Dental Web Site Marketing with the Internet
I want you to imagine the following scenario and think about a potential dental marketing plan. 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 marketing opportunity.
When new dental patients search online for you with their city in the search box, your online reviews and the online reviews of your competitors show up off to the right side. New dental patients find tremendous value when looking over these reviews. Furthermore, new dental patients are much more likely to compare and contrast reviews because they are all presented right next to each other in most search engines.
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.
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 a typical dental practice sees at least fifteen patients a day, collecting reviews is not a challenge when you have your own review site. You will not need to pre-screen patients for the ones who know are going to write a good review. With your own review site, you control which reviews are published on the Internet and syndicated to search engines. Because of that control, you will be able to collect a tremendous number of positive reviews in a couple of months.
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.
