Social Media Marketing Tips for Dentists That Get More Patients

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These social media marketing tips for dentists are meant to be realistic, easy, thoughtful and most importantly, memorable in the minds of dental patients looking for a professional dentist they can trust. Let’s face it, dentists and other small business owners serious about putting their product or service first and giving their and clients the best experience possible can’t possibly be experts at social media. But it is possible to convey knowledge, build trust and come from a place of service regardless of which medium is being used to convey the message.

At the end of the day that’s really what social media marketing is all about. Being genuine and staying true to serving customers as best as possible. The more time and effort somebody puts into these initiatives on social media, the better their organic results and overall branding will stick in the minds of prospects in the long run.

Any dentist out there reading this went to school for an extended period of time, and then put in a ton of work to master their craft. Some dentists who are super ambitious and want control over their own marketing may take the same approach to social media, but most serious dentists probably just want to focus on their craft.

This blog post is dedicated to those professionals. The ones who want to leave patients with a glistening smile and a healthy sense of oral hygiene. These top social media marketing tips will have any dentist building trust, building a sense of community and ultimately getting more patients in the dentist’s chair.

The Best Social Media Marketing Tip for Dentists

The most powerful form of advertising in any business is word-of-mouth. Online, the idea of word-of-mouth advertising displays itself as customer reviews. Customer reviews help to rank a business’s website, they establish its positive reputation based on what real people think about using the product or service, and it’s a chance for business owners to respond to negative comments or feedback and make their dentist office better.

Google My Business

The simplest way to get customer reviews and built that third-party credibility is to register on platforms that collect reviews. The easiest and most important platform a dentist needs to register for is Google My Business. It’s no secret that Google is king when it comes to providing traffic to its billions and billions of Internet users.

One of the first keys to Google My Business is for the dentist to list their name, address and telephone number properly on the platform. This has to happen on Google My Business, Yelp, Yellow Pages and any other sites that collect reviews. It’s fine to go for most of the large platforms like Google, Facebook, Yelp etc… but it’s also good to look for dentist specific sites.

A Side Note Regarding Your Name, Address and Telephone Number

For a dentist or any other business owner, listing one’s name, address and telephone number properly on Google, Facebook, Yelp and Yellow Pages connects a link from these websites back to your dental site. This tells Google that you are a reputable business owner with credibility. Getting links from other websites to point back to yours is a huge factor in ranking for dental keywords in your local area. Get this wrong and all that credit for those links doesn’t get transferred to your site.

The art and science of getting onto these directories and properly listing contact information is collectively referred to as a local citation. Building proper citations with accurate information and getting rid of old ones are duplicates is a big key to success online. Most dentists will have a digital marketing agency do this for them because it’s tedious work and although we’re only mentioning four or five websites here, there are potentially hundreds to go after.

There are also likely hundreds of directories and review sites specific to dentistry that will also benefit a dentist’s website in terms of rankings. Building local citations is something that should be done meticulously over a number of years and updated on a regular basis to ensure accuracy.

Also note, many of these websites appear high up on a Google search of your dentistry, which means registering citation information on these websites ultimately gets a dentist more exposure outside of their own website. The more search results a dentist can appear on (especially on the first page), the more likely the person searching for them on Google is to actually make an appointment with a new dentist.

Another Way for Dentists to Get New Customers

Influencer marketing is another way to get more dental patients in the dentist’s chair. It can be cheaper than running Facebook ads or engaging in other forms of advertising as well. Again, the average dentist probably doesn’t have the know-how to figure out how to do this but, it’s not that hard.

Find a local influencer and Instagram or Facebook with a large following. It will no doubt be difficult to find someone who specifically attracts millions of people by talking about their teeth, but it may be helpful to find someone who focuses on beauty or simply looking and feeling your best.

A good looking woman with a healthy smile can attract a lot of followers if she posts engaging content. Rather than a dentist or his digital marketing agency focusing on coming up with that content, capitalizing on the influences existing following might be an option.

How do you do this?

Offer local influencers free cleanings or free screenings at your dental clinic. Give them hundreds of dollars in value just by investing your time in paying for the materials. If they give you a shout out on Instagram and link to your website in exchange, you may just get a large number of new patients walking through the door. They will pay for the free cleaning and the time you gave away and then some.

Most local businesses don’t even scratch the surface with this. Influencer marketing is a great opportunity for a local dentistry.

Content Marketing Key for Dentists: Capture the Before and After

Being youthful and beautiful and showing off a great smile is driven by a natural human desire to be better tomorrow than you were today. Tapping into that desire is a dentist means capturing before and after pictures and video of the results you’ve created for patients. This is an effective content marketing strategy in niches like weight loss and fitness, there’s no reason they can’t be good for a dentist. Nobody wants to have bad teeth, unless there is an after image or video that shows off a great smile.

When a dentist delivers incredible results for somebody, they will be more than happy to show off their results even if it means displaying a less than attractive before image that shows off who the old person was before the grand reveal happens and the new and improved smile is on full display.

Even dentists who are just starting out can use before and after examples from their college days or even from their peers that they have to. The point is that doing this as part of content marketing for social media is imperative. It’s a tried, tested and true way to show off what a dentist can do best.

Creating a Series of Content to Tell a Story

Putting together a series of content is a great way to show off before and after results without just using a simple split image. That’s cliché and it’s been done many times before. Putting together a series of content makes people follow along. It tells a story, brands the local dentist is the expert and a magician of creating our smiles. It also builds trust with the prospect as the experience more and more touch points with that particular dentist.

Here are four tips for creating a series of content:

  • Put together tutorials that explain how to care for teeth properly. Everyone knows the dentist will tell them to brush their teeth for two minutes twice a day, but have you ever actually seen a dentist do it? This and other simple tutorials will work, and it shows the human side of the dentist.
  • Tell the personal stories of previous patients and use them as case studies. Try to find somebody that’s really happy with the results there dentist created for them. Tell the story of how it improved their confidence in their health. Either that, or create a story by inviting a local influencer in for a free checkup or cleaning.
  • Make sure the content being created matches the medium. Longer form content should go on Facebook or YouTube. Short form or bite-size content should go on Twitter or Instagram.
  • Ask questions to prospects. Get them to take a survey are answerable related to oral health. This works best on Twitter and Facebook since it’s easy to create a poll.

Spending Money on Advertising

Facebook and other social media platforms get inundated with content every second of the day. The average person who signed up for these websites earlier and has 1,000 friends listed on their profile can’t possibly see all the content their friends post every second of the day. Facebook has to use algorithms to prioritize it, there’s just no other way of doing things.

This means that the best way to make sure a piece of content gets seen by as many friends and followers as possible is to invest in advertising. While it is possible to lose a lot of money on ads, starting small and then scaling up when a effective ad is identified as the best way to do things. Advertising doesn’t just have to mean paying for exposure on social media sites. Pay per click advertising on Google is also an option. Generally speaking the average dentist is better off using a digital marketing agency to employ these paid advertising strategies on their behalf.

An agency will usually charge a monthly fee plus advertising expense in order to manage advertising on behalf of a dentist.

Savvy Social Media Marketing Equals More Appointments

Armed with some of the best social media marketing tips available to dentists today, it’s time to focus on implementation and start booking more appointments. It takes time and it takes a commitment to creating great content, but most dentists don’t do that on a regular basis. Even just doing a little bit then is enough to stand out above other local dentists looking to create great smiles.

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