Differentiating yourself is the key in every business, and your dental clinic is no exception. In this, our second blog article on digital marketing for dental clinics, we will tell you how to start creating a successful and effective digital marketing campaign from scratch, explain some concepts and formulas that will help along your journey in an efficient and practical way, because many times the biggest mistake people make is simply not starting from the beginning.
We will also talk about how essential it is to have an optimised and quality blog on your website, and how it can help you position yourself as a authority and reference. At the same time, a blog will attract future potential patients for your dental clinic. We encourage you to start writing because we are sure that you have a lot to contribute. We will explain how to start, where to get ideas, and how to make your blogs position you at the top of search engines. Are you ready to start adding value to your dental clinic? Let us begin!
Stages of a digital marketing plan for the dental clinic
Now that you have decided to implement a digital marketing plan in your dental clinic, we will tell you the steps to follow and the tools that you can use to do it easily and efficiently. It is very important to be methodical and orderly, because it is easy to get off track. To stay on track, we recommend using this 4-stage structure:
1. Situational analysis
In this stage we will ask ourselves questions such as, "Where are we?" Digitally speaking, do we already have digital marketing elements in place? Are they effective? Should we start from scratch? What are other dental clinics doing? Does it work?
2. Objectives
At this point we should be able to answer the question: Where do we want to go? It is important that the objectives that we define for our marketing plan are quantifiable and that we set deadlines to achieve them.
To remind you, your goals should be SMART:
3. Audience
Now it's time to identify who we want to reach, where these people are, what their characteristics are and how they behave. Based on this, we can segment audiences according to their characteristics: geographic, demographic, behavior, and lifestyle.
For example, having many people interested in our services is useless if they are 1000 km away. It is important that the target audience is defined from the beginning and is always designed according to the services you offer in your dental clinic.
4. Tactics
The last thing is the tactics, that is, how will we do it? What tools will we use? Starting a marketing plan bypassing the 3 previous processes is like starting to build a house from the roof, because the tactics we choose will be defined by the objectives we want to achieve and the audiences to which we will direct our plan.
We'll show you an example:
Objective: Increase the approval of costs by the patient in the dental clinic by 30% in the next 3 months.
Audience : Patients who have received an estimate in the last 6 months, have not responded, and are in our database.
Tactic: Send a newsletter that reinforces habits and the importance of dental health and the following week send a second newsletter with a discount on the budget.
Digital Campaigns for your dental clinic
The generation of digital campaigns for our dental clinic is within the tactics stage of our marketing plan. That is, if we have come this far, it is because we have already studied the current digital situation of our clinic, have defined our objectives, and have set our audiences according to the services we offer. We are ready to talk about the mix of digital channels, the content, and the tools we will use for it.
Dental clinic website: How to generate content?
Content is the basis of any digital marketing campaign and it is very important that we know how to create it. Many companies attribute their successes to having a formal and high quality content strategy distributed on their digital channels. The content that you create for your dental clinic's website will have the purpose of educating your audiences, generating credibility and trust.
Content Marketing Matrix
An efficient way to determine what content to use is through the content marketing matrix created by Danyl Bosomworth and Dave Chaffey, in which we see two axes:
- The horizontal axis indicates the different stages in which our potential customers can be found within the customer journey. This ranges from creating awareness of our offer to encouraging the purchase or contracting of our services.
- The vertical axis is for seeing whether the decision to purchase's influence is classified as an emotional or rational reason.
The four quadrants of our content marketing matrix are: entertain, educate, inspire, and convince. These are the types of content that we will generate, depending on the stage in which our client is. We explain it to you:
Entertain : when people know our clinic superficially or find out about the services we offer, they do not expect great arguments from us to convince them, it would be enough at this stage to generate content more directed to emotions and capture their interest with lighthearted and entertaining things.
Educate : This is the time to develop your full potential and educate your audiences, for example: on healthy habits, explain why good oral health is important, explain procedures in simple terms, develop topics of interest to patients, etc. At this stage your audiences want to know everything you can provide them to make an informed decision about their health, they are moving from the emotional to the rational.
Inspire: Here our audiences already trust us, know us and like our content. It is a good time to invite them to interact with us in a more personal way.
Convince: This is the end of the customer journey and it is time to offer our service, so our content must be persuasive and aimed at closing the deal, in our case, offer our dental services.
