Seventy percent of dental patients are jumping online to do some form of checking before showing up for their first dental appointment. This presents a tremendous marketing for dentistry opportunity about which most dental practices have no clue. Typically, new patients type in their city and the name of the recommended dentist in a search engine like Google. This article will review the dental marketing solution which can tackle this opportunity.
Most search engines including Google, present such local search results with the dentists reviews off to the right side. That means when a new dental patient searches for you online they will also be shown your information along with the information of your competitors.
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.
Having a handful of positive reviews is not enough to keep attracting the new patients who are researching online for a new dentist. Patients go with their gut feeling when picking a new dentist. The first person experience afforded by a review is an excellent way for new patients to gather information when making their gut feeling decision.
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 intelligent dental marketing 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.