Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Dental Office Marketing with an Online Angle

By Marcus Somani

A new dental marketing opportunity has developed in the last several years about which most dental practices have absolutely no idea. It presents an excellent dental marketing idea. Did you know that sixty percent of patients do some form of online checking before showing up for their first dental visit? Even when new dental patients are referred to you by one of their trusted friends, they tend to do some form of online validation.

When new dental patients search online for you with their city in the search box, your online reviews and the online reviews of your competitors show up off to the right side. New dental patients find tremendous value when looking over these reviews. Furthermore, new dental patients are much more likely to compare and contrast reviews because they are all presented right next to each other in most search engines.

Research has some shown that reviews are very influential on consumers who are making decisions. If you have two or three mediocre reviews but you have a competitors who has twenty-five favorable reviews, this new prospective patient may be swayed despite your being recommended by the patient's friend.

Making the right decision is very important to most patients searching for a new dentist. The only channels they have to learn about you without getting biased information directly from you is through people who have visited you. Because of the value new patients place on reviews, it is critical that you pay close attention to your online reputation.

To avoid the scenario of losing new dental patients who are doing online research, you need to control your reputation on the Internet. The best way to do this is for your dental practice to create its own dental review site. By having your own dental review site it, your practice will a tremendous amount of influence in the new patient's decision making process. As the prospective dental patient is doing his or her research and stumble across your review site with scores and scores of favorable reviews, that dental patient is much more likely to end up visiting you. In fact, sometimes, you might even sway dental patients who were strongly considering visiting one of your competitors. Online favorable reviews have been shown to have this effect.

Because you are at the front lines of dental service, you are in a better position to collect reviews than any third party review site. In fact, when your dental practice has its own review site, you can collect reviews from every patient. Since you control the review site, you decide which reviews get published and syndicated online versus which reviews are used strictly for internal purposes. It will not take long for your practice to develop scores and scores of webpages with favorable reviews about your practice.

The best way to think about an online dental marketing media program is like a grocery store. Imagine that the Internet is a very big grocery store, and right now you have a dental practice that occupies one little thin sliver of a shelf at the very bottom of the aisle that belongs to dental services. By collecting favorable reviews, you will be increasing the width of that shelf space. Over time, as you gather more and more reviews, the width of that shelf space will occupy the entire aisle or even multiple shelves on that aisle. Therefore, any time a prospective dental patient is walking down that aisle searching for dental services, the odds that they are going to pick your office for a new visit are much higher.

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