Every man, woman, and child needs and deserves the proper care and attention of a dentist, and there is no shortage of dental professionals in the United States. What’s in relatively short supply is information on where and how to find their dental practices in a particular area.

Your dental practice may have the most advanced equipment, and your dentistry skills unparalleled, but all that would be all for naught if few to no people know you are actually practicing your profession near where they live.

Twenty years ago, traditional marketing techniques like advertising your services on radio, TV, newspapers, the yellow pages, and huge billboards would work just fine and get you more warm bodies on that dental chair of yours. The competition these days, however, just got tighter, and most of them have taken to the Internet to market their dental practice.

If you haven’t done anything of the sort, then you are definitely going to be left behind. It’s about time you come up with online dental marketing ideas that will help your dental practice grow.

The advantages of dental digital marketing

The costs are lower

One of the most glaring differences between traditional marketing and online dental marketing is the cost involved. When you’re trying to target, say, 2,000 people using traditional marketing methods, prepare to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get word about your dental practice out on the radio, TV, or print media. If you’re targeting the same number of people but through online marketing methods, the cost would be significantly lower.

Digital campaigns are more targeted and cost-effective

In theory, all marketing efforts target audiences, but digital dental marketing offers tools and methods that would help fine-tune your campaign even more. For example, instead of paying more for traditional marketing to reach everyone within the state, your dental marketing strategies can focus on those who live within a ten-mile radius of your practice. That should save you a lot of money.

You can engage your audience 

With traditional marketing methods, there is never a real opportunity for you to interact with your audience. Dentistry online marketing, on the other hand, provide plenty of opportunities to engage your target audience. A blog on your dental practice’s website, for example, can be used to communicate to patients and potential patients alike advice or tips that would help them take care of their oral health better. If you engage in dentist social media, your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account can also be used for the same purpose.

Aside from the chance to engage your audience, digital marketing for dentists can help position you as an expert in the field. You can share not only dental advice but also the most recent developments in dentistry, among other things.

Results are easier to track

With online marketing for dentists, everything can be monitored with just a click of a button, provided that you have the appropriate tools. Whether you want to know the number of people visiting your website or how they got there in the first place, the online tracking tools available to you can help you monitor and measure any of metric you want, making it easier for you to make decisions relevant to your campaign.

Basic tools for your online dental marketing campaigns

Digital marketing would be an unbearable undertaking without the wealth of tools that are readily available today. Whether you want to know the results of your dental Search Engine Optimization, dental Pay Per Click, or social media campaigns, no one can deny that the tools listed below would be quite indispensable.

Google Analytics

Google is a gift that just keeps on giving, as Google Analytics continuously provides a treasure trove of data that tells you how your dentist Search Engine Optimization marketing efforts are going. It tells you which pages get the most visitors, which links get the most links, and how your visitors found your pages, among so many other things. Most importantly, Google Analytics is for free.

Hootsuite

When it comes to managing and analyzing your dental marketing campaigns on social media, Hootsuite is probably the most popular platform with more than 15 million users.  Apart from giving dental marketers the ability to schedule social media posts ahead of time, Hootsuite also offers a host of other features including Geosearch, which tells you what people are saying about a certain topic in a given area, and a drag-and-drop capability that makes organizing lists so much easier.

MailChimp

Email marketing is an integral part of any online dental marketing strategy. It is, after, all, one of the best ways to engage your patients and at the same time build referrals for people who have no idea your practice exists. With eight million users on a daily basis, MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms in the world, and it’s a must-have for any dental marketer worth his or her salt. Professional and newbie email marketers alike love the straightforward platform structure of MailChimp, which also boasts of features that allow users to automate routine tasks, send email blasts, customize signup forms, and even publish your own newsletter.

HubSpot Marketing Free

HubSpot Marketing Free is a pretty handy tool for converting visitors to your dental website to leads. It generates email leads that contain important information about their owners such as their employers and the other sites they have previously visited.

YouTube

Google, the largest search engine in the world, owns YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine. Add video marketing to your dental marketing campaign strategy, and you should be able to make use of this tool to boost the chances of your dental practice website showing up on Page 1 of the Search Engine Results Pages. You can make videos of yourself conducting a virtual tour of your practice, or you can shoot videos of patients’ testimonies about the dental services you offer. You can also create instructional videos related to proper oral and dental care.

With all the tools now at the disposal of anyone who engages in digital dental marketing, it becomes clear which platform dental professionals should choose to promote their practice. While traditional marketing may still work, online dental marketing is starting to prove that it’s a more cost-effective—and eventually more effective—option for dentists everywhere.