I want you to imagine the following scenario and think about a potential dental marketing strategy. You are a prospective dental patient. You have been told to visit Dentist Smith by a trusted friend. Sixty percent of patients these days do some form of online validation. Most prospective patients start off by putting the name of the dentist and the name of their city in a search engine. This presents an excellent dental practice marketing 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.
The firsthand reviews of patients are very powerful in the decision making process of patients. There is a fair amount of consumer data to back this up. Even if your practice had been recommended by a friend, a competitor might be able to steal that new patient away if that competitor had a high volume of extremely favorable reviews compared to your handful of positive reviews.
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.
The way best way to avoid this scenario is for your practice to take charge of its online reputation. This is simple to do when your practice creates its own review site. One of the big but hard-to-measure benefits is your practice will appear to be a credible provider of dental services. This is important because people do validations inadvertently, motivated by trying to get your phone number or address. When they stumble across numerous favorable reviews that have been written by your patients, they are going to be very impressed. This will increase the odds that they are going to follow through with their first visit. Even if they were considering some alternative dental practices, they are going to be attracted to your practice because of that favorable reputation that has been developed online.
It is not difficult to develop a favorable online reputation, particularly if you have your own review site. It is not unusual to see sixteen patients in a typical dental practice daily. It would not be hard to get feedback from your patients on your own review site. The good part is that you can collect reviews from all your patients. With your own review site, you will be able to control which reviews get pushed online and syndicated to search engines. Because of this, you will not need to pre-screen patients and get only small number of potentially favorable reviews. When you collect reviews from as many patients as possible, in little time you will have webpages and webpages of extremely favorable review content which you can publish online and syndicate out to search engines.
Within fifteen miles of most dental practices, fifty searches occur each day for a dentist. The internet marketing plan this article has reviewed will help you capture that new business. The following metaphor helps explain the value of having reviews for your dental practice. With a website, your dental practice has only a thin section of a lower shelf in the aisle dedicated to dental services on the web. As your practice publishes more and more favorable reviews, your dental practice will occupy more and more shelf space. Before long, new patients looking for dental services in your area will be more likely to find you when searching on the aisle of Internet dedicated to dental services.