There are a lot of things you want to get right to create a successful dental practice, especially focusing on a dedicated passionate, and highly trained team of experts to provide only the highest quality care.

At the same time, word-of-mouth advertising (though powerful and effective) isn’t going to be enough to create the kind of practice success most dentists strive for today, that is why you need dental marketing and dental SEO.

In an effort to help you get more new patients into your dental office (quickly and inexpensively) we’ve put together this quick list of tips and tricks that can begin to help almost immediately!

Your website is your foundation

An intelligently designed, easy to use, and professional website is the cornerstone and foundation of all effective marketing strategies today.

A quality website is going to be (in a lot of cases) the part of your practice that potential new patients interact with most before they actually visit with you. It needs to be catered to their needs, any questions they might have, and provide them with the most important relevant information they are searching for in a timely fashion.

It’s also important to make sure that your website includes a CTA (call to action) on every single page. It’s important to encourage visitors to your site to not just browse but contact your practice and set up an appointment.

SEO is a big piece of the puzzle

After you have had your website built it’s important to drive traffic to it.

There’s not a lot of “if you build it, they will come” in the world of dental practice websites!

Search engine optimization (SEO) encompasses a whole host of tactics and strategies designed to move your website up in Google (and other search engine) rankings. Studies show that about 64% of ALL website traffic comes from organic search – and you want to be sure that your practice ranks highly.

Paid advertising (PPC) is another way to go when doing medical marketing but you want to be sure you’re working with experts that know their way around the block. It can get expensive in a hurry if your PPC ads aren’t optimized regularly.

Social media matters, too

Social media is a powerful tool for communication these days, with over 50% of the US population using Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis. If you aren’t regularly getting your marketing in front of people on social media you’re missing an opportunity to communicate with them where they are, which is half the battle.

Not only should you be thinking about advertising on social media but you should also be thinking about creating and sharing content on social media platforms as well. This is a great tool for drumming up modern word-of-mouth recommendations and referrals. Practices get a big bump in the credibility department when they have active and interesting social media profiles as well.

Create a marketing calendar and stick to it

Big businesses all over the world have their entire year of marketing planned out ahead of time, sometimes more than a year in advance.

You don’t necessarily have to take that same kind of approach but you shouldn’t be worried about coming up with marketing ahead of the Christmas season in the month of December!

Pre-plan as many of your new patient acquisition campaigns as possible and always have something going to bring new people to your practice. This kind of approach will pay big time dividends compared to more one-off style marketing campaigns or advertising pushes.

Prioritize referrals and offer amazing incentives

Referrals are the most powerful form of marketing, simply because they aren’t driven by any business but instead by people that are seen as impartial and can be trusted to have someone’s best interests at heart.

Good reviews, ratings, and referrals online can be a huge bump to not only your credibility as a dental practice but also a powerful tool for getting new patients as well. It’s important that you are asking all of your patients for a recommendation and a referral in a systematic kind of way, actively building up these kinds of referrals by offering great incentives whenever and however possible to do so.