5 Things Your Practice Website MUST Have for Dental Marketing Success

Your dental practice website is an integral part of your online presence and dental marketing efforts. Here’s how you can ensure it makes the right impression.

For businesses today, including your dental practice, a homepage is just as important (if not more so) than an actual physical storefront. With just a momentary glance, today’s consumers assume volumes about your practice, your team, and even the quality of your treatment.

If your website is outdated, difficult to navigate, or has poor design direction (or no direction at all), potential patients will also see your practice as outdated and inconvenient.

If it’s cleanly designed, content-rich and mobile-friendly, your practice website can begin to build relationships of trust with potential patients before they even give you a call. It’s a central part of your online presence and dental marketing efforts, and can be one of your best tools to attract, educate, and retain the people who will most help your practice thrive.

Here are five essential things you need in your practice website to make it a truly effective dental marketing tool:

5 Dental Marketing Essentials for Your Practice Website

1. Intuitive, Mobile-Friendly Design

People will find your website using a variety of devices, from phones and tablets to laptops and widescreen desktops. With over half of all internet searches coming from mobile devices, you need to make sure that however potential patients interact with your site, it’s easy to navigate and allows them to quickly find what they need.

Of all of the elements mentioned in this post, this is where it’s most worth hiring some professional help. Unless you’re both a dentist AND a web design expert, don’t waste your time trying to hammer a free website template into something you can use, and don’t trust this essential part of your online presence to your nephew who “knows some code.”

Make the investment in a custom-designed practice website that showcases what makes you special and enhances your dental marketing efforts.

2. Emphasis on the Human Side of Your Practice

Think nobody’s going to look at your “About Us” page? Think again! The About page is typically one of the most-visited parts of a dental website. Take advantage of this valuable dental marketing opportunity to build trust and share your practice’s story.

Your About page is a great way to introduce potential patients to your team and practice culture. Having an individual photo and short bio for each team member creates connections with potential patients — before they ever call or visit your practice! Update these bios periodically or as team members join and leave.

The bottom line is people like to do business with people they know. And in dentistry, where relationships are especially important, a strategically personal online presence offers doctors and their teams unprecedented opportunities to connect with patients and prospective patients on a meaningful level.

3. Consistent New Content

What do we mean by “consistency” in your online presence? Primarily, it’s making regular attempts to connect authentically with your audience by posting high-quality content, such as blog posts, and responding to readers’ interaction.

There’s a degree of transference that takes place in patients’ minds with practices that are consistently provide new content in their dental marketing efforts. The assumption is that if you’re consistent and reliable in providing relevant, educational, honest human content through your online presence, then you also likely provide the same consistency and leading-edge standards in everything you do — including the dental materials and procedures you use, the patient benefit-driven technologies you ascribe to, the way you respond and treat people, the CE you attend, etc.

My Social Practice makes it easy by providing subscribers a new, professionally written dental blog post every week.

4. Highly Visible Social Proof

What others are saying online about your practice has an enormous influence on the level of trust you inspire in existing patients and prospective new patients. In the case of your dental practice, building this “social proof” is one of the best things you can do attract new patients and retain the ones of you have.

One of the easiest ways to provide social proof in a highly visible way is to feature patient reviews on your website from popular reviews platforms such as Facebook and Google.

With a website from My Social Practice, it’s simple to feature positive patient reviews where people will see them, and negative reviews are immediately passed on to you so you can follow up with the patient.

5. Calls to Action

Ask yourself what you want people to do when they visit each page of your website, and then give them a clear path to do it that is immediately visible. For example, upon reaching your homepage, do you want people to make an appointment? Then make sure there is a button in the top section of your homepage that says “Request an Appointment.”

Or if one of your pages is explaining how you do smile makeovers, place a button that says “Schedule Free Consultation” perhaps in the middle and at the end.

The more quickly and easily you can allow someone to progress from learning to taking action, the more effective your dental marketing will be.

Get a Gorgeous, Blazing-Fast Website for Your Dental Practice

Whether you don’t yet have a website or you’re looking to upgrade, My Social Practice provides a turnkey dental website solution that will make your practice look fantastic. Learn more and request a demo to see how a gorgeous, blazing-fast dental website will help turn your online presence into your best tool for attracting and retaining ideal patients.

The post 5 Things Your Practice Website MUST Have for Dental Marketing Success appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing for Dental & Dental Specialty Practices.

Our March Practice of the Month — Wheeler Orthodontics!

Congratulations to our March Practice of the Month — Wheeler Orthodontics!

It’s called social media marketing for a reason — the more people you involve, the more fun and effective it becomes! Practices that understand this and participate in social media as a team consistently see the best results in online visibility, reach and engagement.

Wheeler Orthodontics is a great example of how combining smart post ideas with a strong practice culture creates a compelling social media presence that patients want to be a part of. It allows them to build relationships and maintain top-of-mind awareness, making it more likely for patients to introduce the practice to family and friends.

We reached out to Jacquelin Wheeler, social media marketing coordinator for the practice, for some insight into what makes their social media strategy so effective. Take something to apply in your own practice!

Ready for a quick demo of our social media service? Fill out the form below.

 

Q&A With Marketing Coordinator Jacquelin Wheeler

(Responses edited for length and clarity.)

Since you started using social media marketing, what has been the biggest benefit to your practice?

“The number one benefit to our practice due to our social media marketing efforts is that search engines find us and provide our name when potential patients and current patients search for an orthodontist. We have had wonderful reviews, and I think the parents really like when we post pictures of their kids with braces just on or just off.”

“We were told that the more personal the post, the more engagement we would see. That really hit me with the first Christmas Lunch post that we did. It was just a picture of us all out to lunch together. We couldn’t believe how many people took the time to engage with that post!”

What’s the HARDEST part of social media marketing for you?

“The hardest thing for our office is to come up with creative ideas! But the content that My Social Practice provides is creative and usable, and we use the Monthly Content Calendar as a starting point for planning and it keeps us on task all month. The Share Your Visit campaign definitely increased our page likes and got us moving on our Instagram account.”

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

“We announce the content plans for the month at staff meetings and ask for input. This gets everyone thinking in advance of preparing the post. We have more celebratory birthdays and bring in lunches to make more opportunities to share team posts. We also try to be sure and capture any special events that we are doing.”

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

“I would say that as a practice gets started using social media, they need to look around at what other practices are doing. My Social Practice features client examples on their dashboard and looking at those features is a good place to start. Also, plan out your posts.”

Thanks for your comments, Jacquelin!

Showcasing your practice culture on social media regularly helps you build relationships, and our all-in-one Engagement Boxes make it a snap! Get a free demo today!

The post Our March Practice of the Month — Wheeler Orthodontics! appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing for Dental & Dental Specialty Practices.