free demo today!

The post 6 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is an Easy Win for Dentists appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing For Dentists, Orthodontists, & Optometrists.