+ RSSGood Online Reviews is the Best Possible Dental Marketing
The best way to market a dental practice is to control your online reputation. And the absolute best way to do that is have your own review site where you have your patients write reviews. This will allow you to control which reviews get published online for others to see.
When reviews are written by your existing patients, you will receive an email notification that a review has been written, and then with one click of a button, you will be able to decide whether the review is deleted, whether to use the review for internal purposes to improve the practice, or alternatively, whether you use that review as a marketing mechanism and push it out onto the Internet, so that it is picked up by search engines for potential new patients to see. This online service is extremely easy to implement and is the absolute best way to develop an online marketing program. Creating your own review site allows you to put your finger on the pulse of your practice.
The dental practice, your existing dental patients, and future dental patients are all winners when you have your own review site. BY putting more and more dental patient generated content on the Internet, you practice is more likely to be found when the people are searching online for dental services. Future dental patients get the benefit of seeing what existing patients have said. Your existing patients like having a hand giving feedback and many happy patients want help your practice succeed by writing good reviews.
The upside of having your own review side is tremendous. Having your own review site is an extremely low cost form of advertising. Having a review site also allows you continuously increase your marketing content by leveraging the efforts of your patients in an ongoing process.
Having a website for your dental practice does not mean you have an Internet marketing program. People searching for dental services are not likely to find your website simply because you have one. If you are spending dental advertising dollars on a click through campaign or banner advertising, you are spending a lot of money with little measurable return. The likelihood that a person clicking on your online ad will wind up in your office is generally less than 2%. That is terrible dental marketing economics.
The simple truth of the matter is most prospective patients looking for dental services typically do a validation of where they are going to go, and it could be a validation for reasons that are completely unknown or completely not relevant to what you may think is important. For instance, if a patient is told about your practice by a friend, surely the major source of referral is a friend of that prospective patient. But that friend may not have told them exactly the location or the address, or they may only partially know the doctor's name or know the street intersection. In these situations, what prospective dental patients do is they go online into a search engine and type in a partial version of the dentist's name or the dental practice or, alternatively, put in the street address, or they may just do this simply to get a phone number to make an appointment. If you are not controlling your online reputation, in the next several years, you are going to have one or two dental patients that are disgruntled. What these patients typically do is go to some third-party web site where they are going to write a review that is quite unfavorable.
