How can internet marketing help attract new patients to your dental office?

Our special guest was Dale Warner, who is an internet marketing expert that has worked in this area for 8 years.

We want the outcome of this conversation to be educational for those that hire these services out so you can better understand what your company is discussing with you. We want you to be as informed as possible so you can make better decisions. If on the other hand you are doing this stuff yourself, we want to give you the most impactful things to do.

We started the conversation off with the difference between Interruption Marketing vs people seeking you out. The acquisition cost per patient is much lower with people contacting you vs you doing Interruption Marketing. An example of Interruption Marketing would be a TV ad offering whitening for life. It is called "Interruption Marketing" because you have something in the ad that interrupts their train of thought and directs their thinking to your ad content. On the other hand, if you had patients looking for implants contacting you because they googled it and found you, your odds of acceptance are much higher and much less expensive. Therefore, we want our internet content to be such that people seeking the services you enjoy offering the most, show up when someone searches the internet for them. "Qualified leads" is the term used in the marketing world.

Now we need to understand the technical things about websites and how we get our content to our target audience. You can do this via your website and “organic” search results or via paid ads, or what is termed “pay per click” (PPC). Typically the cost for results is lower with PPC as we demonstrated on the show.

We then discussed “search terms” and how those can impact either your website or your PPC ads. This is key to success - you need to fully understand what people are looking for to have the most success. You also need to match the services you offer to what people are looking for. For example, when we looked up the search results for “Denver dentist” there were about 700 searches per month on for this phrase. Now if you simply make dentist plural, you lose 500 searches per month. It is amazing how impactful one letter can be. While there is a lot of search volume for “dentist” having a more narrow search might be even better. For example, “denver dental implant” might not have the volume, but will probably be a more qualified group of people and also a higher fee service and, therefore will have a better return on your investment.

We also discussed how consumer’s eyes move around a website and search results, therefore giving you insight into where you want your content. Some of the real estate on a website is extremely valuable and often doesn’t have the most impactful content in the best places. Similarly, we discussed claiming your local listings and the importance of this. This is something very simple to do that could have huge results for you getting more inbound calls. As with anything in life, often the small things can yield huge results and should not be ignored. Some of the seemingly insignificant things we discussed could results in 20 or more inbound calls. Take the time to understand these little things and how they can impact your internet presence.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about how the internet can help you grow your practice, please contact me. If you want to see the video on this topic, visit the website and play the video.

Darren Kaberna MBA

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http://www.acceleratemypractice.com/