7 Dental Marketing Ideas You Can Work On From Home

There are many things you can do to improve your dental marketing and social media pages from home! When it comes to improving your online presence, you’ll want to start with the simple steps that you can do right from your couch. Whether you are a seasoned expert or just starting, you’ll find these 7 dental marketing ideas to be valuable for your practice!

1. Continuing Education

Stay up-to-date on your CE credit by completing online dental continuing education courses. As a dental professional, you want to provide to very best experience and quality of care that you can. Information in the dental industry develops quickly. It is essential for dental professionals to keep up with new training to keep patients coming back to the dental office, know what new dental technology is available in the industry and how to keep current dental patients happy and healthy.

Dental CE courses online are becoming increasingly popular. There are various subjects available, from clinical care to the best way to run a dental social media campaign. Use time at home to watch webinars and complete certification without ever leaving your couch! Build trust by sharing your experience with your patients and followers online. Sharing your efforts in continuing education illustrates to your patients that you are improving your skills to better serve them.

Free dental continuing education online courses 📚

• Dental Digital Marketing Course (FREE from My Social Practice)
  
• Staying Successful During Social Distancing
  
• ADA Dental CE Courses

2. Send Appreciation Gifts To Referring Practice

Being a successful dental practice doesn’t only mean providing great patient care, it means uplifting and appreciating everyone that comes in contact with your practice. Sending appreciation gifts to your referring practices is a great way to cultivate strong relationships with the other dental professionals in your community and grow your practice. Referral marketing is one of the best strategies to grow your business. To keep a stream of referrals coming in, you have to cultivate mutual trust and friendships. Giving gifts is a perfect way to make a great impression and be remembered.

Gift ideas for referring dental offices 🎁

• Send a box of treats or gift basket
• Mail a gift card for a massage
• Send lunch to their office
• Send a heartfelt thank you note
• Make a charitable donation in their honor

3. Start A Monthly Newsletter

Newsletters are essential to your practice’s marketing strategy. Emails are still a prominent component of dental digital marketing. They keep your patients familiarized with your staff, updated on specials and office announcements and encourage patients to refer their friends and family. If you aren’t consistently sending a dental newsletter you may be missing out on some significant marketing opportunities.

However, coming up with newsletter ideas for your dental practice can be challenging. Don’t overthink it! Keep your newsletter helpful and fun. Your patients want to hear from you! Speak to your email audience as you do with patients who are in your practice. Remember, the purpose of a dental office newsletter is to maintain relationships and keep top-of-mind awareness.

Great Dental Newsletter Ideas 🗞

• Advertise new specials. Do you offer teeth whitening? Are you promoting cleanings for new patients?
• Talk about the products you sell in the practice. Do you have electric toothbrushes or WaterPiks? Explain what kind of in-office products are available!
• Give tips on how to have a healthy smile! Share a few tips on how to keep a healthy mouth in-between cleaning appointments.
• Share practice announcements! Shout out your team birthdays, talk about patient appreciation events or giveaways!
• Use content from your dental blog

4.  Ask Your Patients To Leave A Review

Online reviews play a major role in how to get new dental patients to find you. When a patient is looking for a new dentist the first place they will go is to local search to check out the reviews of the practice’s nearby. Reading through the reviews of local businesses before making a decision has become the new normal.

Studies say that one-third of online consumers in the U.S. used the internet to search for local businesses daily. And 72% of those customers won’t take action until they read the reviews. Positive online reviews are crucial for growing your dental practice and attracting new patients. The good news is, your dental patients love and appreciate you.

As a dentist, you already have a connection and relationship with your patients that many businesses don’t. This gives you an advantage because you can hand-select patients that you know will give you a great review. Honest feedback and positive reviews are crucial for building your dental practice. Let your patients know you rely on reviews to improve their experience in your office and to find more awesome dental patients like them! Chances are if you’re not actively asking for reviews, you’ll only get one when a patient is unhappy.

Here are 3 ways to ask your dental patients for a review from home:

• Email or Text Your Patients 💬
  Send your patients a personalized email or text message with a link that goes directly to your Google, Facebook or HealthGrades pages. You can easily manage your text and email marketing communication by using an online review management system.
  
  
  A sample email or text message:
  “Hi, [patient name]! thank you for being a valued patient. Here at {dental practice} we really rely on online reviews to help us know how to improve and to help people in the area find us. Will you help us out by leaving us a short review? Here is a link that will take you right to our reviews page. Thank you!”

• Create a Social Media Post 🌅
  Facebook and Instagram are great places to share positive reviews and ask your patients for feedback. Create a graphic asking patients “How did we do? Leave us a review!” Or, snap a picture of yourself holding a sign that asks patients to leave a review to add a personal touch.

• Call Your Patients On The Phone 📞
  Although phone calls may seem like an outdated form of communication, it’s a perfect way to reach your patients on a personal level, especially your older dental patients! Calling your patients gives you the ability to connect on a personal level and possibly help them figure out where and how to write it.

5. Host Virtual Team Meetings

Hold dental team meetings via video conferencing. Your team culture and your brand starts with what you to go the extra mile for your team members and your patients. Have a virtual dental team meeting to talk about how to make your practice an enjoyable place to visit and work.

Ask your team to bring ideas for a dental marketing ideas brainstorm. 💡
Does your team celebrate birthdays? What would be enjoyable team-building activities? What do you do to keep patients coming back? Have you recently given away a prize or congratulated a patient on a personal accomplishment? Talk about your accomplishments, set weekly goals, and bond as a team over a video conferencing chat from home!

6. Update Your Website, Social Pages and Search Listings

Making your website pages look friendly and professional and posting regularly is important, however, attracting dental patients to your practice requires some online clean-up. There are many factors that may be preventing people from finding your practice online.

Take some time to evaluate your practice’s consistency across your website, local directories and social pages.

Here are a few things you can to do to improve your visibility online 🔎

• Ensure that your practice address, phone number, and website are consistent across all your pages.
• Place links on your website that go directly to your social media platforms.
• Update the information on your reviews sites like Yelp, Google, Facebook, HealthGrades.
• Upload new photos of practice, team members, and patients to your website and review pages.
• Update your dental Facebook cover photo

Appearing in local search results is powerful and will help your practice become visible to new patients. Search engine optimization is complex. Cleaning up the online presence of dental practices frequently includes deeper issues that require expert help. There are dozens of factors that could be slowing down your dental website and hurting your local search ranking. Run an optimization check-up for your dental practice.

7. Create A Dental Marketing Calendar

Social media marketing for dental clinics is crucial for building awareness and highlighting the quality of care and relationships in your practice. A dental social media calendar gives you and your dental team a plan and some direction. Great ideas for dental social media posts include celebrating holidays (from major holidays to silly fun ones), staff birthdays, promotional launches, and practice events, and current events like local businesses opening or a new movie in your local theater.

When planning a dental marketing calendar, keep in mind that celebrating holidays and fun events creates the best opportunity to show off your practice culture and build interactions with patients and potential patients online. Your marketing calendar doesn’t need to be complicated! Your dental marketing ideas should focus on being friendly and inviting across all of your social media platforms.

Brainstorm and think through events happening in your practice this year. Are you planning on being a part of a charitable cause? Are you running referral campaigns or patient giveaways?

📅 Make a plan for at least one post a week for the next two months. If you find it challenging to know where to start or what good dental Facebook marketing for dentists looks like, get some inspiration from these ten dental practices that rocked social media last year.

The post 7 Dental Marketing Ideas You Can Work On From Home appeared first on My Social Practice - Social Media Marketing for Dental & Dental Specialty Practices.