Now that we are clear about how to create our content and personalize it at each moment of the customer journey, we will talk about the content itself and its different formats and forms of presentation.
Your dental clinic's blog
A blog? Why? 86% of B2C businesses that have a blog improve their sales opportunities, so why not?
The blog is one of the main tools for creating content for our audiences. But How do you know what to write? A good way to start is to think about what are the most frequently asked questions in the dental office? I'm sure that's a good topic, because it's the same thing that people look for on the internet. It would also be interesting to write about the new trends in dentistry or the new advances that are available to patients or maybe to debunk some well-known myths or popular beliefs. What do you think? You'll certainly not lack ideas! You'll also have fun writing and you can do it from anywhere.
A blog requires dedication, it must be optimized and offer quality content. In addition to this, it is important that we have a certain frequency to improve in terms of traffic and sales opportunities for our services.
As a dentist you are an authority figure, and as you show yourself as a touchstone, you can gradually gain the trust of your audience, favouring the traffic of your website and attracting future potential patients.
How can a blog contribute to your dental practice effectively?
It is a fact, the blog helps you optimize your content in search engines, that is, the blog attracts patients to your clinic. Every time you publish a new blog, that page will be indexed in search engines and you will appear in the search results of people who require information or services related to your sector.
For this to work, optimization is essential. This means that your articles must include key words or keywords in the titles and you must take into account, when choosing those keywords, how people who are not dentists would look for information?, because:
It is not the same to say:
“Postoperative recommendations after complex extraction of an included wisdom tooth”
Than to say:
“What to do after wisdom tooth extraction”
Keywords are very important, but it's not just unique words or terms. You should also consider keyword phrases relevant to the dental industry. Some websites that can help you find them are:
In addition to positioning yourself in search engines, having a blog on your dental clinic's website will help you position yourself as a leader and expert in oral health, offering solutions to your audiences in terms that everyone can understand. In this way, you can begin to show your potential clients that your dental clinic will provide them with a positive experience both online and offline.
Your blogs can also carry a call to action, which is known in marketing as CTA or call to action. It's better that you include it after you have provided valuable information to your reader. You can relate the content to the services that you propose, in this way you capture the natural interest of your potential client. If your CTAs are contextual, they will have much more appeal and a higher number of clicks than isolated text.
As you can see, the blog is an essential element in your digital marketing strategy and it is very important that you have it, that it is optimised, and that it offers the reader quality content. Creating blog content requires work, but the reward is valuable because you will undoubtedly multiply the opportunities to sell your dental clinic's services, as well as consolidate yourself as a leader in the sector.
Factors that influence search rankings
In addition to the keywords you use in your blog, and how you use them, there will be other factors that determine the position of your website in the search rankings. This is important considering that, for example, the first page of Google results gets more than 90% of the traffic and the first search result could get up to 40% of the traffic. Understanding how search engines like Google and others work, and how to make our website occupy the first results, is what is called SEO.
The most relevant factors that determine good SEO positioning are:
- Responsive website: One that looks good both on the computer and on the mobile or tablet
- Fast website : When you change pages within the site it is fast.
- Secure website: It has a certificate of authenticity (HTTPS)
- Quality and own content: Not copied from other sites.
- Incoming links from other websites: They count as a quality vote
All these factors and many others (more than 200) contribute to the organic positioning of your website. But there is also a "non-organic" way to position your page in search engines, this is called SEM and corresponds to the sponsored ads that you can see in the first places of the searches you do.
They also work with keywords or phrases that companies bid on to compete for clicks on their ads. The best example of this is Google Ads, which works as follows:
For example, if you want to appear at the top of Google results when people search for “teeth whitening”. You can use Google Ads to create an ad about your offer in which, for each click that users make on your ad, you will pay Google. The good thing about this is that you pay Google for each click and not for each time your ad appears (impressions) and you can also define from the beginning what your budget will be. Every time a user clicks on your ad, they will go to the URL you have configured, for example, to your website where you explain the tooth whitening procedure step by step and offer your service.
Thank you so much for reading! In our next blog article on digital marketing for dental clinics, we will tell you in detail about all the tools available to disseminate your content and how to implement an effective digital media strategy that provides value and patients for your dental clinic Remember, we're always updating our social media, so look out for new posts. See you soon!
