Marketing Tips For Your Dental Billing Business

All dental practices understand the importance of dental patient marketing. It brings in new patients, and it can even help to strengthen ties with existing patients. Marketing is essential if you want your practice to thrive. It’s easy to know that you should market your dental practice. It’s much more difficult, however, to know exactly how to do that. There’s no one right answer to this, and there’s a large number of different strategies you can use. For most practices, using a combination of several different dental marketing methods will yield the best results.

Not sure where to start? Let’s take a look at some of the most effective dental patient marketing strategies you can use to market your dental practice.

Fill out your Google Business Page completely. You want to add as much information as you can, here. This isn’t the spot to slack up.dentist marketing The more information you give, the more legitimate you appear to be. In order to optimize your dental office’s Google listing, you will need to fill out all of the information completely and correctly.

Make sure your listing is accurate. In order to gain and keep the trust of your potential patients, you’ll want to also make sure the details for your practice are correct and stay up to date. If you decide you want to leave early on Fridays, that needs to be reflected in your listing’s hours. Otherwise, you’ll have a pile of unhappy customers and start racking in the negative reviews, which is never good.

Know which keywords you want to rank for, and use them appropriately. Your keywords will be crucial for SEO. Without these, Google may find it difficult to understand all your practice areas.

You’ll also want to add the following to your Profile:

• Outside photos of your dental office
• Logo and any other brand identifiers
• Staff photos
• Before and after pictures
• Services offered information

On a weekly basis, add the following to:

• New pictures
• New Google Business posts
• Ask customers for reviews

Emergency Keywords

Two months ago, I found myself googling “emergency wisdom tooth extraction boston” at 2AM. The first two results didn’t provide a “call” CTA, so I chose the third and two more from the Google maps results with the highest ratings. None of them picked up (which was expected), but I made an appointment with the first practice that called me back.

Bidding on keywords like “emergency” or “urgent” is an easy way to get clients with immediate needs and high intent; imagine the return on investment for those keywords! But make sure that your practice can take emergency cases and provides an easy way to contact the practice, or else you may get a bad review on Google.

Keep Your Website Up to Date

Your website will look more professional and secure if you have the following:

• Regularly updated new helpful patient education content
• Video media content showcasing recent technology changes in your office
• A section for each Dentist in your office, along with a professional picture to show patients
• Messaging capability for patients, directly from the website
• Online bill pay
• Prescription request for renewal available online
• Online scheduling

Local Awareness Facebook Ads

While you want to get the word out about your dental practice, being specific about who you market to is important. Most likely, you don’t want to be showing ads for your practice outside of a 50-mile radius—if you are in Pennsylvania and someone in California is seeing your ad, that doesn’t do anyone any good.

Local Awareness ads are a great way to reach a local audience, and you can now use the new map card to share locally relevant details about your dental business, like the address, distance to the business, hours of operation, and a “Get directions” link. Your CTA can even be a call button, an easy prompt to make an appointment.

Appointment Reminders

Whether it comes in the form of a postcard or a phone call, appointment reminders are important to make sure your patients show up. Streamline this process by using Google calendar alerts, and sending appointment confirmations and reminder by email.

You can also easily use these methods to remind your patients to make an appointment, i.e. for an annual cleaning.

Email Marketing

Imagine a world in which your patients could email the practice when they wanted to make an appointment. Your receptionist could respond with a few timing options, and ta-da, an appointment is made and on the calendar. Even better, you can send bills this way, reminder emails, and cute “we haven’t seen you in a while!” emails.

Referral Bonuses

The Pride Institute reports that 93% of people trust recommendations from their friends. Encourage those recommendations! Referral bonuses can be used to retain current customers and expand your practice. Express your gratitude and give $10 off a dental visit for every referral that makes an appointment! To make it easy, give out business referral cards when patients check-out and tuck them into any mail you send.