You surely dream of building your own dental office, after going through years of schooling, education and practice in the field. But most often, the difficult part of one’s dentistry journey begins when they enter the fierce industry competition.
For new dentists, generating new leads is especially more important because successful sales and a steady influx of patients will ensure their office makes a permanent place in the industry.
Without an engaging website and effective strategies and tools, the chances of generating new leads and successful growth are very slim for dentists.
For dental leads, lead generation is the most vital tool, just like dental marketing. In this article, you will learn about the art of lead generation and how you can use the two essential channels for converting leads into customers successfully.
What is Lead Generation?
Generally speaking, a lead is someone who shows a vested interested in the product or service you’re offering. Leads show interest when they have heard about a business or organization, in our case a dental practice, through open communication.
Open communication refers to the consent of dental leads who have opted or subscribed to your channels, for offers and services etc. For instance, you are a lead when you’re taking a survey online asking regarding dental procedures.
So when the dental practice, which created the survey, emails you for personalizing their open communication with you and give you more information about their services, you become their lead.
For a dental practice to be successful, it needs to maintain a steady stream of patients. If you wish to grow your dental establishment organically, every new patient you can win is important.
In dentistry, lead generation is the art of making someone interested in you as their go-to dentist. It refers to the process of making new patients-to-be share their phone number and email address with you so that you can initiate open communication.
Dental marketing also means the communication between your practice and your patients. It includes the more concrete details like all the services you are offering, how your staff responds to the patients and similar things.
Lead generation and dental marketing both use the same channels but the former is more an art of converting leads into permanent customers.
Dental Marketing Turns into Creating Lead Generation
Once you have you put your dental marketing plan into action successfully, it won’t be long before it starts winning promising dental leads for you. But how does that happen? How does dental marketing connect with a dental lead?
You see, dental marketing employs several advertising and marketing tactics both offline and online. These tactics play a major role in luring potential customers to your practice and converting them into a dental lead.
In doing so, the marketing tactic acquires the name, phone number, email address etc. of the dental leads and convert them into new patients.
For example, your dental lead is a person, who fixed an appointment with you, subscribes to your newsletters or follows your dental page on social media.
The dental lead performs an action that depicts they’re interested in your dental practices and want to try your facility. Thus, they give you the chance to initiate open communication.
Some of the common marketing techniques include:
SEO
Google is the primary search engine choice for those who wish to search for dental practices near them. If you wish to earn new leads, then you need to keep appearing in SEO searches.
Email Marketing
Email marketing helps nurture leads.
Social media
Social media handles, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms are excellent platforms for attracting new patients.
Apart from these, there are lots more essential techniques dental establishments employ for marketing and lead generation.
Email- Boosts Your Dental Practice
Email is a splendid form of nurturing new dental leads, because it helps gently lure those in who’re hesitant to become your clients at first. Email is that powerful tool that helps build faith and trust but many practice owners fail to utilize its potential.
It is a vital bridge in creating a personable relationship between patients and dentists.
For including more incentives to draw new leads through email, you can offer discounts to potential customers to draw them more to your business.
Some of the most common email practices that other dental offices follow are sending newsletters, and information about dental services, dental care tips new equipment and offers etc.
The most powerful weapon is email marketing is reaching the inboxes of dental leads directly, with a plethora of information, tips, new products and services and offers.
Now while this mainstream approach is definitely successful, being even more innovative in your email campaigns will help you earn a competitive edge.
For example, SMS marketing would be a splendid option in email because it has a higher response rate.
Social Media-Every New Dental Lead is Present There
Social media is one of the fastest tools of gathering dental leads. Almost every new client your office needs is on a social media platform right now.
From Facebook, Instagram to Twitter, log on to any of these right now and you will see millions of users present.
Imagine how many new patients you could win if you start advertising your dental business on online pages. By creating your profile and posting authentic, valuable and relevant content regularly, you will soon gather a significant following.
With online marketing, dentists can even interact successfully with their users, answer their questions, resolve issues and provide useful information when they’re visiting your profile.
In fact, for winning even more new dental leads, a great idea for dentists is to host contests on their social media pages. You could offer giveaways as contest prizes, like gift cards, free cleaning sessions, electric toothbrushes etc.
In return, you must ask your users to share or follow your page, post pictures after availing your dental procedures and etc. This way, more users will follow your page and learn about your business.
Let’s take a look at some of the best social media practices for dental offices.
Go Mobile
Part of the reason why many dental offices fail to make significant progress in finding new leads is because they have their mobile strategy quite wrong.
Commonly, dental businesses first design their marketing techniques for desktop users and then reverse engineer it to cater to mobile users too.
This is quite a common occurrence in digital marketing but dentists need to turn around their paradigm for mobile users.
Prioritizing mobile access more for your business dental leads will attract more patients for your business.
Social Messaging
Another essential strategy that successful businesses are following is social messaging. It is not only an effective trend but also has incredible reach.
Social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Twitter, WeChat, Viber and others have more users right now than online platforms. If your target is to strengthen your digital marketing strategy, focusing on social messaging will be a great step forward.
Team chats for example, would give your company some much needed exposure, leverage and connection.
Video Chat
Every new patient finds video content highly useful and you could capitalize on this aspect. Creating high-quality video content for your users will engage them and widen your social connection.
Dentists are popularly posting reviews, community events, case studies, procedures and more for winning new dental leads.
Dental SEO
Local SEO strategies are playing a vital role in helping a dentistry company earn the right exposure. Having your dental website show in the top search engine results is the most effective ways of to attract more leads.
Let’s take a look at some of the best SEO practices the dentistry businesses are currently employing:
Content marketing
Dentistry website owners not only optimize their existing pages but also keep adding new pages of tons of high-value, relevant, useful and detailed content on their website. The target of this action is to call more qualified clients to their site.
Once you gain more traffic to your site with powerful blogs and relevant content, you can then direct your efforts into converting your traffic into leads.
One fine way of doing that is through using software tools like Livechat that Podium offers its customers for free.
Dentistry Optimized Local Keywords
Researching local practice-relevant keywords and optimizing content accordingly also helps win new patients.
Building “Google My Business” page
With a GMB page, you earn your place in Google’s radar list for local businesses and your name, contact number; address etc. will pop up when patients search online for dentists in their vicinity.
Tracking Progress
It is essential to include tracking in your SEO strategies, like many other businesses do. It will help you track your conversions, traffic and rankings etc.
Conclusion
Every new dentist has to go through a challenging journey, from completing years of schooling and education in the dentistry field and then setting up a successful practice.
To get started may still be the easy part, but to win every new patient for growing your business requires strategic marketing, unlimited efforts and powerful tools. At Podium.com, we offer all the solutions you need to ensure your business enjoys a steady influx of new patients, higher revenue and an unbeatable reputation in the industry.
