Dentists, Start Your Engines for this Month’s Marketing Tips!

May is chock full of famous races, and we’re glad you found some time to stop by Practice Cafe’s Marketing Tips on how to get your dental marketing up to speed. Whether you’re saddling up for the Kentucky Derby or revving your engine for the Indy 500, our pit crew can help you decrease your drag, find your groove, and get your dental practice on the fast track to marketing success.

On Your Mark, Get Set, Click

On May 2, 2009, Mine That Bird came out of obscurity to beat 50-1 odds and take home the Kentucky Derby roses, proving that natural talent and an already established reputation are only part of a winning equation. Mine That Bird even ran the early part of the race in dead last, but he and his jockey, Calvin Borel, closed like no less than champions, winning by 6 3/4 widening lengths, the largest margin since 1946. Borel loves to save ground by racing on the inside rail, which at Churchill Downs on May 2nd was the driest and smoothest surface for running all day. So the race isn’t all about your talent or how well-known you are, it’s also about what you do with your talent and what you’re doing to position yourself.

The same concept can be applied to your dental practice. Excellent customer service, up-to-date facilities, and a competent team are very important for any practice, but they’ll only draw new patients if people know where to find you. Take a tip from those winning jockeys and drivers and move your marketing into the ultimate fast lane – the Internet! A good website doesn’t have to be super flashy to communicate your message and move your web presence from the starting line into the lane of traffic.

What Do All Good Websites Have in Common?

Good websites look good and they handle well. Isn’t it a given that a good website will be attractive in its layout and overall design? It should be a given, and it should be according to today’s standards and not the days of dial-up. If your website looks “so 10 years ago,” then people who visit it will get the impression that your practice is outdated, too. Good design will be customized to match your other marketing materials, and it entails an appealing color scheme that is appropriate to your office décor. It will also incorporate engaging content presentation, and don’t underestimate the power of high quality images of you and your office!

When people visit your website, you actually want them to feel like they’re the drivers – like they’re in control and never overwhelmed. A user-friendly website, or a site that “handles well,” will load quickly, be easy to read and navigate, and it never feels busy or overloaded like a traffic jam. Consider limiting features that turn on music or videos without the user’s permission, because if people visit your website while at work, they probably don’t want sound playing spontaneously. Of course we’re not saying that you shouldn’t use video, because online video marketing is a terrific way to engage website visitors and increase search engine optimization if videos are properly built in to website code. A good rule is to focus on your end user (patients and potential patients) and their website experience rather than your own when adding features to your site.

As we explain in further detail on our Websites page, your site is often a new patient’s initial impression of your practice. Make it count! It’s important for that initial impression to stay consistent with your brand image and to accurately represent your practice philosophy.

Good websites know their audience. For your website to succeed as a marketing vehicle – as opposed to being solely a resource of information or reference for current patients – it should be designed with your primary target audience in mind. This means that everything from the layout and content, to the keywords for search engine optimization, should be geared towards your target area and target patients. In regards to design, remember that women are your primary target, since they make the vast majority of healthcare decisions for their families. Ask the women in your life to be honest with you about your website. Take their feedback seriously and make changes to increase your website’s appeal to your target, even if it means that it becomes a little less appealing to you. We understand your desire to steer your marketing’s course, but to ensure that it’s not just you and open road, let others whose opinions you trust help you keep your marketing on track.

As for search engine optimization, we’ll talk more about it in next month’s tips. However, this month’s tips couldn’t cross the finish line without at least mentioning how SEO helps you reach your target audience. Much like a stock car, what’s under a website’s hood matters a lot! In the code, or “under a website’s hood,” SEO methods such as metatitles/page titles, hyperlinked text, meta descriptions/description tags, and meta keywords/meta tags are all effective “onsite” or on-page SEO practices to increase your site’s chance in the searches that it is optimized for. More details to come next month...

Good websites get regular tune-ups. Periodically updating your website with new information and tweaking your code keeps your site up-to-date, relevant in the search engines, and patients will be more likely to visit after they see that you keep things current. Sending out a quarterly or semiannual newsletter directing patients to recent web updates or seasonal web specials like Winter Whitening or A Straight Smile by Summer can also help your website stay ahead of the pack. Think, Are my web updates both flossy looking AND functional? Don’t add bells and whistles to your website just for the sake of making updates. Email or call us if you’d like some recommendations for beneficial website additions.

Social Networks & Instant Communication

Online networks and communities such as facebook, flickr, Blogger, and the now ubiquitous Twitter are changing the way people use and even think about the Internet. Once considered a purely social forum, these sites have recently expanded into the business world and have been surprisingly utile. Before you start blogging or blast off into the Twittersphere, though, it’s important to know how social networking actually works, and how you can make it work for your practice.

Making Friends & Influencing People

The very nature of social networking sites is relaxed and informal and all about interweb togetherness. For example, facebook lets you add friends, share info and links, and even play games with anyone from your childhood best friend to your old neighbor who has since moved to Bermuda. Creating a business page for your dental practice can give you a more interactive web presence, and posting specials, photos, and links makes you more approachable to patients who use these networking sites. You don’t want to be overwhelming, but give off a friendly vibe and give patients a chance to become a fan of you on facebook.

The general goal here is to interact with patients in a relatively new and interesting way, through a medium with which they feel in their comfort zone. You can put yourself out there, inform, entertain, and hopefully achieve better top-of-mind awareness with your patient base. As an added speed booster bonus, social networking builds links to your website, which can raise your search engine rankings. Some marketing experts refer to this slow, character-based approach to marketing as the “soft sale,” but we like to think it can be fun, too, in addition to creatively supplementing your traditional marketing.

Peer Pressure

If incorporating some (or any) of the major online social networks simply doesn’t fit your personality or your practice, don’t feel like you have to force it! You’ll benefit plenty from a well-done and informative website, you don’t need to overwhelm yourself with social icons and links and live newsfeeds. Regardless of how many laps you choose to make around the marketing speedway, getting in the race is crucial to your success. Start with lap one and go from there. Call us if you want to make a pit stop with Practice Cafe to see what we can do to help you!

May Facts – Did You Know?

Many countries in the Northern Hemisphere recognize May 1st as May Day. The reason for the celebration varies from country to country, but most May Days involve some combination of singing, dancing, and wrapping ribbons around a maypole. Students at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland take the festivities to a whole other level, with tradition dictating that they stay up all night on April 30th and then take a dawn dive into the North Sea. A few brave (or certifiable) souls take the plunge au naturel.

In 1923, British radio officer Frederick Stanley Mockford proposed “mayday” as an aviation distress call. At the time, most of Britain’s air traffic was with France, so Mockford’s rough Anglicization of the French phrase m’aider (“help me”) would have been understood by speakers of both languages.

Other Major May Holidays & Events to Recognize:

May 5th – Cinco de Mayo
May 6th – National Teacher’s Day
May 8th – VE Day, WWII
May 10th – Mother’s Day
May 17th – Armed Forces Day
May 25th – Memorial Day

Also in May:

Martin Luther King, Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech on May 2, 1963.
National Barbeque Month, Bike Month, Blood Pressure Month, Photograph Month, Salad Month, and Older American’s Month, among others... We’re not sure how BBQ and salad both claim May, but who are we to judge? Nurses and emergency medical services people are also celebrated in May, as are our national police force and wildflowers.
Speaking of flowers, May’s flowers of the month are the Lily of the Valley and the Hawthorn. We hope you got some or something else special for the mom of your life this month.