What’s My Competition Doing For Dental Marketing (That I’m Not)?

Dentistry is both a challenging profession and a difficult business. Staying at the top of your game with your medical skills while running a successful practice can prove a tough balance as you provide the best patient care possible while handling the business aspects. And for good or ill, you are competing for potential patients with other practices around your area. Setting yourself apart and attracting the patients you need is a vital business function.

So, how do you go about that? What marketing strategies work best? What’s the competition doing for dental marketing that you aren’t? Let’s take a look at some possible strategies and approaches that you may be missing.

Social Media and Dental Marketing

It’s no great secret that social media is a vital tool for dental marketing. It allows you a dynamic way to both reach out to potential patients and communicate with existing ones. Relative to conventional advertising, it can be fairly easy and cost-effective to implement and quite a bit more effective if done correctly. However, therein lies the rub: how do you know you’re doing it effectively? Which social media platforms should you be using?

Facebook still occupies a central role in social media marketing for many businesses and industries, including dentistry. Your practice’s Facebook page fills a similar role to that of your website: it allows you to present your business to the world, show potential patients what sort of experience and services you offer, and then allows you to communicate with existing patients. It’s one of the first places some of your patients will look to find you. With all that in mind, a robust, regularly updated, and well managed Facebook presence is a must for any dental practice.

This is not to say that Facebook is all you need. Younger potential patients–those under 35 or so–have moved to other social media platforms as their primary outlets. Instagram in particular is now a must-have for all businesses, including dental practices who wish to engage with potential patients in that age bracket.

While Instagram is fairly easy to use in a basic sense, it requires a different social media strategy than Facebook. Instagram is by definition image-centered, so developing high quality photographs and video for your practice becomes a requirement. Likewise, connecting with new patients via Instagram and making the best use of its hashtags are a skill that takes time to master. And depending on your practice, you may find it useful to explore some of the newer visual-oriented platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. Those tend to reach more niche audiences, but they may prove useful to practices oriented towards younger people.

Effective Dental Marketing Solutions

Your approach to dental marketing projects the personality, quality, and scope of services offered at your practice. So how do you find the dental marketing solutions you need? At Dental Marketing, we bring our experience and resources to bear in providing your practice with the dental marketing solutions and strategies essential to your success. Whether yours is a new practice or an established one, we have the answers you need so get in touch today.